Press - Assignment Management

Star-Tribune Adds Fault-tolerant Operation and New Assignment Management System to Merlin Picture Desk

Quincy, MA, October 18, 2007 - The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis has completed Phase II of its Merlin digital asset management system installation, bringing complete system redundancy and a new assignment management system to the newsroom staff.

"The Merlin picture desk is a fundamental part of Star-Tribune production," said John Harrison, VP of Sales & Marketing at MerlinOne. "A single point of hardware failure is just too risky when so many people and production depend on it. The Merlin MSync package, just installed, uses two servers that operate as one system, maintaining a synchronized copy of the database and content on each server. Should one server suffer a hardware failure, MSync provides a seamless failover and users are automatically pointed to the second server with zero downtime. Once the down server is repaired, MSync gets the content and databases back in sync. So in addition to the fault-tolerance, MSync is a way to ensure data is always redundant and secure."

The new integrated Trax assignment management system is used to initiate and manage photo, multimedia, and graphic requests, manage staff workload and track deadlines. As photos, graphics and multimedia projects are completed and uploaded into the digital asset management system, they are linked to the assignment, and workflow status is automatically updated. Even after publication, assignment history, contacts, directions, usage rights, publication data and technical data linked to the content as long as it is kept in the system.

An existing assignment history going back more than 10 years is now in the new Trax assignment management system. MerlinOne provided the tools needed to convert The Star-Tribune legacy Jobminder assignment system data.

Merlin serves as the Star-Tribune's picture desk, taking live feeds from the wire services, as well as, input of locally scanned and digital images from the newspaper's photo staff. Photos in the digital asset management system are automatically routed for production and long-term archival storage.

About MerlinOne - MerlinOne, Inc. is a leading provider of digital asset management systems and electronic document discovery platforms. E-Sheets® is the foremost electronic tearsheets service. The Merlin picture desk management solution has over 140 major installations at corporations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Harvard University, Pfizer, Habitat for Humanity and The White House. MerlinOne technology helps companies manage photos, text, graphics, PDFs, multimedia and e-discovery material.

Press Contact
David Farrell
Phone: 617.237.2363
Email: