Green Point has moved its home base from Rye, NY to Fort Lee, NJ. The new location - in a beautiful office building on the banks of the Hudson and at the foot of the George Washington Bridge - is more accessible to New York City and provides room to accommodate Green Point's continued expansion. Click here for address information and directions.

Green Point completed the purchase of a new facility, nearly triple the size of its current plant, in the Navi (New) Mumbai section. Navi Mumbai is an ambitious, modern business and commercial park, designed from the ground up to accommodate high-tech enterprises that require fail-safe 24 x 7 operation. Buildings have redundant power and connectivity, enhanced security, and many amenities to enable recruitment and retention of high quality staff. Construction of the new facility was just completed and operations were transferred over the Memorial Day weekend. The facility has a capacity of 800 seats. Green Point plans a housewarming ceremony during the week of June 19th to commemorate the expansion and move. Please email if you would like to attend, or for additional information. Our new Mumbai address can be found here.

Eli Willner, Green Point's President and CTO, served as a panelist, along with representative of Adobe and other companies, on the Industry Standardization Panel, to provide his insight on the interoperability of content, digital rights management, NIMAS and the consumer format. The session was held on May 24th, 2006, at The McGraw-Hill Auditorium at 1221 Avenue of the Americas, NYC. Click here for a copy of the presentation.

Green Point's unique new production model, which has been in the planning and testing stages for some time, is now being rolled into live usage. The model utilizes intercontinental project teams, consisting of production analysts in Mumbai, American expatriates living overseas to handle supervision, training, quality control and project oversight, and dedicated project managers in the USA to handle client interaction and overall project management. The model achieves quality levels previously unattainable using offshore-only labor, without significantly impacting cost. The model is currently being used in the legal services and financial publishing arenas, and will be extended to other areas where native American language skills, or specialized professional American certifications (bar, CPA, etc.) are required.

Utilizing it's unique "dual shore" model (see article above) Green Point is now entering into engagements to perform outsourcing of legal services, including research and brief writing in addition to its traditional legal editorial services, such as abstracting and indexing of legal content. Green Point has hired Ira Piltz as Director of Legal Services. Ira is an Honors graduate of the De Paul School of Law, a published legal author, and an experienced teacher and public lecturer who has served in private practice as well at prestigious law firms. Ira serves as National Vice Chair, Trusts, Probate, Estates and Real Estate Division of the American Bar Association. To inquire about Green Point's legal services capabilities, click here.

Green Point is now the primary supplier of production services for this company, whose high-end service model includes digitization of ad with "hot" links to advertisers, classified ad offerings and digitization of news content material. This project is high-volume, has stringent quality requirements and imposes turnaround times as short as 4 hours. With this project Green Point has moved completely to three-shift "no gaps" production schedule.

This relationship, which also uses Green Point's unique "dual shore" model (see article above) initially consisted of technical writing, copyediting services for a particular document set. Upon successful completion of the initial project the relationship was expanded to include similar services for additional document sets, as well as indexing and proofreading services. It is anticipated that the scope of this relationship will shortly expand to encompass additional document sets as well as additional services.

Talk about cool, there is nothing cooler than the new Green Point browser toolbar, now available FREE to all Green Pointers readers. With versions available for both MS Internet Explorer and FireFox, the toolbar provides a handy and powerful search facility, a built-in RSS reader that is pre-programmed with five valuable XML resource RSS feeds (you can also add your own), a weather button (program your favorite location) and an Internet radio player that is pre-programmed with five dynamite stations (you can add your own here, too). Naturally there is absolutely no spyware or tracking cookies! Click here to download now!

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After months of feverish brainstorming, arguing, designing and writing, Green Point launched its new and enhanced website mid-September. The new website reflects the company's enhanced capabilities and wider scope of service offerings.

Green Point has added significant talent to its management and production rosters both in India and the USA and is handling XML and publishing-related projects of increasing complexity and sophistication. In addition the company is making significant inroads in editorial services - in traditional publishing as well as in legal and financial publishing - due to its ability to provide first-rate researchers and writers at very competitive rates.

