Westchester Publishing Services

Excellence Delivered

Westchester Wrap-up – Spring 2019

Client Portal

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

We’re halfway through our 50th year in business, and Westchester Publishing Services has continued to be very productive in several areas! Here are a few of the highlights from this past spring:

The Westchester K-12 Team Welcomes Walter

Walter Henderson, Jr., Senior Supervising Editor, English Language Training In April the Westchester K-12 Product Development team grew when Walter Henderson, Jr., joined the team as Senior Supervising Editor for ELT (English Language Training). Walter has an impressive professional background as a classroom instructor both in the United States and overseas, as well as working with academic institutions and publishers to develop suitable course materials for English Language Learners (ELL). Having Walter and his extensive professional network as a part of Westchester K-12 allows us to provide educational, academic, and professional publishers with a wide range of product offerings, including bilingual and translation content to support the specific needs of English Language Learners in educational and business settings.

 

Westchester Publishing Services UK profiled

Coverage about Westchester’s 50th anniversary continued into the spring, with a comprehensive profile in The Bookseller (may require login to read) about our company and the factors that brought us to further expand the business into the UK market, under the guidance of Managing Director of Westchester UK, Tim Davies. More coverage about Westchester’s anniversary can be found in these articles.

K-12 Catalog

Westchester K-12 Publishing Services Catalog 2019This spring the Westchester K-12 art and design team produced a comprehensive catalog that showcases the capabilities and services the Product Development team is able to provide educational and ed-tech publishers for new curriculum content or product updates. Download your complimentary copy and let us know how the Westchester K-12 team can help you.

Client Portal Nominated for Innovation Award

Stationers Company Shortlisted Innovation Excellence Awards 2019In May, we were excited to learn that our Client Portal had been nominated for the Stationers’ Company 2019 Innovation Excellence Awards in the Customer Experience category. To receive this recognition from the Stationers’ Company – a London-based guild with a more than 600-year history of serving members of the publishing and media industries – was a particularly special acknowledgment of the work our technology team has invested into building a project management platform that serves the specific requirements of publishers. This article provides additional information about the newest features we’ve added to the Client Portal to make it even more user-friendly.

British Book Awards

Westchester was proud to be the sponsor for the Academic, Education, and Professional Publisher of the Year category at this year’s British Book Awards which took place in London on May 13.  The awards program is also known as The Nibbies, and draws a veritable Who’s Who of the British publishing industry to recognize the successes of authors and publishers in the previous year.  Additional information about the Books of the Year shortlists and winners is available here.

Association of University Presses

Tom Hartmann and Susan Baker at the 2019 AUP Conference, DetroitIn mid-June, members of Westchester’s sales and editorial teams traveled to Detroit to attend and exhibit at the Association of University Presses annual conference. We always enjoy meeting with our clients at conferences to discuss the latest developments that are having an impact within the industry, and sharing with publishers who may not be familiar with our product offerings the many ways that Westchester’s services can help them to improve their workflows.

In the Community

In the last edition of the Westchester Wrap-up, I shared with you that the Westchester K-12 team had begun an initiative to make a positive difference one classroom at a time. Learn more about the projects that Anne Riccio and Laura Rolfe selected, and how you can help a classroom in your community.

Summer Reading

If you’re looking for a new title or two to add to your reading list, the Westchester staff have some interesting recommendations that you probably won’t find everywhere else. Check out the variety of fiction and non-fiction titles that we’re planning to read this summer, and let us know what you think!

We’ll be on the road at a few key conferences during the remainder of 2019, and planning is well underway for the trade shows Westchester will be attending and exhibiting at next year. The Conferences and Events page will continue to be updated as we confirm our commitments, so check back regularly to see where you can meet with us in person.

You can also keep up with the latest news from Westchester by following us on LinkedIn, and subscribing to our blogs (Westchester and Westchester K-12). Contact us any time to learn how our editorial, typesetting, design, and project management services can help you reduce production time and expense in your publication program.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!
Best,

Nicole Tomassi

 

 

Nicole Tomassi
Marketing & Conference Manager

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

Westchester is continually reviewing feedback regarding our Client Portal.  The Client Portal, our no-cost online system for project management, is currently in formal release v. 2019.C.05, but a small, new feature was added this weekend that may make your life a little easier if you are a client with many live projects or articles in the Client Portal at once.  Meet the ability to indicate “Priority” projects in your dashboard.

How does the new “Priority” Star work?  In the Header of the Dashboard you will see a new Star icon next to “Action”. The Star is next to each job you have showing on your Dashboard as well.

This star will allow you to flag a job as a priority for you only.

So, if you have a priority project that you are focusing on, click the Star next to the job and it will change to red. You can then sort on the Star in the header, and all your jobs you flagged as priorities will show at the top of your Dashboard list.

Here are some screenshots to put more context to the above:

Click the Star next to a job and it turns red.

Portal Star 002

Sort on the Star in the header bar, and it will sort all Star jobs to the top.

Portal Star Button

This and other new features will be covered in the new User’s Manual we will be issuing in July.

Lastly, congratulations to Heidelberg UK for winning the Stationers’ Company Innovation Excellence Awards for 2019.  Tim Davies, Managing Director of Westchester Publishing Services UK, represented Westchester at today’s awards ceremony, where The Client Portal was awarded a certificate for being shortlisted for the Customer Experience category.  Congratulations to all our fellow nominees and to Heidelberg for the win!

