Saxotech, anyone?

So we just got a notice today that our company is switching our CMS to Saxotech, and I was wondering if anyone here was familiar with it. The company's memo makes it sound like a great thing, but I've formed a healthy distrust for company memos over the years.

Considering what we're working on now, I'd say it has to be an improvement, but you never know.

 

I've used it in the past. The version we had has surely been upgraded, but it was very tedious. That said, there were some pretty cool things you could do in it when you really got to know it.

 

It's easy to use. Here are some tips

- Don't search for anything older than three months unless you are using keywords. Otherwise the massive amount of data may freeze your machine.
-Never delete stuff. Only unpublish. When you delete, the URL of the deleted item could get used again and you might get a cached copy of an old article on some new article that got the same URL (make sense?)

 

It's a massive improvement over old school DTI. Workbench, Incopy and Indesign work nearly flawlessly together. Indesign will crash once every three or four months (in other words, not that often), but if you open Indesign back up (open the program, not the page), the crash recovery is impressive.

Only problem I have with it is inconsistency with agate macros, but that's probably just because of how our shop uses Saxo. It also doesn't play all that well with our online CMS, but we're in the process of changing that so that the two will supposedly play well together.

 

Easy to learn and use, just labor-intensive.

 

After a few years with Saxotech, I'd be happy to never hear the word "taxonomy" again.

 

We only use Saxotech as our web content-management system.

It meshes remarkably well with our new publishing system, but it's also easy to create and post stories on the fly... though we're not really supposed to do that anymore.

The basics are quick to learn. Our version has a surprising number of options, very few of which actually get utilized.

mustangj highlighted the most frustrating part for me. It seems like every change you make once a story is posted causes issues with the URL and can mess with analytics. Or that's what the Digital people would like me to believe.

 

It's good to hear all of this. I'm not afraid of new things; but when corporate says they're doing something to help us, I get nervous.

I should've specified: We're only using it for Web content, so I'm more than a little encouraged.

They say it'll be in place by the fall, so I'm guessing we'll see it by the second quarter next year.

 

Should have called it Sexotech.

 

We're supposed to go to Saxotech for live page design this summer/fall, with (most) stories, pages and photos in cloud storage instead of locally on the network. I have heard that 1) it will use InDesign and 2) it won't and it'll all be on the web. No definitive word yet. Supposedly this will be more efficient and sufficiently speedy, although I have great doubts about the "fast enough" aspect. (Our computer guy says he's hearing a lot of complaints on the private newsgroups he gets.) Haven't heard anything about using it as a CMS here. We're using a version of Ellington at the moment. So from comments here, I gather Saxotech will do about whatever you're willing to pay for?

 

You can route stories to the Internet through InCopy, but it takes at least half an hour for the system to post like that. If you go in and create the post yourself, they go up rather quickly (though re-cache is required).