To All NCI Employees and Business Partners

There will be upgrades occurring over the next three weekends. We will send out reminders every week.

On Sunday 11/9/08 from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM. 

The following Business Applications/Services/Websites/Connectivity will be down during this time:

            Email services (leads will not be affected)

            Blackberry email services

            Prinergy

On Sunday 11/16/08 from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM. 

 The following Business Applications/Services/Websites/Connectivity will be down during this time:

            Email services (leads will not be affected)

            Blackberry email services

            Prinergy

On Sunday 11/23/08 from 8:00 PM to 6:00 AM Monday 11/24/08. 

The following Business Applications/Services/Websites/Connectivity will be down during this time:

            Email services (leads will not be affected)

            Blackberry email services

            Prinergy

To All NCI Employees and Business Partners

On Saturday 10/18, from 9:00 PM – midnight, we will be installing a change to our network. During these hours you may experience short intermittent disruptions to our systems and websites. The result would be that you may be disconnected momentarily from NCI systems (AMS, Tracker, etc) and/or you may not see images on our websites temporarily.

The following Business Applications/Services/Websites/Connectivity may have intermittent outages during this time:

AMS (Listing and Community)

NCITools

Tracker

Lawson

Our websites (NCI.com; Realestatebook.com; Livingchoices.com; Apartmentfinder.com; Uniquehomes.com; etc)

Consumer websites may have redx’s for photos

VPN

We thank you for your patience during this time period.

The beta testing for the new High Resolution (Hi-Res) workflow has been successfully completed with 15 magazines participating.  We now have 175 magazines scheduled to convert to this workflow during the months of October, November and December. 

If you’ll recall, we sent a communication out in August explaining the need to convert to this new workflow.  Basically, the manufacturer, of Synapse Prepare (Kodak), decided not to upgrade Synapse Prepare to support Quark 7.0 or Indesign.  This untimely decision, forced NCI to respond by shifting the current low resolution/high resolution “swap” workflow to a high resolution only workflow, allowing the use of Quark 7 and Indesign. 

As you prepare to convert to the Hi-Res workflow, it is important to note the current Synapse Prepare “auto-correct” fixes certain file settings during PDF generation. The new process for generating PDFs  for Quark 7 & InDesign will not “auto correct” these file settings.  Prior to conversion to the Hi-Res workflow, we highly recommend that you review the logs generated by Synapse Prepare for your files and then evaluate any warnings or error messages within these logs.  This step will prevent inconsistent output when you switch to the Hi-Res PDF Workflow.  Below is the procedure that will show how to access the log files in Synapse Prepare to determine the adjustments that need to be considered prior to conversion.

Weekly web conference sessions have been scheduled and will begin the week of 10/20. Due to the detailed information covered in these sessions, we are limiting each web conference to 20 participants per session.

Sessions will be held on the following days:

Mondays          10am – 11am               Quark Hi-Res Workflow

Fridays             1pm -  2pm                  Quark Hi-Res Workflow

Fridays             2pm – 3pm                   InDesign Hi-Res Workflow

Please contact your account manager to schedule training for the Monday or Friday sessions, or if you have any questions in general about the Hi Res workflow.  We appreciate your continued partnership.

We were not able to complete the install of the upgrade to our email server last weekend as planned and have rescheduled for this weekend. The upgrade to our email server requires 4 to 10 hours of downtime to complete.  The downtime window is scheduled from 8:00 PM Sunday 10/5/08 to 6:00 AM Monday, 10/6/08. 

We wanted to let you know in case you should need to send an e-mail to an NCI employee during these hours.

Thank you for your patience.

 As a follow up to our letter dated July 1, 2008, I wanted to provide you with a current status on NCI’s plans to upgrade to Quark 7, replace Synapse Prepare and transition to the High Resolution Workflow Submission. 

We have identified and will begin converting our first pilot publications to Quark 7 and the high resolution workflow in mid August. As discussed in our previous letter, with the industry shift to high resolution files, we, too, must adopt the acceptance of these files in our environment using one of the two options below: