The MNA’s new editorial content management and publishing system, Knowledge, is beginning to attract attention outside the newspaper industry.

Following the successful rollout of the system to the Chronicles series in Wolverhampton and the Weeklies series in Shropshire, Phil Walker, MD of PCS, who are developing Knowledge in conjunction with the Claverley group, has been invited to demonstrate the system to two important non-publishing industry forums.

In September Walker, with Knowledge product manager Peter Cole, demonstrated the system live to an audience of more than 200 at the InterSystems Symposium at the Marriott Hotel at Twickenham and in November he was asked to reprise the presentation to a conference organised by leading systems analysts The Butler Group.

Earlier this year, Knowledge earned PCS the annual Worldwide Innovator Award from InterSystems, makers of the Cache database at the heart of the system.

Said Walker: “The Butler Group invitation was a direct result of the interest we generated at the InterSystems Symposium.

“Bearing in mind that Knowledge is still very much a system in development, we were able to show it live running across hotel broadband and the internet to our servers in Wolverhampton – raw, no smoke and mirrors.

“There was even a bit of a gitch when the broadband went down, but we were able to carry on when it came back.

“We not only made up a document in a browser – with content created on the day reporting the speakers from a previous session – but also proved that we could simultaneously output the content to a couple of web sites, an e-reader and an iPhone application.

“After the presentation we produced a print-quality pdf of the document, had it printed locally and returned to the venue for delegates to take with them.”

The presentations come on the back of articles about Knowledge appearing in a number of technology magazines in the Europe and the USA, part of a ‘soft marketing’ strategy to raise awareness of the system while it continues to mature.

Said Walker: “Our first and most important aim is to fulfil the rollout of Knowledge across the MNA and that’s progressing well. The system has gone in to the Features and Business desks at both Queen Street and Ketley  and it is on course for rollout to Sports desks next before the key push onto News.

“But it has always been part of the strategy of developing Knowledge in-house that it becomes a product we can take to market. We can only see as encouraging the kind of interest it is creating , within and outside our traditional pubishing markets, even at this early stage.”