The following is an abridged version of an article which appeared in a recent issue of "Catalogue & e-business", written by ec2i's Technical Director, Steve Wallis.

Read more about ec2i and CMS over on the CMS Case Studies page.

Every catalogue is, in its own way, unique, therefore the method employed to produce it has to be tailored to the end requirement. For that reason, it is vital to research and select the right CMS. There are many on the market, all purporting to have just the features you want but, from our own experience, there are some fundamental differences between them all.

For an example, I have selected Advantia, an office supplies group which, through its 400+ page catalogue, offers over 6,500 products to independent dealers. The catalogue presents a challenge to a database, in that it does not carry the same style and format right the way through.

Further up the M1, the Advantia marketing team can view the same CMS via a standard web browser for tasks such as product selection, or changing product text or, through a client version of the software, over the web for more interactive sessions where they can mock up a page with images, text and logos, using a browser. This mock up can then be flowed straight into Quark at the designer's site so that the final tweaking of the pages can be done.

After trail and error, we advised Advantia to select the Matrix CMS for several key reasons. In the stationery industry several pages within catalogues are given over to key manufacturers and they each have their own way of describing products. For example, manufacturer A may describe product size in height followed by width then depth while manufacturer B may use a different order. These small nuances, on the face of it, do not appear to be a problem but when trying to establish an automated database that will flow text into a page ready-styled, it needs a flexible system to deal with it.

The user-friendly interface has won some friends at Advantia. It has made product selection very straightforward and, after only a day's in-house training, the staff at Advantia were able to use the system to create new products with fresh text and images, assign all products to the correct pages and paginate the 430pp catalogue with very few problems. New products/updates to text can be added throughout the year.

These key points made Matrix the right choice for Advantia. Factors such as the complexity of design, whether the same database feeds web and print, and price restraints on the hardware and software to run the system all need to be considered.

Karen Nicholls, Advantia's marketing director, says. "Our catalogue is our prime sales tool and takes a considerable chunk of the year to produce. Since we've moved over to the Matrix CMS it has made the team's job much easier and quicker allowing them to spend more time on other areas of marketing. The system enables us to hold all product information in one place, which can be used to feed all of the other marketing channels that we use. A lot of the proofing is also carried out online which saves time and delivery costs. We can also add new products to the system as and when they are sourced which helps spread the workload more evenly."