ACS Welcomes Wiley
by Cindy Morphew
ACS is delighted to welcome John Wiley & Sons, Inc., to the Advantage community. Wiley was founded by Charles Wiley in 1807 and, in its early years, published works by such authors as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. By the early 1900s, Wiley was established as a leading publisher of scientific and technical information. In 2007, the company acquired UK-based Blackwell Publishing, greatly expanding its journal and society publishing business.
Wiley's global headquarters are located in Hoboken, New Jersey. With more than 5,000 employees and operations across North America, Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia, Wiley is a global enterprise. The company reported revenues of nearly $1.75 billion in fiscal year 2011.
Wiley began its search for a subscription management system in the first half of 2011 and sent out an RFI in June to a number of vendors. The field was narrowed to three companies who participated in workshops and product demonstrations over the summer. After a thorough evaluation process by the Wiley search team, Advantage was chosen, and implementation is now underway.
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Martin Media Goes Live on Advantage
by John Hughes
Congratulations to Martin Media, who recently went live on Advantage (11r1 revision). This French publisher is located in beautiful eastern France, at Revigny sur Ornain. The company publishes a variety of educational and special interest magazines, with 130,000 active subscribers. They also have a large product order component to their business and are working on integrating their websites.
Due to intensive and thorough testing by the Martin Media team, the transition was made without significant cutover challenges, and they are now successfully up and running on Advantage.
On ACS's side, John Hughes was the project manager, with assistance and direction from Levi Hyssong and Philippe van Mastrigt. Barbara Smith served as the lead engineer for the project. The Martin Media team was led by Philippe Canus, with Jean-Luc Poncin giving executive direction.
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ACS' Sultan of Swat Retires -- Farewell to Stan Pyett
by Cindy Morphew
Stan Pyett earned the nickname "The Sultan of Swat" early in his career at ACS and it's stuck ever since. ACS folklore has two explanations for how the term "SWAT," (which is our designation for work done investigating and fixing software bugs) got started. One is that it came from the 70s police term "SWAT team"-- an elite tactical unit using Special Weapons And Tactics. The other option is that it stands for "SoftWare Attack Team." Either way, Stan has made it happen for more than 25 years. There isn't a client company-current or former-that Stan hasn't worked with at one time or another. He has endeared himself to dozens of users over the years by tracking down and fixing some pretty gnarly issues that were causing said clients to tear their hair out. Advantage users have expressed their gratitude on many occasions.
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The Economist Intelligence Unit and Bauer Media Now Live on Advantage
Congratulations to CDS Global clients The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Bauer Media, who both recently completed successful implementations of Advantage.
The Economist Intelligence Unit is a global leader in country, industry and management analysis, providing trusted business intelligence and advice to over 1.5 million decision-makers from the world's leading companies, financial institutions, governments and universities. EIU is especially excited about the streamlined renewal processing features in Advantage, and the convenience of meeting their distribution and reporting needs for their 450 publications via jobstreams.
Bauer Media is the largest client at CDS Global in the UK. Bauer publishes over 50 magazines, many of them household names in the UK, such as Heat magazine, FHM magazine, and Grazia magazine. They also publish some of the top magazines in various areas of special interest. Their go-live was preceded by a two-week lockdown period comprising mostly 24-hour conversion processing. VIEW FULL STORY |
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An Informal Survey on the State of Publishing
by Greg Stout
During the holidays, we attended the requisite round of get-togethers with family and friends. This year, my family hosted four events, which actually made all the cleaning and decorating worthwhile.
My conversations frequently migrated to publishing and information technology. While sampling the wine and cheese pairings, I noted a number of common topics that were on the minds of my small, statistically-challenged sampling of the
Why are bookstores going out of business?
My sample noted that bookstores are now hosting special events or selling video games, candles, collectibles, board games, jigsaw puzzles, coffee, and sandwiches rather than selling books. New library branches appear to have more computers than books.
All of my classes now use course packs.
