How Sports Illustrated uses Frontier

Jason Levine, jlevine@si.timeinc.com, writes:

I am a techie for Sports Illustrated's Photo department (yep, swimsuits and all). Our workflow involved hundreds and hundreds of pictures daily, both crossing our editors' desks and working their way onto our layout servers (the computers that we use to store the images that are going to end up on the pages of the magazine).

Each of these pictures must be captioned by someone who knows what the hell they're talking about, namely the picture editor. A problem has always been how we could then pass this captioning information (attached to each image file, for database searching's sake) on to the senior editors, who are responsible for the integration of the images into stories.

We essentially had two options: first, we could buy a copy of the software that we use to create the captions for each of the senior editors. Unfortunately, it's proprietary software for a small market, and at a price of $800 per seat for 20+ editors, this wasn't something that we wanted to do too eagerly. The other option was to generate web pages that the editors could look at with all of the information from the layout server.

Frontier made it possible to go from nothing to a full-production suite in under one week. (And I'm also in medical school right now, deep in the middle of Gross Anatomy, so I can assure you that there wasn't even a whole lot of time devoted to it in that week!)

With Frontier, now we have the capacity to "serve" images to the editors on an intranet web site, complete with the proprietary caption information and a whole _host_ of other specific needs that were part of our baseline requirements.

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