Single E-mail Route Cuts Costs for Knight Ridder

Software Magazine, June, 1999 by Elizabeth U. Harding

In order to integrate disparate e-mail systems after mergers and acquisitions of new news-papers, as well as a corporate move from Miami to San Jose, Calif., the IT department at Knight Ridder Inc. decided to overhaul its messaging infrastructure. Knight Ridder, a U.S. publishing giant with $2.9 billion in revenues, 31 newspapers, and 22,000 employees nationwide, has about 15,000 users of its internal e-mail system, says Ricardo De La Fuente, Knight Ridder's director of Information Services in New Media Technologies.

"To get messaging in place and make it work, we decided to centralize the functions by using a directory as a key infrastructure piece," says De La Fuente. "We deployed a combination of [Microsoft] Exchange and Netscape messaging servers."

To connect the Microsoft Exchange Directory and synchronize the data between the messaging servers, Knight Ridder used a meta directory from Zoomit, Toronto, Canada. Running on Windows, the Zoomit Via Directory Server has a range of management agents that integrate NOS and application databases.

Having replaced the old infrastructure, Knight Ridder began to distribute some of the administrative requirements to each paper, telling local administrators to manage their own users within their own space, De La Fuente says. Knight Ridder is using Oblix CSA (Corporate Services Automation) from Oblix Inc., Mountain View, Calif., to extend administration of information and the directory to the users. They can make information updates directly through the Oblix browser-based interface.

"Oblix takes advantage of our centralized directory," says De La Fuente. "Using Oblix, the most promising thing now is that we can do some workflow and better provisioning, and can begin to utilize the Web as a mechanism to accomplish a lot of these tasks."