Prime Example
I don't like change. It's almost always painful, it's not always better.
The news-side software change was a hassle, particularly with stress over internet connection speeds, but the actual change went reasonably well and people were mostly prepared. There are still things being worked out, and whether it's an improvement depends on who you ask. The remotely-hosted environment does have the advantage of being accessible from outside the office along with the disadvantage of being reliant on a connection to servers in another state. We lost 2-3 hours of work just this week due to an outage on the other end. But I think it's an overall improvement to have the work done in InCopy and InDesign rather than Word and QuarkXpress (4) and there's some functionality in the system that's nice, though it may not be used in the long term.
The advertising system, however, is seriously tempting me to use the term "nightmare."
People were not as well-prepared. There has been a lot of duplicated work required. The installers we've been given work properly maybe half the time. Some things that weren't working were because of "junk" in a folder on the server that gets pushed down to the client software on loading. Ad entry doesn't appear any easier or cleaner to me, and in some cases is more complicated (going back and forth between a Java-based program and InDesign). Pagination software does not do as good a job as what we have been using, and is arguably not even as good as what we had the generation before that. Some expected (I assume due to communication lapses) functionality is simply not there, including a way to organize ads (so we're actually leaving the old system in place just for this ability).
Someone remarked to me "I hope someone is getting something out of this" today and, for perhaps the first time, I thought about the big picture and I am unable to name any step in the process that has gotten better with this change. It's possible the system interface with the website will work better, but the new site isn't done yet so I'm not sure of that.
Right now, it looks like a lot of money, a lot of extra hours, and a lot of grief all with no real benefit. I hope things get better, I really do, but... ugh...
The news-side software change was a hassle, particularly with stress over internet connection speeds, but the actual change went reasonably well and people were mostly prepared. There are still things being worked out, and whether it's an improvement depends on who you ask. The remotely-hosted environment does have the advantage of being accessible from outside the office along with the disadvantage of being reliant on a connection to servers in another state. We lost 2-3 hours of work just this week due to an outage on the other end. But I think it's an overall improvement to have the work done in InCopy and InDesign rather than Word and QuarkXpress (4) and there's some functionality in the system that's nice, though it may not be used in the long term.
The advertising system, however, is seriously tempting me to use the term "nightmare."
People were not as well-prepared. There has been a lot of duplicated work required. The installers we've been given work properly maybe half the time. Some things that weren't working were because of "junk" in a folder on the server that gets pushed down to the client software on loading. Ad entry doesn't appear any easier or cleaner to me, and in some cases is more complicated (going back and forth between a Java-based program and InDesign). Pagination software does not do as good a job as what we have been using, and is arguably not even as good as what we had the generation before that. Some expected (I assume due to communication lapses) functionality is simply not there, including a way to organize ads (so we're actually leaving the old system in place just for this ability).
Someone remarked to me "I hope someone is getting something out of this" today and, for perhaps the first time, I thought about the big picture and I am unable to name any step in the process that has gotten better with this change. It's possible the system interface with the website will work better, but the new site isn't done yet so I'm not sure of that.
Right now, it looks like a lot of money, a lot of extra hours, and a lot of grief all with no real benefit. I hope things get better, I really do, but... ugh...
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