‘Touring’ is created in the cloud

The starting point

From newspaper to magazine: The new concept needs a new production solution

With around 1.5 million members, the Touring Club of Switzerland (TCS) is the biggest mobility club in Switzerland. The non-profit association was founded in 1896 in Geneva and now comprises 24 departments all over Switzerland.

‘Touring’, the TCS members’ newspaper has been sent to the members since 1936. Then, the ‘Touring’ editorial team decided on a complete change in concept.

Since 2015, ‘Touring’ has been published as a high-quality magazine in modern design. Content, layout, as well as the number of editions were changed. Instead of 20 time a year, the members’ magazine is now published 12 times a year – however, still with a print run of 1.4 million issues and in the three national languages of German, French and Italian. What is new is a more active integration of the departments. Employees of each department are involved in the graphic production, as well as the editorial work.

This conceptual reorientation of the members’ magazine also requires a change in production method. The greater number of persons involved in the production alone requires new systems and new solutions. Moreover, a new provider was needed for printing.

The solution

The cloud makes it possible: Systems are hosted centrally, maintained and remain scalable

The most independent central solution was needed. It should be easy to integrate all parties involved while keeping systems scalable. All production systems (see graphic below) now run in the green datacentre in Lupfig in the a&f Community Cloud.

We employed WoodWing Enterprise as an editing system (InDesign and InCopy) for article recording and layout, Timone for page design, Claro for automated image editing, and Made-to-Print for output for printing. The systems and the server are hosted and operated in the a&f Community Cloud at the green data centre in Lupfig. User administration is organised with an AD system, and client access the programs via virtualisation with Citrix.

Conclusion

The system scalability is impressive. Other departments can be included in the project within two to three days with little configuration effort. A high level of security is warranted – There have been no issues thus far. Citrix facilitates access to the systems from anywhere. The situation takes some getting used to for the layout artists. Most of them work on a Mac and now find themselves in Windows environments due to the access via Citrix. However, tests are in progress to facilitate a direct connection of Mac clients via VPN.