HBE Software is introducing the latest version of its portal server solution for the online newspaper publishing industry, HBEPublisher 2.0, and showcasing the system in action with Howard Publishing Group’s northwest Indiana portal site, NWI.com.

The Howard Publishing Groups will use HBE Software’s HBEPublisher to roll out Web portals for 15 of its properties. NWI.com is already live.
Photo courtesy of HBE Software

Howard Publishing signed an agreement last month to deploy HBEPublisher at 15 of its newspaper properties during the next year. The newspaper group chose HBEPublisher as its portal technology primarily because of the maturity of the product and the professionalism of the company, according to HBE Software.

“HBEPublisher includes all the major aspects we felt were important to a regional portal — message boards, personalization, automated news publishing, business directory, a sophisticated event calendar system, and much more,” said Christine Tripunitara, the lead architect for NWI.com.

The system also helped Howard Publishing reach new technological goals.

“[HBEPublisher] helped realize our goal of moving to a Unix-based, open source platform,” said Jack Palmer, director of new media at the Howard Publishing Group. “Because HBE-Publisher was created with mod_perl in open source code and the front end is customizable with standard [HyperText Markup Language] editors … the product is easily expandable and can be modified by our staff if necessary.”

Howard Publishing also felt it was important not to be tied contractually to one vendor and forced into a relationship where “we pay monthly or yearly licensing fees to use a product. With HBEPublisher, we buy the product and we own the product,” Palmer said. “Our house development staff has the ability to go into the source code and modify it if needed, giving us the choice of maintaining the product ourselves, or having HBE Software do the maintenance and future upgrades.”

HBEPublisher comes with many revenue-generating and technology features. Revenue-generating features include:

• Yellow page directory listings.

• Micro-sites can be sold to businesses for a monthly fee on a sliding scale based on the number of templates deployed. Businesses can add online coupons and targeted business card advertising. Prominence in an online mall or some other special section of the Web site can also be sold at a premium price.

• Classified ad directories for jobs, cars and homes can be deployed, generating a considerable source of revenue and linking to all other aspects of the publication.

• Editorial content from the archives can be sold to third-party data providers and end users.

Technology features include:

• Rapid deployment — HBEPublisher can be deployed for an online newspaper or portal in as little as six weeks.

• Minimal infrastructure costs — HBEPublisher is designed to run on a suite of low-cost servers and with license-free, open-source operating systems and databases.

• Configurable role-based administrative system.

• Easy-to-use tools speed up the rate of acceptance of the HBE technologies in the workplace.

• Speed and scalability — Core HBEPublisher technologies include Apache, Perl and MySQL — proven leaders in speed and scalability. With these, HBEPublisher can become the solid and scalable platform for one paper or for an entire chain of publications.

• Open DataBase Connectivity — HBEPublisher can be integrated with all leading database systems. HBEPublisher supports Oracle, MySQL, SQL 7, Postgres and other ODBC databases transparently. This connectivity protects previous technology expenditures and enables users to integrate content and applications from a variety of vendors. Clients will have access to a greater variety of content and applications as a result.

• Supports integration with datamarts and external data feed in a variety of formats, including eXtensible Markup Language, NewsML, Standard Generalized Markup Language, WML and others. This allows users to leverage their existing content resources or choose the external content provider they want.

• Multi-lingual and multi-device access.

• HBEPublisher also renders on personal digital assistants and WML and Wireless Application Protocol-enabled devices.