John Fairfax, publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review, signs for major upgrade to their advertising system, positions themselves for the future.

John Fairfax consolidates advertising operations, adds a Disaster Recovery System and positiones themselves for a future J2EE-based advertising system. All accomplished by a large upgrade to their current net-linx supplied advertising system.

March 31, 2003, Sacramento -- John Fairfax Holdings Ltd, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review, Newcastle Herald and Fairfax Community Newspapers have signed a AUD$1.1m order with net-linx Publishing Solutions, Australia, for the replacement of their 14 CPU K1000 advertising system and 6 CPU Newcastle advertising configuration to a 7604 HP ServerNet system.

The ServerNet configuration will enable the majority of Fairfax newspaper's advertising operations in New South Wales to run from the same server located in the centre of Sydney. Over the coming months, the installation will encompass moving all Newcastle Herald's advertising clients to run from this configuration together with Fairfax Community Newspapers' clients which are located in Liverpool - approximately 40 kms from Sydney.

Not only has this upgrade brought many fault tolerant and speed benefits to Fairfax's advertising operations throughout NSW it will enable Fairfax to seamlessly move to nxAdvertising in the future, if required.

John Fairfax will be able to utilize the ServerNet's unique capability of being able to run both Guardian-based software - such as System/77 advertising - at the same time as nxAdvertising v3 under J2EE. This is a significant feature when considering the next suite of advertising products and cost of ownership of the ServerNet configuration.
John Fairfax is moving their old advertising K1000 configuration out to their print plant which will then be configured as a Disaster Recovery System.

Currently Fairfax have around 350 clients running over the three sites.

Chris Payne, Group Development Manager, said: "I feel that this technology not only provides a secure production environment but it gives us room for expected growth and provides for a DRS method for all three main classified sites.
"The installation will be transparent to the whole user community - except for instant response times once completed."

About net-linx
net-linx Publishing Solutions develops J2EE-based software for the publishing industry. Backed by round-the-clock global support, our solutions for news-gathering, workflow, pagination, advertising, new-media and asset management enable customers to create, manage and deliver reliable content while lowering their Total Cost of Ownership.
net-linx has offices in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America

© 2003 net-linx Publishing Solutions.
K1000, HP and ServerNet are trademarks of Hewlett Packard. Net-linx Publishing Solutions, System77 and nxAdvertising are trademarks of net-linx AG.