Expensive text books are being replaced by customized course packs that are printed, digital, or both. Teachers and students find these both more flexible and less expensive. Even when textbooks are used, course packs are used to supplement the material.
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Help Us Plan 2012 Webinars
by Angie Markel
Happy New Year!
Thank you everyone for your participation in Advantage Webinars in 2011. It's time to put together 2012's training schedule and I need your input. Please take a moment to answer the following brief survey in order to ensure the topics you want to see are included on the schedule.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WEBINARS-2012
As always, if you have general feedback regarding the format of the webinar training program, please pass that along to me, too.
Angie
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Agora, Crain Communications, Kalmbach and Massachusetts Medical Society Complete Upgrades
Successful upgrade projects were recently concluded at various Advantage clients.
Agora is now live on 11r3 and Suzanne Earley was highly pleased with the efforts of the upgrade team, which included Doug Moore, Larry Kleber, John Moore and Molly Mathe.
"We had such a great experience with all the members of team," said Suzanne. "Doug was a terrific project manager; he was always available and very supportive. Larry went above and beyond so many times on this upgrade. He worked several weekends to get dry runs done so I could avoid down time. John and Molly keep the issues moving and resolved quickly. Overall, it was a great experience."
Crain Communications recently went live on 11r1, completing a five month upgrade project. They are especially excited about using the new campaign/promotion setup workspace, using the enhanced credit card response rules features, and the upgraded list management email handling. They also upgraded hardware to a brand new, top-of-the-line server - which will have tremendous positive impacts on processing and performance.
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AUG To Meet in Orlando in February  The 2012 US meeting of the Advantage User Group is Wednesday, February 8th through Friday, February 10th at the Holiday Inn in the WALT DISNEY WORLD® Resort. This year's conference will focus on "Doing More with Less" and will feature topics that AUG members have identified as being of particular interest. There will once again be a guest speaker and vendor sponsors (such as Chase Paymentech). Keynote speaker is Greg Erlandson, President & Publisher, Our Sunday Visitor, and Dan Heffernan and Dick Hile of ACS are scheduled to present.
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Europe Links In
by Philippe van Mastrigt 
After their successful meeting in Paris last fall, Advantage's European users decided to create a dedicated European Advantage User Group on the professional online network Linked In. They discovered a growing need to share not only Advantage usage and administration knowledge, but to do so within the dynamics and business practices unique to Europe.
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Where Do You Get Your Industry News?
by Cindy Morphew
We'd like to know which trade pubs, e-newsletters, websites and other sources you look to for keeping up to date on the publishing industry. Please take a moment and respond to the very brief survey by clicking on the link below. Thanks!
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B39LR8N
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Upsell Performance Tracking Tips
by Mike Miklosovic  This Tech Tip discusses upsells performance tracking. The Upsell Business Case A customer calls and places an order for Product A. Advantage "knows" that people who ordered Product A also ordered the "I've Got To Have It" book. So an upsell script pops up with an enticing offer for the book - one that your customer agrees to. Ideally, this positive result takes place more times than not. Wouldn't it be nice to know the precise success rate of your staff's upsell efforts? Well, you're in luck--Advantage can track and report the number of sales made from upsells compared against the number of upsell opportunities. Here's how it works.
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ACS Exhibited at "La Presse au Futur"By Virginie Motte
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Philippe van Mastrigt and Virginie Motte at the Advantage booth at "La Presse au Futur."
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Philippe van Mastrigt and Virginie Motte represented ACS at the exhibition "La Presse au Futur" in Paris Nov 30th and December 1st. This was the third year for the show, which is geared to publishing industry leaders, and attendance has increased each year. It covers a large range of topics: editorial needs, print, digital and nomad solutions, advertising support, and of course subscription handling. The exhibition identifies trends and offers innovative tools and thinking to help publishing professionals deal with the major change the publishing world is going through with the rise of digital.
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Advantage ComputingSystems
Cindy Morphew
Editor
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