Introducing New MDM Publisher
In previous Weblogs, Markus Ganser (Rich Product-Content Management with SAP NetWeaver MDM) and Ravikumar Allampallam (MDM Client / Content Manager - Different Modes) have already described basic functions of SAP NetWeaver MDM concerning Product Information Management (PIM) and print publication. With SAP NetWeaver MDM 5.5 Sp04 however, a lot of things change in the Data Manager. One important innovation concerns the move of Layout Mode, Publication Mode, and Index Mode from the MDM Data Manager to the new MDM Publisher and MDM Indexer.
Welcome to MDM Publisher
When you open the MDM Publisher, you find yourself in the new version of former Layout Mode. Instead of only a family hierarchy and a preview pane, you can now choose between the hierarchy and an overview of the available pages and between a spread pane with guiding grid, presentation view, or side-by-side display of both views.
Within the MDM Publisher, you have all the known functions of the Data Manager from previous MDM releases but with a new, user friendly interface that allows for a lot more design operations. With the new Spread pane, you can, for example, move and arrange objects directly in the preview pane. You can also resize items right there in MDM Publisher. The experts among you might also be interested to hear that common keyboard shortcuts from DTPs also work within the MDM Publisher, e.g., Ctrl+g groups items. Doing most of the work in MDM, the connection to the potentially changing product data remains until a very late stage of the catalog creation – a major advantage with regards to data quality and flexibility.
When you use the new option to view the pages, you can easily evaluate the actual space each family requires and determine the optimum positioning to make the best use of the limited room in your print catalog.
Once you created a publication (just like in former Publication Mode) it is possible to move the families to their ideal position before actually sending the information to the desktop publishing program. Also, you can split your publication into sub-sections and establish the pagination right away which facilitates handling in the DTP.
With these functionalities of MDM Publisher, the layout achieves a very high degree of completion and provides a solid basis for further processing and fine tuning with your page-layout program.
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