Yaffa Publishing rolls out WoodWing

Sydney, Australia (April, 2009)

One of the oldest family-owned publishers in Australia has begun using WoodWing’s Enterprise content publishing platform to produce their large range of niche consumer and business-to-business titles.

Yaffa Publishing is an independent Australian-owned operation with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Amongst their many titles Yaffa publish AdNews (Australia’s top-selling advertising, media and marketing magazine), and the oldest and bestselling fishing magazine in the country; Fishing World. Yaffa is also Australia’s premier photography magazine publisher with titles including Australian Photography, Capture and Digital Photography & Design and their business-to-business division incorporates over 15 titles spanning industries such as fashion, advertising, healthcare, foodservice and packaging.

“Creative Folks approached us in the middle of 2008 with the concept of streamlining our editorial systems and as soon as we saw the demonstration we realised that WoodWing offered great potential for our business,“ said Matthew Gunn, the Production Director at Yaffa.

“In order to prove an impressive ROI we commissioned Creative Folks to scope our new workflow and run a pilot installation. The results were brilliant.”

“Yaffa’s range of niche publications presented us with a unique challenge,” says Andrew Lomas, Project / Sales Director for Creative Folks. “Content for their consumer magazines is produced by editorial teams working from remote coastal locations as well as the Australian outback. We used a combination of WoodWing’s Web Editor with Adobe InCopy and InDesign Server to create a virtual office so that the editors felt as though they were working from head office.”

“When we first starting talking to Creative Folks we were using a mixture of Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign for page layout, so our workflow was somewhat over complicated. WoodWing’s Smart Styles and Smart Layout plugins made the transition to InDesign easy,” said Matthew Gunn. “For our flat-planning requirements Creative Folks provided us with a site license for van Gennep’s PlanMaker fE which integrates directly with our WoodWing database. Incoming ads are automatically placed in the InDesign file giving us a solid, robust workflow that we couldn’t be happier with.”

“All the people at Yaffa have been open and acceptant of the new system. Change management has not been an issue, with everyone – right up to the Managing Director – embracing the new technology,” says Matthew Green, Managing Director at Creative Folks. “We have been extremely fortunate to be able to work with such a wonderful team.”

“The installation at Yaffa really shows the flexibility of our solutions,” Remco Koster, Managing Director of WoodWing Asia Pacific, said. “Because of the large distances in Australia, being able to work remotely as if you’re in the office is an important feature, and this is working exceptionally well.”