Legacy documents, reuse and copyright management
THE COMPANY
The BAYARD-PRESSE group has its origins in the aftermath of the 1870 war and will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2023. Nowadays, as a leader in all its business segments, it publishes no less than 120 press titles, 4,800 book titles and 200 websites.
Now at work in some thirty countries, the BAYARD-PRESSE Group has a creative network of more than 1,400 employees in France, 550 abroad, 700 freelancers and more than 5,000 authors generating a considerable amount of content.
Working in almost all segments of the publishing industry, from daily newspapers to magazines, the group ranks third among French press groups and fourth among magazine publishers, thanks to the large circulation of the daily newspaper La Croix and the magazine Le Pèlerin.
In all, BAYARD-PRESSE serves 36 million readers worldwide, including 5 million subscribers.
THE CHALLENGE
The BAYARD-PRESSE group brings together a large number of subsidiaries and published a large number of titles.
In general, sending back and forth between creative entities of all the assets (documentary objects, texts, media, compositions, and so on,) made by each entity represented a huge challenge for the group: searching for and reusing content.
The development of the group’s presence on digital media tended to increase this need until the implementation of a first DAM in 2009. Although the solution made it possible to manage part of the Print content via a web portal that allowed the user to select, order and moderate content for foreign subsidiaries, the portal was limited to the print channel only, and had several shortcomings in terms of group-wide searches and the type-checking of assets.
The challenge was to propose a solution that would allow all types of cross-media content, to be grouped and stored, and not just print, by proposing a database model based on MarkLogic technology and an interface that would facilitate internal and external exchanges of assets.
The whole thing had to be moderated by a dedicated interface. In short, the platform had to allow all users to find content created by another subsidiary, order it virtually, and receive it after validation by a moderator. In addition, the content databases had to be populated by both French and non-French entities.
It was therefore an optimization tool that BAYARD-PRESSE was looking for, the idea being also to generate savings on the costs of creating content by sharing it.
It was also important not to neglect the issue of copyright in the reuse of content; hence the importance of moderation and its specific workflow established on a cycle of internal orders.
This last element was related to legal issues directly linked to the reduction of the risks of intellectual property infringement.
THE SOLUTION
The first objective that 4D CONCEPT met was to be open to the type and quantity of assets managed by the solution. Also, thanks to CONTENT FACTORY and the MarkLogic database technology that 4D CONCEPT had been integrating for more than 10 years, BAYARD-PRESSE users could now integrate and use all types of digital and print content.
The great indexing and search capabilities of CONTENT FACTORY made it the ideal tool to meet the global need to benefit from an internal, multi-support, and above all a multiple named-entity search engine service.
In order to apply a workflow managing the exchange of content in the form of an internal command and in particular to moderate the requests and guarantee the correct use of the assets while respecting copyright, 4D CONCEPT developed a specific module for this purpose directly in the product interface. The whole system also generated statistics and opened the solution to external partners who were generally authors, freelancers or agencies, while applying quality controls to their work.
4D CONCEPT also paid great attention to the overall ergonomics of the solution. The great variety of the user types required a simple interface that could ensure quick results. This was possible both because of the general buy-in and a simple learning curve, which is generally a prerequisite for putting any tool quickly and easily into the hands of external partners.
Entirely based on the solution published by 4D CONCEPT, acting both as publisher of the ECM (Entreprise Content Manager) CONTENT FACTORY and as integrator and consultant for the BAYARD-PRESSE group, the solution set up today meets a major part of the initial requirements while continuously developing thanks to the high buy-in rate from users. This project demonstrates the total cooperation between 4D CONCEPT and BAYARD-PRESSE in continuously developing a specific solution built on a solid technological base.
THE BENEFITS
The deployment of CONTENT FACTORY was a real change for the BAYARD-PRESSE teams. The number of users increased by 50% with an average of four times the number of simultaneous connections. Naturally, the number of internal orders also rose sharply.
Now open to all types of content, the fluidity of interaction was as expected, with a workflow that had been defined and was being followed, and that guaranteed the quality of the assets exchanged and the conformity of their use with regard to copyright.
Finally, and this was the first objective of implementing a single asset management solution, the rate of content reuse rose sharply, certainly generating important savings on the creation costs. The same element could now be used several times, on several media, for several subsidiaries, in several countries, all very easily, multiplying its value as a result.
