INTRANET MAKES NEWS AT TOI

Come August, and the intranet of The Times of India-the country’s leading news daily and flagship of heavy weight publishing group Bennett & Coleman—will go on line.
The company, which has played a pioneering role in auto mating the process of news dissemination across at least 30 offices countrywide, is now focusing on taking its commercial applications Into cyberspace and back.
TOI basically has two networks which look after the two distinct needs of the organization. There is for instance, a systems department which caters to the editorial/production side of automation – transfer of news stories across regional bureaus, page make up and final output and there is an information services division which takes care of the applications side of computerization.
The intranet in TOI, the brainchild of the information services division, expected to be a logical extension of the organization’s existing wide area network, which has been up and running successfully for the past two years.
“We heard about intranet technology and realized that it was the route we had to take to expand our information system,” said AK. Peter, general manager, information services, The Times of India.
Conceptualization
“At The Times of India, we have the concept of quarterly reviews! branch reviews where all senior people meet to thrash out the is sues of relevance. The Web- based intranet will enable such reviews to take place without actual physical interaction among managers. The intranet is all about collective thinking— collaborative thinking. If some body wants to say something, he/she can put it down on the home page. If anybody wants to react to it, they can do so. It will all ultimately boil down to a very efficient information system,” Peter said.
The TOI web site will also hold information on competition, and yes, even news. “Thereafter it will grow on its own. That is the beauty of the intranet. Our  intranet user will also have access to the Internet anyway. If he needs information from the Internet all he needs to do is press a few keys,” explained Peter. “Security of information is of course going to be key, though things will definitely be more secure in the intranet environment than they are with cur rent PC-based applications.”
New wine in an old bottle?
While the company has already invested around Rs. 10 to Rs. 15 crores in its commercial network, plans are on to pump in around three to four crore rupees more in the next year. “How ever, I don’t visualize any investment for the intranet. We have everything in place. We have the machines, and we have  the network in place. What we might look at are a couple of mirror servers in key cities. We are currently in the process of creating a Web site and learning the tools—the high-end Web management tools. Work is currently on and a core group has been as signed the task of getting the intranet up and running by early August.
“Our intranet will eventually cover around 1,000 users— primarily marketing and finance people. Ultimately journalists will also be hooked on.”
In terms of hardware, TOI will be banking on its existing Challenge S net server from SGI. “We plan to have a server in New Delhi and mirror servers in Bombay and Bangalore. We chose SGI, because these machines come Net ready. There is hardly anything one needs to do to set up a web site.”
Pioneering work
The intranet is a possibility to day because of the pioneering work the company has been able to do in setting up its wide area network. In fact, the information services division, which is currently spearheading the company’s Internet/intranet initiative began the networking exercise two years ago. The division’s connectivity strategy has culminated in Respect, a response net work that is available on invitation to select advertising agencies. “The application which required transactions-level interconnectivity was response, and that is what we decided to take head on,” said Peter.
The right response?
Believed to be “a key survival tool in the intense media wars of today,” Respnet-Response on- Line-TOI’s major cyber ace, is a real-time, on-line information service for the organization’s business partners. The idea is to provide a unique facility to advertisers/advertising agencies that allows for instantaneous scheduling updates, pre-and post release support, billing and ac counting information.
“With the increasing demand from advertisers to agencies, urging them to reach more of the target audience in a shorter span to time, systems that expedite and facilitate the advertising function are an absolute imperative,” commented a source from TOI’s information services division.
“Earlier, when an ad agency in New Delhi booked an ad in the Delhi center for publication in Bombay, Bangalore and other cities simultaneously, the department in New Delhi would take photocopies of the release order (R,O) of the ad, and courier them to the other centers,” said Raj Mathur, senior manager systems, information systems division, TOI.
“Thanks to the network and the RespNet application itself, we do not have to do that anymore. The R.O. when it is received, is keyed into the computer into one of the servers and the information is automatically transmitted to the relevant centers. In the next phase we will be looking at the transfer of material itself,” said Mathur.
“Currently this is being done to a certain extent, particularly with classified advertisements, which are text-driven. Classified advertising material is being transferred over the network.
“However, there are two is sues with transferring graphic — material. One—you need a setup at each place where the graphic material can be converted into the computer readable format. At the minimum you need a scanner that also interfaces to your application. In this situation, as the R.O is being entered, the material is also getting scanned and travelling to the relevant destination.”
“The second issue is band width. Scanned images typically are very large in size and our network currently isn’t really a very high bandwidth network. It satisfies our requirements today, but if you are talking about sending scanned graphics on that network, I doubt if we will be able to do so. This application is definitely on the cards and we are considering it seriously,” Mathur added.
The add-ons
A lot of response-related ac counting information also travels on the network because once the ad is published, the agency needs to be informed about when it was published and where it appeared. Bills have to be generated at each center. Applications running on the network include financial accounting, inventory and MIS. “We have done all the work ourselves without any readymade packages. We have a very strong skill set in Ingres and our work is done in the Ingres RDBMS environment. RespNet, (which is the name of both the network and the application), is completely written in Ingres with a little bit of C in the networking part.
The network is mostly over terrestrial leased lines, with speeds ranging from 2400 to 9600 bps.”
“If we are lucky, we manage to even drive these up further, to 28.8 kbps. On the hardware side, we are using TCP IP. Earlier we had an X.25-based network,” Mathur said.
While the RespNet response application is the prime application on the network, the other most widely used application is E-mail. The TOT’s E-mail services have led to major cost cuts and savings in phone calls, faxes and other communications costs.
“Some of the other applications we are using on the network include on-line chat and multi- user conferencing, which is currently only character-based. You can key in what you want and a pseudo conference can be con ducted among employees across the country and worldwide,” Mathur informed.
Yet another application the publishing giant has on its portfolio is network administration. Whenever there are changes required in the network software, they are very often made on-line. “We log into the remote machine and make the changes, thereby saving travel time,” said Mathur. “We are also looking at video conferencing over the network, but here again bandwidth be- comes a criterion. We are looking at options for increasing bandwidth to support video conferencing.”
Plans ahead
While currently the TOI network is based on terrestrial lines, the company is contemplating technologies such as VSATs. “VSATs are one option we are looking at. The other option is to increase the bandwidth of our terrestrial lines,” Mathur said. Meanwhile, the company is considering a 64kbps line, “or then take a quantum jump and go for a Ti line between New Delhi and Bombay.”
“We might even go in for a completely different option such as ISDN, which is available currently between metros. The end result may be multiple trans ports—a combination of VSATs and terrestrial lines, or terrestrial lines and ISDN. That’s where we are moving,” Mathur informed.