OCTOPUS NEWSROOM: NAB 0 press PREVIEW

OCTOPUS NEWSROOM: NAB 2013 PRESS PREVIEW 04 Apr 2013

Newsroom computer system specialist OCTOPUS Newsroom is introducing its new Octopus7 NRCS at NAB 2013. This builds on the experience gained with over 120 installations of Octopus6 worldwide. The innovative Octopus7 introduces features to enhance workflow efficiency as well as new tools for working with social media, web and mobile devices. In addition, the development programme included the updating of many Octopus6 features that are now a part of Octopus7.

New features in Octopus7 include Octopus7 Topic Bins to organise and share news information, Octopus7 Assignment Desk, a powerful planning tool, Octopus7 REST API that opens an additional public communication interface with custom third-party applications, Octopus7 Event-based Actions allows configuring the rules that trigger automatic tasks within Octopus7. Two features updated from Octopus6 for inclusion in Octopus7 are MIS Reporting Tool that tracks the volume of story creation and Social Media Integration that allows working directly with social media.

Octopus Newsroom CEO Petr Stokuc, explains, Now television news is not just for television. The demands of news are changing fast so we have now built a new raft of capabilities on top of our well-established Octopus6 platform. This is Octopus7. It not only works with, and delivers news for, social media, websites and mobile phones but now also provides new powerful tools to enhance the efficiency and speed of the workflow.

New Octopus7 Topic Bins introduces an innovative way to organise and share newsroom information. Every item in Octopus7 can be tagged with one or more topics and then is automatically sorted to relevant topic bins. External files, including images, PDFs, MS Word and Excel, can also be tagged; so all information on the subject is together and accessible to everyone. Then accessing a topic in Topic Bin shows all relevant Octopus7 items agency wires, RSS feeds, Twitter posts, assignments, stories, contacts, media clips, photos and PDFs. Topics can be defined as hot' while the most frequently used tags over a period are automatically listed as trending'. Shortcuts to hot and trending topics are at the top of the Octopus7 window. So, as well as providing quick access to the topic, items can be dragged and dropped onto the shortcut to add them to the Topic Bin.

The Octopus7 Assignment Desk is a powerful planning tool that includes a state-of-the-art linking tool, a modern planning calendar, a chat room for every assignment using the built-in user-to-user messaging system, user notifications of new assignments, and much more. Users can attach local files form their computers, PDFs, images, videos, etc. - to an assignment that can then be easily turned to a story. Assignments can contain as many stories as required.

Octopus7 Event-based Actions further streamlines the news production workflow. This new feature allows configuring the rules that define automatic tasks that Octopus7 will perform when triggered by user events. This is a powerful tool with a wide range of uses for example, sending a message to a reporter when they have a new assignment, notifying an editor when a script is ready for review, or automatically moving a story to a story pool folder when it is approved as Ready for broadcast.

Octopus7 REST API opens an additional public communication interface between the NRCS and custom third-party applications that, to date, have mostly only been used by internal modules. External applications may request any data from the system (including wires, stories, rundowns, etc.) and receive these data in JSON format. The variety of data retrieved from Octopus7 this way is very broad and includes not just the stories, scripts and rundowns but also wires, user assignments and much more.

MIS Reporting Tool, introduced in Octopus6, this new tracks the number of stories created by all users or selected user groups over a period, offering benefits for news management and the HR team alike. Users can be motivated, or even appraised, based on the number of stories created, or their total duration. Built-in story tagging can help track the total time aired for a specific topic compared with another, or one political party against another, etc. All results can be displayed graphically and saved as external spreadsheets for further analysis.

Social Media Integration allows working directly with social media, offering tools to efficiently manage both social media contributions and monitoring. Users can get your posts out faster - upload a video to YouTube, advertise your programme on Facebook or tweet breaking news straight from Octopus7. They can follow tweeters or subscribe to YouTube channels to have all the posts downloaded to Octopus7. There is no faster way to receive tweets than with Octopus7 query Twitter in real-time for topics of interest and receive instant notification when a new tweet is posted.

LINK:	http://www.theiabm.org/article.php?group_id=8339...
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