United Borneo Press, which publishes Chinese daily the ‘United Daily News’ in East Malaysia, is upgrading editorial with a new Miles 33 system.

The integrated Asset editorial and archiving system encompasses editorial  and picture workflows, page planning and tracking, page make-up and archiving.

The operation is based in Miri, in the northern part of Sarawak, one of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo, and employs a total of 300 people. Other plants are in Kuching and Sibu, with editorial offices at Bintulu, Kuala Lumpur and Brunei.

The agreement was signed by UBP group managing director Sim Yong Liang after a successful staging of the Asset system in Chinese. In an aggressive implementation plan, the system will be rolled out across all seven sections and three editions.

The cloud-based Asset system is fully integrated editorial with thin clients and plug-ins to third party applications such as Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. These criteria were important to the newsroom to manage the way content is linked, authored, edited and published in a distributed organisation such as UBP.

Asset is a browser based digital workflow system for editorial workflow and content management, designed to be media neutral.

At the United Daily News, editorial content is authored at branch offices located all across Malaysia and submitted electronically through its in-house intranet. Previously, content had to be manually gathered and entered into its legacy layout software through ‘cut-and-paste’ processes. The Asset system centralises editorial content while enabling remote editorial authoring and workflow management.

Tan Hhen Chee, deputy chief editor for United Daily News was also impressed by the ability to to operate within mobile devices such as Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices, even for managing and editing Chinese content.

Joe Liew, Miles 33 director for televisual products Malaysia, says the company is “very excited” to work with United Borneo Press towards completing the distributed Chinese editorial system.