Since 1970, RAG (formerly known as Ruhrkohle AG) has been publishing an employee journal. In 2004, the company decided to revamp the journal’s appearance and released a fresh visual makeup under the title Folio. From its first edition, the magazine Folio has been produced monthly with Adobe InDesign, Adobe InCopy and the K4 Publishing System. 

RAG Aktiengesellschaft located in Essen, Germany, is an international industry group with strong roots in the Ruhr Basin, Germany’s most important heavy industry region. The company employs more than 100,000 people and generates a turnover of more than 20 billion euros worldwide.

RAG’s editorial team started researching options for a high-performance publishing system in 2002. A major system requirement for publishing the employee journal was to connect all editorial sites producing the magazine: the main editorial office located in Essen, a publishing house and a design agency in Hamburg, a remote editorial office and a translation office in Cologne as well as a freelance proofreader in the south of Germany. Until the installation of the K4 Publishing System, the editorial staff used QuarkXPress and Microsoft Word.

The Folio staff produces 40 pages each month, which are distributed across the group. Up to 12 additional pages are produced in the editorial office in Herne, Germany, for the employees of the subsidiary company Deutsche Steinkohle AG (DSK). Four of these pages are produced with texts written by employees of the individual coal mines. These texts are sent to the editorial office in Herne, where they are integrated into the K4 workfiow to produce different versions of Folio for coal mines belonging to the group. In order to optimize the editorial work of all members at the different sites with a new system based on Adobe InDesign and Adobe InCopy, a centralization of the workfiow was necessary. The aim was to produce a much more extensive magazine with remote offices all over Germany without significantly increasing the number of employees working on it. In addition, the company decided to publish the magazine in English as well.

From the start, certified K4 Integrator Dr. Wirth New Media GmbH based in Frankfurt, Germany, was in charge of planning, installing and training within the group. The implementation was carried out simultaneously at all sites. In addition to the transparent teamwork across all distributed sites, the parallel workflow between layout designers and editors was also very much appreciated by RAG. The close integration with Adobe InDesign and InCopy offers an excellent possibility for editors to follow the layout development.

The employee journal Folio is published on a monthly basis and has a circulation of 100,000 copies (80,000 in German and 20,000 in English). Currently, Folio is created by about 30 employees at different sites. A third of the editorial staff works with Adobe InDesign. The rest uses the specialized editor’s tool InCopy.

All editorial workstations are equipped with Windows XP Professional or Mac OS X machines. A Linux Server, hosted by a professional service provider, is used as a dedicated database server for the K4 Publishing System.

“In the past, we exchanged files via email and ISDN. With the growing number of remote sites, it became more and more time-consuming to manage and keep track of the files,” says Rolf Sonderkamp, Editor-in-chief of Folio. “A decisive factor in favour of the implementation of the K4 Publishing System was the possibility to manage files centrally and to always keep track of the production progress across all sites. This enables us to connect additional remote sites without additional worries, e.g. local editorial teams at our allied companies or freelance contributors working for the magazine.” In addition to the easy connection of remote locations, the cross-platform compatibility of K4, Adobe InDesign and InCopy was a big advantage.

The actual state of production is visible to every employee at the company’s headquarters in Essen and to remote editorial teams all over Germany at any given time, simplifying time planning at the main editorial office. Designers and editors adjusted quickly to the new system. Within a short period of time, the K4 Publishing System was fully accepted by all parties involved.

After the successful introduction at Folio, the RAG group is planning to produce more of their publications with SoftCare’s K4. “This system makes our magazine Folio surely one of the most modern corporate publications regarding workflow management,” emphasizes Rolf Sonderkamp. “With K4, everybody working on the magazine Folio can use their operating system of choice --even the links to placed images or logos remain intact when opening a file on another operating system.These small details make a world of a difference and save the company a lot of time when added up over the working day.”