CMS Vendors
Atex
Desk, ACE, web, print (Hermes and Prestige)
Long-time print-oriented vendor from Sweden today still focuses on those roots, even as it rolls out digital content management system (CMS) capabilities
- Atex has a long history of automating news production, with a deep understanding of newsrooms, though the firm has undergone many changes and the digital toolset is evolving slowly
- Best fit for its digital CMS lies with mid-sized, independent news organisations, still centred primarily on print and only secondarily on digital
- Customers include la Repubblica (Italy), El País (Spain), the Daily Mail and Metro (UK), and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia).
Likely fit
Atex's complexity limits it to medium to large publishers that need to manage both digital and print and need a highly tailored and custom approach for individual publications. Atex is not particularly suited to digital-only publications or publishers that require extensive content sharing across multiple publications.
At a glance
Primary customer fit
Mid-sized independent news organisation
Secondary fit
Large news organisation
Most active geographies
EMEA
Official support hours
Help desk support during office hours
24/7/365 on-call support for production-critical issues
Officially supported languages for user interface
English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Turkish
Third-party language support available?
No
Licence model
Subscription licence (SaaS) based on users, storage and web traffic Perpetual licence based on users plus additional support and maintenance licence to get access to updates and bug fixes
Scope summary
Focused on content production for print and digital, with some basic digital front-end functionality, but no revenue generation features out of the box
Tech base
Java (Tomcat), Docker, GraphQL API, NextJS/React
Cloud model
SaaS in AWS
Headquarters
Stockholm, Sweden
Head count
150
What customers report
- Tight integration between digital and print, including print previews within the browser
- Comprehensive toolset can be extensively tailored to the needs of a publisher in close cooperation with Atex
- Content editing in Desk feels familiar to editors
- Implementations can be slow and hard to scale, especially if print is part of the workflow
- Outdated architecture can prove difficult to run, even if Atex is slowly updating this
- Treating the article body as one block of content works well for editors but can be hard to publish across channels when shared between digital and print
- Platform is not particularly suited to sharing content across different publications
- The ACE CMS remains very much in development and doesn't always feel like a finished product
Background
- Atex was founded in 1973 in the US and produced one of the first electronic (paperless) platforms for the news industry. The company has since undergone multiple major changes, having been owned by Kodak before being spun off again as a separate entity. It has acquired several other software companies over the years — notably Polopoly, a Swedish news-focused web CMS, in 2008. The company HQ moved to the UK and then to Sweden, though key leadership appears to reside in the Milan office. Atex also has offices in Finland, Brazil, Australia and Singapore. Atex is now an operating group of Canada-based Constellation Software Inc., which buys and holds vertical market software.
- The company continues to support print publication through its 'Hermes' and 'Prestige' systems, though the focus has shifted to 'Desk' (multichannel authoring) and 'ACE' (Atex Content Engine), which includes both a headless CMS and Atex Web as front-end. Editorial staff will generally produce content in Desk, which also allows management of the digital front pages and print editions.
- Atex Desk pivots around the content editor, which, although uses 'blobs' of unstructured (HTML) content, can embed content using iFramely for digital. It also includes a digital asset management (DAM) system, frontpage editor and Matik (for photo collages). Atex is one of the few systems that can automatically avoid duplicate headlines on front pages (though this can be overridden).
- Most Atex implementations still run largely on premise, with the editorial environment, Desk, running in a traditional, Java-based application server. Content can be fed through ACE and ACE Web to manage the web and app front-ends; ACE employs a more modern (largely micro-services-based) architecture.
- In terms of fit, Atex's complexity limits it to medium to large publishers that need to manage both digital and print and need a highly tailored and custom approach for individual publications. Atex is not particularly suited to digital-only publications or publishers that require extensive content sharing across multiple publications.
- While Atex is being used by many newspapers and publishers around the world, given the breadth of the (legacy) toolset, it can be difficult to tell which tools are getting deployed by each. Implementations tend to have evolved over time and are usually tailored to the customer.
- The company reports that an average system for a newsroom of 50 editors can cost around $110,000 USD for content management and print production. Website publishing for a property with around 1M page views per month could cost around $18,000 USD per year.
Package scope (as reported by vendor)
| Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) | Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party) | |
|---|---|---|
|
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
|
Yes
|
|
|
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Support print publishing
|
Yes
|
|
|
Simple social media re-publishing
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
|
Yes
|
|
|
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
|
Yes
|
|
|
User registration
|
Yes
|
|
|
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Subscription or membership
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Personalisation
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Ad management - digital
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Ad management - print
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Content management
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Research
|
Yes
|
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Video management / OVP
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Audio management / podcasting
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Data journalism and visualisation
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Classifieds
|
No
|
|
|
Commenting / community features/
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Newsletter production and management
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Notifications and alerts
|
Yes
|
|
|
A/B testing
|
No
|
|
|
SEO
|
Yes
|
|
|
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
|
Yes
|
|
|
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
|
Yes
|
|
|
AR- / VR- enhanced services
|
No
|
|
|
Audience segmentation
|
No
|
|
|
Online user / partner forums
|
No
|
|
|
Regular user group meetings
|
No
|
|
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