Press - Hosted Picture Desk

Minneapolis Star-Tribune Live on The Merlin Hosted Solution

Quincy, MA, August 12, 2009 – The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has converted to the Merlin hosted picture desk solution and hosted Trax assignment management system to organize their published stories and local and wire photo content with predictable, low-cost, monthly payments. The move to a hosted picture desk system was a good fit for their financial reorganization plans. The staff at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune had been using an in-house Merlin digital asset management system since 2005.

The Merlin hosted picture desk system works exactly the same as the in-house versions, except the hosted system is housed at a top notch data co-location facility with highly redundant power and network connections. MerlinOne supplies all servers, storage and other equipment, does all the IT tasks, and support and upgrades are included. The Star Tribune benefits from lower costs, no IT workload, and no need to be continually adding storage: all that is MerlinOne's responsibility.

The move to the Merlin hosted picture desk was seamless to the end users. Several Star-Tribune staff commented, "We can't tell the difference between using our servers or the hosted servers."

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 system are automatically routed for production and long-term archival storage. As part of the move to the hosted environment, MerlinOne converted the Star-Tribune's ProQuest Publisher legacy text system so that staff has stories, images and graphics in the same system.

The Star-Tribune uses the integrated hosted Trax assignment management system to initiate and manage photo, multimedia, and graphic requests, manage staff workload and track deadlines. As photos and graphics are completed and uploaded into the system, they are linked to the assignment and workflow status is automatically updated. After publication, assignment history, contacts, directions, usage rights, and publication data remains linked to the content.

Merlin is a complete digital asset management system that allows users to organize millions of photos and other multimedia files using fast, precise searching with easy and flexible workflows. Access to Merlin is via thick or web clients.

The Merlin hosted picture desk is physically housed in a top-notch co-location facility with high security, generator backups and connections to 4 Internet backbones. MerlinOne provides performance and uptime guarantees, fault-tolerance and can include an interface to pre-press production systems. Merlin customer service staff can directly support end-users.

About The Star-Tribune - The Star-Tribune is a news and information company serving the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. The Star-Tribune newspaper is one of the top 20 largest newspapers in the nation. The company's website, www.StarTribune.com, is the most frequently used local news and information service for the Twin Cities market.

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: