Corporate &
Capital Market
Communications

The key factors for selecting the right publishing system: when evaluating your publishing system, ask the right questions and demonstrate your specialist knowledge. We have put together a list of key questions for you and structured them according to the core graphic in ns.publish.

① Publishing system

• Does your provider possess an in-depth knowledge of financial and corporate reports?
• Can your provider demonstrate that it has a high number of customer systems in use?
• Does your provider possess expert or integrator knowledge in the field of publishing systems and/or does it rely on third-party support?
• Is your provider independent? Is it required to obtain certain services from affiliated companies?
• Does it use a tried and tested approach for launching publishing systems (process analysis, implementation, training)?
• Does your provider have its own modules that offer added value through elimination of manual processes?
• Has your provider formed technical and development partnerships that contribute to the expansion of functions in the publishing system?

② Finance interface 

• Can your financial figures be transferred automatically into the layout for all languages without any manual intervention?
• Can you change (rows, columns), move or create new tables without the provider’s support?
• Can you link figures to text and carry out automatic updates?
• Does your finance interface come with an audit trail that logs all changes in a transparent report?
• Does your financial interface include a dictionary to manage and automatically update the technical terms and translations?

③ XBRL (mandatory for all companies listed in the EU from 2020)

• Can the content created in the publishing system (for a printable PDF) be processed simultaneously as tagged ESEF (iXBRL)?
• Does your system support you to output the entire annual report including the management report as XHTML (in addition to XBRL) as required by ESMA regulations?
• Are the contents and texts of the various channels fed from the same database (single-source-of-truth approach) or are manual copy&paste transfers required?
• Does your system allow repeated transfers of your data?
• Does your system support other channels besides XBRL, such as a high-quality PDF or a designed, interactive online report?

④ Online report 

• Can the content created in the publishing system (print-ready PDF) be edited simultaneously as an online report in HTML?
• Can content in the online report have a different structure to content in the print-ready PDF?
• Does the automatic text transfer function still work?
• Can the contents of the online report be updated at the push of a button?
• Is it easy to implement interactive key figure comparisons?
• Can you incorporate multimedia content such as videos and animations?
• Can you export table contents to Excel for analysis purposes without any manual work?
• Can you add content from social media whenever you want?
• Does the publishing system allow responsive design for smartphones and tablets?

⑤ Efficient workflows

• Does the publishing system allow the layout to be edited in a flexible process (e. g. by an agency) even during the production stage or does it use fixed templates?
• Do you have access to an easy-to-use text editor with text-based and dynamic layout previews?
• Are changes documented and are they transparent?
• Can PDFs or Word versions of the entire publication be exported and archived as milestones at any time?
• Can milestones be compared and the differences automatically specified?
• Can PDF and/or Word documents be exported at chapter and/or overall publication level at any time and archived as milestones?

⑥ Translation management

• Do you have access to a consistent translation process?
• Is an automated process available without copy/paste?
• Is the use of translation memory systems guaranteed?
• How do you deal with follow-up translations?

⑦ IT expertise and IT security 

• For data security and data protection, is the IT architecture geared towards hosting listed companies?
• Are operation, support, maintenance and improvements to the publishing system guaranteed?
• Are release planning and a planned maintenance window available for the tools?

With a network of certified partners in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, mms solutions combines the best publishing system with a high standard of work in its innovative business model. Your demanding publication projects achieve the best results with ns.publish if all parties understand the system and the associated processes and take them into account in the design phase.

For this reason, mms solutions has been working with certified partners for a number of years. As the system house, mms solutions focuses on consultancy, integration, operations and enhancements to its publishing systems; its certified partners are responsible for looking after the technical side of production, including first-level support for projects. Certified agencies have the content-based and design skills needed to ensure the success of your projects.

Your advantage: ns.publish certified partners and agencies work with ns.publish without requiring additional licenses.

Certified partner

A certified partner meets the following criteria:

• Expertise in the pre-press stage of complex publications
• High quality standards
• Experience in the production of financial and corporate reports
• IT skills

Services provided by ns.publish certified partners:

• Project management
• Installation and production
• First-level support

Certified Agency

A certified agency meets the following criteria:

• Proven experience in the production of complex publishing projects
• Production of at least one report using ns.publish

Services provided by ns.publish certified agencies

• Content and creation
• Project coordination
• Production consulting

Thanks to our many years of experience and the joint expertise of our network, we can offer you the best possible service. And thus ensure that we bundle the highest competencies for the handling of your projects. Convince yourself.