Year 10 of "System News for Sun Users"

With the start of the current volume, #109, "System News for Sun Users" has begun it's 10th year of production. For the first couple of years, "System News" was a monthly print newsletter, provided through Sun resellers. We converted to a monthly email PDF document to save on trees, postage and delivery time. In 2000, we developed a customization system and went to a weekly email eNewsletter in the subscriber's choice of PDF or text. A couple of years later, we added HTML and made that the default format.

I am very proud of the quality of the publication and the production standards. In the 6 years of weekly production, we have never missed a deadline - 52 issues a year. We're based in Florida, and we have had a few weather related challenges over the years. Our target is to have the newsletter delivered to the 45k+ subscribers by Monday morning.

Our business model has also evolved. In the beginning, Sun Resellers were our customers. Then we added certain Sun sales teams as customers - SunFlash is the Sun-branded version of "System News for Sun Users" (http://sunflash.sun.com)

As Sun has reduced the co-op marketing funds that it makes available to Resellers for sales/comunications/marketing systems like "System News" , we have been converting to a subscriber and advertiser funded business model .

We now offer a custom portal service that includes a sophisticated Open Source CMS, our newsletter content (1200 - 1500 articles/year) and our email newsletter service.

A couple of years ago, we conducted a survey and asked people how we were doing.
The feedback was quite encouraging!

"I have subscribed for many years. I look forward to each issue just like my Wall Street Journal."

"Concise summaries make it easy to find relevant articles/announcements."

"I manage a large team of software engineers who are developing, integrating, and testing on Sun environments. Our customers worldwide also deploy our products on Sun environments. System News provides me with just the right amount of detail to inform me of where I need to delve deeper. I am extremely busy, so I print it out and take it with me to the beach where I scan and mark the articles for further reading. It's perfect for my needs."

-johnj