Tim Davies, 2019 Stationers' Company Innovation Excellence Awards

Do you have suggestions for new features in the Client Portal?  Call your account manager or Contact Us to share your feedback and ideas.

by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

Many year in review pieces come out in December, which means anything that happens the last few weeks of the year runs the risk of getting overlooked. That’s why I decided it might be better to wait a bit before sharing some of Westchester’s 2018 highlights with you:

Client Portal Enhancements

We continue to add capabilities to the Client Portal, our project management system that helps put more productivity and time back in the hands of our clients. Take a brief tour of the different ways the Client Portal gives you visibility to your projects while they’re with Westchester.

 

Prepress services whitepaper

Published and distributed by Publishers Weekly, Westchester sponsored this comprehensive report that provides in-depth analysis on why using the right third-party vendor to take care of editorial and composition services for your publication projects not only makes fiscal sense, but also frees up valuable resources within your company to focus on growing your business.

 

Westchester K-12 opens an office

2018 began with the opening of our K-12 division’s office in Dayton, Ohio. It’s an ideal central base for our team, given its proximity to several of our K-12 publisher clients who have offices in the Midwest region, combined with the large pool of educational publishing talent that calls the area home.

Westchester UK opens an office

After careful analysis and the strong reception we received in the market, we officially opened the doors to our Westchester UK office in Stratford upon Avon in September  – an apropos location given that it’s the birthplace of the Bard himself. Tim Davies, who was appointed as our UK Managing Director, has signed on a number of new clients who have been very pleased with the quality and the cost savings they can achieve when we provide editorial and typesetting services on their projects.

Expanded partnership with Dropbox

Our partnership with Dropbox continued to grow stronger throughout 2018. We collaborated on a case study about how we use Dropbox within our workflow processes with clients, and have integrated the Dropbox API into our Client Portal to further improve the UX, and deliver efficiencies for clients using this project management tool. We also had a discussion with George Baier to better understand how Dropbox envisions the ways media and technology will continue to intersect.

K-12 Familiarity

In the October newsletter I shared with you that our Dayton-based K-12 Publishing Services division was working on some special projects in front of the camera. One of the video projects the team focused on is about a graphic novel titled Unfamiliar. Take a look behind the scenes to see how our content and art teams created this graphic novel that addresses the themes of diversity and inclusivity in a format that students can engage with and see themselves in.

We built a new website!

The Dayton team was very busy this fall with a number of projects, including the updated and expanded Westchester K-12 website. Providing a complete overview of all the capabilities our K-12 team can execute on for educational publishers, it’s a great way to learn more about Westchester K-12. Click the image on the right to take a tour, and let us know what you think about it,

Our following grows

The number of people following us on LinkedIn nearly doubled in 2018. It’s a great way to stay in the know about what’s happening at Westchester, along with our website, blog, and other social media channels. If you’re not already connecting with us through at least one of these outlets, you should check them out so you can always be up to date!

On the road again…

The Westchester team was very busy in 2018, attending conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, including London Book Fair, Book Expo, ILA (International Literacy Association) NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Math), AUP (Association of University Publishers), IPG (Independent Publishers Guild), Frankfurt Book Fair, and many more. Be sure to visit our Conferences & Events page to see where we will be this year, and make an appointment to meet with us.

This is a very special year for Westchester Publishing Services, as 2019 marks 50 years since the company was founded. While some of the faces and much of the technology has changed over the past half-century, the one constant is the pride every employee has in delivering excellence on every job they work on for every client. We thank everyone who has been a part of this amazing journey, and are looking forward to celebrating this special milestone throughout the year!

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

As announced last summer, Westchester Publishing Services partnered with Dropbox to use its Dropbox API as part of the architecture of our Client Portal. Since then, we’ve been hard at work to bring you even more enhancements, resulting in the release of Version 2018.C.03, late last year.

To start off the new year, I thought I’d take a few minutes to give you a relatively concise tour of all the great features the Client Portal has to help you streamline management on your Westchester projects.  Want to learn more about how you can use the Client Portal to easily submit editorial and production projects to Westchester, track the assets and status of your project at each pass, customize dashboards and reports, email your rep at Westchester, and more?

If you’ve got about 9 minutes, you can learn more about the core editorial and production features as well as our newest enhancements to the Client Portal.

After you’ve toured the Client Portal, contact Westchester to learn how you can use it to help you trim costs and condense schedules on your publications projects.

Westchester has been a client of Dropbox for some time, and after conducting an in-depth analysis of the extent of their capabilities, we made the decision to partner with them at the beginning of 2018. It is important to us as a company to ensure our clients are able to use a best-in-class solution product that allows them easier ability to transmit files and track versions than they could with FTP sites, WeTransfer, or other alternatives. While Westchester has had enterprise FTP solutions via FTP and web-based FTP transfer for many years – constantly expanding those capabilities, we realized that many of our newer and legacy clients were adapting to newer transfer options.
 
In our latest version release of the Client Portal, Westchester has integrated features of the Dropbox API to save our clients valuable time when sending and receiving files, as well as tracking versions and interacting with Westchester on their projects. By adapting Dropbox features into the Client Portal, clients benefit from both the Dropbox DBX platform as well as our own project management software, to gain a clearer understanding of where each project is in the editorial or production workflow, and engage with their assets throughout the project. 
 
Learn more about our use of Dropbox in this video, and contact us to find out how using Westchester’s Client Portal can streamline your production workflow.