A 21st century media transformation

Francesco Chicchiriccò explains how L'Osservatore Romano, the Holy See's Journal, will extend its reach to the entire world by introducing an internet version of its newspaper.

“Systems that consist of well-established technologies are highly scalable and offer strong solutions for the online subscription”
-Francesco Chicchiriccò

L'Osservatore Romano has been the Holy See's newspaper and broadcasting medium to the outside world since 1861. Today it is published daily in the Italian language and weekly in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, with a monthly magazine in Polish. In India a publication of a Malayalam version began in July 2008, the first in non-Latin characters.

It was the Pope himself, His Holiness Benedict XVI, who requested to further enhance the paper's reach by asking the L'Osservatore Romano team to improve its world dimension. This is particularly important for expressing the true reality of the universal Church, through the possibilities offered today by its presence 'on-line'. The key challenge was to evolve from the current, manually updated website to a real web 2.0 publishing system and portal solution. With the current system, everything was stuck in a typical'90s' format: content authors had to know some HTML, to manage every single page's content, appearance and correct linkage. There was no workflow process in place, nor support from the existing system with regards to publication rights. Furthermore, articles could not be searched nor be designated as classified.

Everett's Italian branch started the contacts with L'Osservatore Romano by conducting a workshop together with the staff of the internet office of the Pope, which was followed by a feasibility study. From that the development of the internet version of L'Osservatore Romano started. All the requirements expressed by L'Osservatore Romano lead to new processes and systems, including processes that involve all members of the documentation team and support the on-line subscription. Systems that consist of well-established technologies are highly scalable and offer strong solutions for the on-line subscription. An enterprise CMS was introduced, which is able to scale a huge number of documents and which caters to an enterprise-class level of control on the document workflow and production. In addition, as the goal is to reach people across the world, proper access management has been addressed. All this resulted in a modern website or 'portal' allowing to browse news, newspaper's archive and enabling on-line subscription.

The chosen solution is based on proven Open Source technologies like Hippo CMS and commercial of-the-shelf products such as Sun Java System Access Manager and their System Portal Server. Everett's successful 'EVOLVE' methodology is used to facilitate the interactive and iterative ('agile') development of the solution and supporting components. The software products of Hippo and Sun Microsystems were selected based on their fit with functional and non-functional requirements. Requirements like the need to structure, manage and archive a vast amount of content for historical importance, given the fact that L'Osservatore Romano is almost a century and a half old, as well as ensuring that recent content will be easy to find and accessible for a global readership. But also the expressed needs for proven technology, ease of customisation and compliancy to a set of well-established standards, technologies and Open Source projects.

Piero Di Domenicantonio, Managing Layout Editor at L'Osservatore Romano stated: "From the collaboration with a specialised partner as qualified as Everett comes the portal of L'Osservatore Romano: a strategic instrument for a newspaper with an international reach, which is a news service and, at the same time, a means of communion and dialogue among the Christians spread across every continent." 

Francesco Chicchiriccò is the Delivery Manager of Everett Italia. Currently leading Everett's CMS-related projects, for the past eight years Francesco had the chance to contribute to many key open source projects and to work in international environments. Everett is located in the Netherlands, the UK, Italy and India. Visit www.everett.nl for more information.