Seybold 2001 Mark Stephens (Managing Director)

Who are IDRSolutions? Based in United Kingdom. Customers mainly large corporations. Focuses on connecting systems together/reusing data. Produces a very flexible ‘glue component’ – StoryPad.

What is StoryPad? Tool for textual restructuring and utilising data as efficiently as possible. Focus on logic/structure of the data. Explicit (location/style). Implicit (content itself). Program has ‘intelligence’ Turn data into its own scripting language.

StoryPad and pdf This functionality extends to data from pdf files.

Some Key features. Java program – multi-platform and extendible. Automated process or GUI client. Takes data from, any textual file format, pdf (without Acrobat) or legacy systems. Turns the data into its own description language. Algorithms for intelligently merging story components together. Inputs and outputs to flat files, into any database or to the web. Enterprise features (include reporting, support for parallel database architecture, incremental feeds, user tracking). In live use. Extremely configurable.

Key Benefits Usability - low level of ‘technical expertise’ needed. Reliability. Open standards. Fits into existing situations/architecture.

Some Uses (so far) include Intelligently feed data into a database. Validate XML news feeds from PA, Reuters. Create an incremental data stream. Extract content from HTML pages. Data mining. Handle syndication data. And extract content from pdf… (anything which can print)

Works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So does our product. News International Part of - Our biggest client (so far) High profile Publisher The Sun 3,572,506 copies daily The Times 723,602 copies daily Sunday Times 1,398,019 copies weekly

Business requirement Need to move data from a freeform ‘page’ structure to a story structure as automatically and as efficiently as possible. Two key systems Legacy publishing system from Unisys (Hermes). Web publishing system from Vignette. Must work together with minimum alterations.

Chosen solution StoryPad Options open for the future (standardise on XML/pdf). Software can be easily reconfigured. Software has numerous other uses. Software supported and developed. No need to change (break) current systems/workflow.

Client GUI allows for mistakes to be corrected, reconfiguration as house styles change, and deal with unexpected circumstances. Implementation As a server process, StoryPad takes pages, uses user-defined rules to intelligently extract stories and places into database. Publishing system database To document management system Unix server running Storypad as background task. pdf odbc

A happy customer… Existing investment preserved. New systems not tied to legacy systems. Allows use of open file formats. Software continues to be developed. Ability to handle any unexpected events.

Interested?? Visit our website at Or come and see us…