Editorial services are provided out of our Mumbai and New York facility, as well as out of our new facility in Chennai, which is dedicated to editorial and composition services. Because of the talent on-staff in the new office Green Point has significantly augmented its composition capabilities and is now producing technical and trade books, complex journals and other materials on a variety of composition platforms. A sophisticated XML-first process is also in place for publishers requiring both traditional print and electronic deliverables.

Green Point has also acquired an experienced engineering and CAD/CAM production group and integrated its operation into the Mumbai facility, and hired business development and support staff for these services in New York. See related article.

The Legal and Financial Services group in Mumbai has also been augmented and has successfully undertaken several new and exciting projects.

Reflecting the company's enhanced capabilities, the website was done entirely in-house, including design, structure and content.

CAD/Engineering Group Acquired

In a bold move into a new market, Green Point acquired the personnel, equipment and customers of one of the premier engineering outsourcing companies in Mumbai, and integrated them into its current operations. The team is headed by Sachin Shilotri, who assumed the title of Manager, Engineering Products at Green Point. They are currently working on several large-scale India-based projects, but have already started on their first US project. The US sales effort in this new domain is headed by Jim Lantry, Sales Manager, Engineering Services, who has spent the past twenty-five years selling into and managing accounts in the CAD/CAM and Engineering Services domains.

Flushed with his almost immediate success in landing his first US contract, Jim says that he will be aggressively pursuing engineering services business in municipalities, utilities and large manufacturers, among other entities.

Green Point chose to enter the engineering services market because it has close business and technical synergies with its existing publishing and financial services markets. Many of Green Points governmental and technical documentation customers are involved in CAD/CAM work as well, and this enables them to do one-stop-shopping with a proven vendor for outsourcing services. Further, CAD/CAM has entered the world of XML and general content management, which are core Green Point skills.

Outsourcing Partnership with Harvard Business School Press

After an intensive qualification process, Green Point has entered into an outsourcing partnership with Harvard Business School Press, the premier publisher of business books and periodicals, including the prestigious Harvard Business Review. The first project, recently completed, involved the conversion of a large backlist of Harvard Business Review issues, in various composition formats, to XML, to a complex and proprietary DTD, for online publication and aggregation. The second project, currently underway, requires the componentization of articles from various publications to their nuclear parts, in XML, so that the components can be individually tracked and licensed.

What convinced Harvard Business School Press to outsource to Green Point, after having used some of the other major players in publishing outsourcing, was Green Point's "dual-shore" model, which maintains full project management in the US, while production is efficiently and economically performed offshore. The ability to interact exclusively with a dedicated, knowledgeable US project manager - who, in turn, handles all interaction with the offshore team - enabled this client to enjoy the best of both worlds.

XML/Geocoding Project Kick-Off

It is known in the outsourcing world that Green Point is the address to turn to for off-the-beaten track projects that require ingenuity in their planning and execution. This is particularly true if the project also requires aggressive pricing. Thus, one of the foremost publishers of travel guides in the world came to Green Point with their unique problem. They had been approached by several mapping companies interested in licensing their content so that points of interest in the travel guides would be available to users of their online and GPS-based maps. However, appropriate longitude and latitude information - geocodes - would have to be associated with the rest of the point-of-interest metadata. Traditional methods of determining this information could not be used, because full address information was often not available. Could Green Point assist?

Green Point built an efficient, custom workflow that filled in incomplete addresses, corrected invalid addresses, and supplied geocodes, for several hundred cities in the US and Europe. The data, which was being maintained in an XML repository, was enhanced with additional metadata to assist in the process of integrating it into map databases, and the client DTD's were modified accordingly. The client was thus able to make this valuable information available to an entirely new market - and as a side benefit, to obtain greater detail and accuracy for their traditional print product.

This project demonstrates how, with ingenuity it is possible to provide a new twist on the old adage about "adding value to your data with XML".

