A new version 6 of ABB's press management system has been marked with a sale to Schibsted's Bergens Tidende in Norway.

The MPS Production 6 release sees the transfer of the entire system to the PostgreSQL database, providing waht ABB says is an ideal basis for virtualisation while retaining previous functionality and advantages.

Marketing head Steve Kirk says the prohibitive cost of virtualisation under the Oracle license model motivated developers to look for a new solution "The solution was found in the PostgreSQL database, which provides all the functionality required by MPS Production without the punitive license costs."

MPS Production 6 can use the virtual environment chosen by the customer, in which case the customer provides both the environment and the virtualised systems, or ABB provides these using the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualisation solution.

A major advantage is that the application can be easily moved to a new platform, freeing users from the challenges of hardware and operating system life cycles. Virtualisation also allows an additional copy to be deployed in parallel - enabling thorough testing on the target hardware - and means that backup data can be stored redundantly.

While retaining all the user functionality of its predecessor, the new release also sees an architectural simplification as an MPS Production 3 application is no longer required in background.

A number of benefits over earlier versions include an intuitive GUI and time-saving templates and default values. Inker curves are automated and a comprehensive imposition generator and editor has been added.

Paper types can be grouped into classes for automated inker curves, ink density regulation profiles and soft-proof ICC profiles.

Pictured: The graphical user interface of MPS Production 5, which has been retained