Thomson Reuters: The international angle

Thomson Reuters

Abacus has been working with Thomson Reuters (formerly Thomson Financial) since 2004, in the UK, USA and Far East. In addition to building the company’s online systems, Abacus has also been responsible for the redesign of a number of Thomson Reuter online magazine titles, creating a consistent design approach for all of them, whilst ensuring that they could each retain their individuality.

Abacus has been working with Thomson Reuters (formerly Thomson Financial) since 2004, in the UK, USA and Far East. In addition to building the company’s online systems, Abacus has also been responsible for the redesign of a number of Thomson Reuter online magazine titles, creating a consistent design approach for all of them, whilst ensuring that they could each retain their individuality.

The UK operation

In 2004, Abacus won a contract to design and build five magazine titles for the IFR group. The Abacus CMS – Webvision – was chosen to underpin the sites, allowing Thomson to handle the web and print publishing. Abacus’ specialist modules – Advision, Dispatch and AIPS – were also implemented. At that time, David Hurst, Director of Publishing at Thomson Financial, said:

“Webvision will provide us with an end-to-end publishing solution, uniting journalists in three continents, and bringing us closer to our goal of making our content available in ever more compelling ways, to meet the needs of this rapidly evolving market.”

Abacus designed XML links within Webvision, which enable access to a number of Thomson Financial databases, and hence the ability to extract relevant data and integrate it with editorial content. Subscribers to the web sites are able to drill down within a story to find out further information about a company, recent deals and other relevant information. The information is generated automatically and delivered as a seamless part of the core editorial.

Expanding to the US and Far East

The consistent design approach was used when Webvision was rolled out in the US to handle the production of a number of publications, including Buyouts, Venture Capital Journal and Private Equity Week.

David Hurst: “With the implementation of Webvision, control over web publishing is back where it should be – in the hands of the editorial staff.” The result has been significant time savings, and because of the huge improvements in the web sites, they have become the fastest growing parts of the business.

Consultants from Abacus worked closely with the Thomson Financial team in the US to specify a system which would precisely meet their needs. A key requirement was the ability to be able to pull data from a number of different Thomson Financial databases – as had been achieved for the UK titles – and deliver these as an integrated and seamless part of the editorial content.

Since the US work, Abacus has rolled out sites for IFR Asia, based in Hong Kong, and Thomson Merger News, based in Japan.