PA spreads the news on open source

Press Association (PA) is moving to an open source platform for its editorial content management system (CMS) to take advantage of flexibility and cost benefits.

The national news agency for the UK and Ireland started working with the Nuxeo Open Source ECM platform last October to improve digital news production and distribution.

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Press Association is increasingly supplying digital news organisations with written content, as well as pictures, video and data, so needed to update its content platform.

Speaking to silicon.com, Paul Berman, IT development director at PA said a change was needed as the previous CMS was coming to the end of its life. "We were being asked to do things that we just couldn't bend the system any further to do," he said.

Berman added: "PA's been using open source software - be it web server or database server - really for some time but we're now moving up the technology stack more into the complete application area."

PA decided to take advantage of the benefits of open source. "It's a mixture of the flexibility, the cost and the potential to scale it and make it really adaptable for our environment," Berman explained.

He added: "We have some really very specific requirements for our editorial applications in which we want to deliver a very effective tool for our journalists to do things with as few keystrokes as possible, efficiently and quickly."

Using the Nuxeo technology also provides costs savings as PA doesn't pay a licence fee but uses its budget to develop the platform to suit its needs.

And the Nuxeo platform also offered more flexibility. Berman said: "One of the things we've found in the past with proprietary systems is our market moves faster than the vendors often are prepared to move at, and we wanted the flexibility to be able to add additional metadata or classifications as we needed."

He added: "So as we come up with new ideas about how we can increase efficiency and make the system work harder for us we can actually get in there and make those changes."

In the future Berman said PA is interested in using the initial work more broadly to help journalists classify and identify content more easily.

The live version of the platform is due to be rolled out in the next few weeks and will be implemented in its offshore operations soon after.