Founded 1946 in Berlin, Cornelsen Verlag is one of the leading publishers in the Education sector in Germany. The range of published products includes schoolbooks and scientific literature, as well as seminars for continued education, multimedia software and e-learning offerings.

Quite obviously, educational publications usually require an enormous amount of images. Therefore it is easily understandable that the Cornelsen Verlag was one of the first to deploy a Digital Asset Management solution. Meanwhile, in over 15 years, about 15 million assets have been accumulated that occupy terabytes of storage. Hundreds of editors require access to the images and the layout files. In short, Cornelsen is certainly a DAM customer with very high demands.

• Efficient archiving of images and layout files
• Automatically cross-link products, images and metadata
• High availability of the overall solution
• Support for internal schoolbook production workflows

Right from the start, the project managers at Cornelsen knew that their DAM solution would have to support the workflow of their users and that the system had to be absolutely reliable. This meant significant investments for custom development in order to automate important workflow steps, such as consistency checks and linking images and layouts that belonged together. The products that were used as building blocks for the solution have been upgraded or replaced over the years. What stayed the same was the need for rigorous testing with every incremental release to assure the reliability of the solution and its flawless operation.

With the assistance of the founders of The Final Candidate the solution is being maintained continuously. Several system upgrades were performed in order to keep up with the ever increasing amounts of data to be managed, i.e., gigabit networks and state of the art SAN storage devices are currently in place. The solution is being used for archiving and backup of all schoolbook productions, revised editions as well as reprints. Yet, there is still room to grow for this solution at Cornelsen, with several other departments still operating separately. Therefore, the internal department "Client Networks Systems" will likely have to continue the solution's expansion.

• Consistent data management for the schoolbook production
• Efficient processes for archiving, revising editions and reprints
• Performing access on very large amounts of data
• High availability of the overall solution
• Automatic backup of all assets