The Globe and Mail transitioned their print CMS, CUE Print, from on-premises servers to the Stibo DX Cloud, a strategic move aimed at long-term sustainability.
The IT department at the Globe and Mail is always busy supporting the business strategy and driving technological innovation.
Globe and Mail originally became a CUE Print customer in 2002, back when Stibo DX was known as CCI Europe. Back then on-premise installations were the default. Globe and Mail had dedicated staff to work on the installation and maintain the infrastructure. Every few years they would do an upgrade and it was never considered a challenge to maintain the system between upgrades.
A key mandate for the IT department was the adoption of cloud managed services to replace legacy on-premise applications. Stibo DX’s CUE Print cloud offering was a logical step for the Globe as it allowed them to continue with a trusted platform but without the overhead of managing an on-premise system.
Ken Carriere, Senior Manager in Editorial Solutions at the Globe and Mail led the implementation for the Globe. The project was completed over a three-month period and the Globe is very pleased with the success of the implementation and stable support it’s had over the last 1.5 years.
Cloud Adoption considerations
The team considered two cloud options: hosting CUE Print in their own cloud environment or transitioning to the Stibo DX Cloud, powered by AWS. Opting for the latter, they aimed for ease of maintenance, compatibility, and alignment with corporate strategy, foreseeing benefits such as automatic upgrades handled by the Stibo DX experts and the elimination of hardware concerns.
One of the internal concerns about moving to the cloud was the loss of direct access to the Fingerpost system that handles wire feeds. With Stibo DX hosting the installation, Globe and Mail would lose direct access to it, prompting them to file Stibo DX tickets for changes to be made, thereby making it harder if urgency demands it. But when Ken Carriere and his team looked back to see how often they needed to gain access urgently, it turned out to be close to never.
Another concern they had to address was the speed of Amazon Web Services. A concern Stibo DX addressed in the contract by hosting in AWS Canada.
3 months from signing the contract to going live
The Globe and Mail went live with CUE Print in the Cloud on October 17, 2022, just three months after the contract signing.
During the implementation process, Ken and his team had to figure out how to work with their printing plants and freelance page designers. Moving CUE Print to the cloud meant that they had to allow access to the system for the external page designers through a secure connection, but only to a limited subset of functionality in the system. A task that seemed big but turned out to be easier than imagined.
The main challenge revolved around The Globe and Mail's printing plants. With five plants nationwide, all serving multiple clients, they were accustomed to receiving EPS typesetting converted into 1.5 PDFs. However, the new CUE Print upgrade would deliver 1.8 PDFs instead, causing compatibility concerns. Even if some plants agreed to the change, unanimous agreement was necessary, posing a significant obstacle to the cloud migration project. The solution was to automate PDF conversion to 1.5 through Asura, ensuring compatibility and ink level consistency, effectively overcoming the challenge. As a result, the printing plants never had to deal with any change at all.
How did it go?
“This is where it might get a little bit difficult for me to explain because it's going to sound like I'm lying. But the project went very, very smoothly. We went live, and most people didn't even notice because the printing plants handled the PDFs perfectly, the editors handled the CUE Print installation handily, and the project was done on time and even a little bit under budget” Ken Carriere summarizes.
The transition was indeed a quiet one. In late November, a little over a month after going live, one of the editors who doesn’t work full time on the newspaper came up to Ken Carriere, asking when CUE Print would go live. It had been such a smooth transition, that he hadn’t even noticed it had already happened.
Today the IT department at the Globe and Mail refers to the project as ‘The Model Project’ due to the ease of implementation and because there have been no outages or slowdowns since. Production is simply running smoothly. Resulting in the IT team being able to support the business strategy even better in their daily work, instead of dealing with complex maintenance tasks.