Massive PDF Forms Database Project Underway

Green Point has been awarded a contract to convert a database of many thousands of municipal forms from "flat" image or paper, to fully interactive PDF forms, for online data collection. The project involves imaging, image cleanup, and field placement, including custom validation, for a large and complex field set. To accomplish this project Green Point designed and constructed a special tracking database, as well as a knowledge base to keep track of the myriad specifications and elaboration and exceptions to specifications that are inherent in a project of this nature.

The process involves a pre-edit step to identify the fields on the form, type them in various ways, and enter them into the tracking database to control the production and QC processes. Green Point's software development team built special production software using Adobe's Acrobat SDK to analyze the raw images and perform preliminary field placement and attribute assignment based on the image analysis and the pre-edit information in the tracking database. Scripts were also coded to semi-automate the process of incorporating the validation code into the forms. Skilled analysts then manually adjust the field placement, and the completed forms are subjected to a rigorous QC process keyed to the information in the tracking database and the knowledge base.

Green Point is currently producing an average of 500 multi-page forms per week. The project is projected to continue for several years.

Another Financial Data Aggregation Client Signs On

Taking yet another step into the financial outsourcing market, Green Point recently signed on as client a prestigious financial information provider, to research and normalize financial data on a select group of several thousand companies the client is following on behalf of their own clientele.

Reports are provided on a monthly basis, based on a database of companies that is subject to change by the client at any time. Accuracy is a critical element of this deliverable so Green Point carefully verifies its sources and validates them on a periodic basis, adjusting the source list as needed. Parallel teams are employed to enable detailed cross-checking, and Green Point's software development team created technology to assure that data is transcribed from online sources without the possibility of error introduction.

Composition and Editorial Facility Launched in Chennai

Capitalizing on the talented labor pool available in Chennai, India, Green Point opened a new facility there, currently focused on composition and editorial work. The Chennai facility will alleviate the resource pressure in Mumbai due to the influx of new projects, and will provide a complimentary set of skill sets, thereby augmenting Green Point's high-end composition and editorial capabilities.

Green Point has been in the forefront of composition outsourcing for several years, with offerings in traditional composition, composition+XML, and XML-first based models, and with deep expertise in math and scientific publishing. As is universally the case with Green Point, composition projects are managed in the US. They are under the direction of Shani Belsky, Green Point's Composition and Editorial Project Manager.

Over time, Green Point is implementing skills transference between the Mumbai and Chennai facilities and the ultimate goal is to maintain complete skill sets at each facility. The facilities share a WAN, and data is backed up mutually. Each facility is able to pick up on any project of the other in the event it is down, assuring production continuity in the event of weather-related or other catastrophic event.

The new facility is being overseen by Nagesh Pai, Green Point's VP of Operations, who also manages Green Point's main production facility in Mumbai.

Broad Range of Services to Legal Domain Offered

Augmenting our long-standing legal publishing and editorial services, Green Point has launched legal services that extend beyond traditional litigation support, targeted both at legal publishers and law firms. We now source attorneys that are US citizens living overseas and have been admitted to the bar. In addition, we have a team of legal experts in India available at lower rates than bar-admitted attorneys. This hybrid model is unique and provides significant cost savings with no compromise in quality since we bring to bear skill levels as needed.

Ken Wollins Joins Green Point as VP, Sales and Marketing

Green Point is proud to announce that Ken Wollins, former Senior Manager, Business Development, of the Publishing Services Group of Datamatics, a Boston-based business process outsourcing firm, has joined its staff as VP of Sales and Marketing. Ken has been active in the publishing sector for over fifteen years during which he has focused on bringing customers measurable results through advertising, interactive media programs, and specialized outsourcing services. Ken has also worked at Ziff Davis and Harvard Business School Publishing.

Nagesh Pai Joins Green Point as VP, Operations

Green Point is proud to announce that Nagesh Pai has jointed its staff as VP of Operations. Nagesh has over twelve years experience in the e-publishing and online information realms. He has designed and implemented XML based systems for numerous clients in the STM, legal and financial verticals and has held key executive positions at DNC and Datamatics.