Recently in Publishing Category

Traditionally, publishing is a pushy process. When I have something to say, I write it down. Perhaps I revise it, check with colleagues, and verify my facts with appropriate authorities. Then I publish it, and move on to the next thing – without directly interacting with my audience and stakeholders. Whether I distribute the content electronically or in a hard copy format, I leave it to my readers to determine the value of whatever I publish.

However, as we describe in our recently completed report Smart Content in the Enterprise, XML applications can transform this conventional publishing paradigm. By smart content, we mean content that is granular at the appropriate level, semantically rich, useful across applications, and meaningful for collaborative interaction.

From a business perspective, smart content adds value to published information in new and compelling ways. Let’s consider the experiences of NetApp and Warrior Gateway, two of the organizations featured in our report.

NetApp
As a provider of storage and data management solutions, NetApp has invested a lot of time and effort embracing DITA and restructuring its technical documentation. By systematically tagging and managing content components, and by focusing on the underlying content development processes, writers and editors can keep up with the pace of product releases.

But there is more to this publishing process orientation. Beyond simply producing product information faster and cheaper, NetApp is poised to make publishing better. The company can now easily support its reseller partners by providing them with the DITA tagged content that they can directly incorporate into their own OEM solutions. Resellers' customers get just the information they need, directly from the source. With its XML application, NetApp incorporates its partners and stakeholders into its information value chain.

Warrior Gateway
As a content aggregator, Warrior Gateway collects, organizes, enriches, and redistributes content about a wide range of health, welfare, and veteran-related services to soldiers, veterans, and their families. Rather than simply compiling an online catalog of service providers’ listings, Warrior Gateway restructures the content that government, military, and local organizations produce, and enriches it by adding veteran-related categories and other information. Furthermore, Warrior Gateway adds a social dimension by encouraging contributions from veterans and family members.

Once stored within the XML application powering Warrior Gateway, the content is easily reorganized and reclassified to provide the veterans’ perspective about areas of interest and importance. Volunteers working with Warrior Gateway can add new categories when necessary. Service providers can claim their profile and improve their own data details. Even the public users can contribute to content to the gateway, a crowd sourcing strategy to efficiently collect feedback from users. With contributions from multiple stakeholders, the published listings can be enriched over time without requiring a large internal staff to add the extra information.

Capturing New Business Value
There’s a lot more detail about how the XML applications work in our case studies – I recommend that you check them out.

What I find intriguing is the range of promising and potentially profitable business models engendered by smart content.  Enterprise publishers have new options and can go beyond simply pushing content through a publishing process. Now they can build on their investments, and capture the pull of content value.

As part of next week's Gilbane Boston Conference, the XML practice will be delivering a pre-conference workshop, "Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization." The instructors will be Geoff Bock, Dale Waldt, Bill Trippe, Barry Schaeffer and Neal Hannon--a group of experts that represents decades of technical and management experience on XML initiatives.

A tip of the virtual hat to Senior Analyst Geoff Bock for organizing this.

... there was SVG. People were excited about it. Adobe and others supported it. Pundits saw a whole new graphical web that would leverage SVG heavily. Heck, I even wrote a book about it. 

Then things got quiet for a long time...

However, there are some signs that SVG might be experiencing a bit of a renaissance, if the quality of presentations at a recent conference is a strong indication. It's notable that Google hosted the conference and even more notable that Google is trying to bigfoot Microsoft into supporting SVG in IE, a move that would substantially boost SVG as an option for Web developers.

So a question for those out there interested in SVG. Where are some big projects out there? Are there organizations creating large bases of illustrations and other graphical content with SVG? I would love to talk to you and learn about your projects. You can email me or comment below.

UPDATE: Brad Neuberg of Google, who is quoted in the InfoWorld article linked above, sent along a link to a project at Google, SVG Web, a JavaScript library that supports SVG on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. According to the tool's website, using the library plus native SVG support, you can instantly target ~95% of the existing installed web base.

UPDATE: Ruud Steltenpool, the organizer for SVG Open 2009, sent a link to an incredibly useful compendium of links to SVG projects, tools, and other resources though he warns it is a little outdated.

Over at TeleRead, David Rothman has a really fine writeup discussing our digital publishing report. He summarizes some of our key points about asset management and flexibility, but also raises some interesting related issues about DRM and the risks of "publishers as mixmasters."

My thanks to David for his thoughtful response.

We have been very pleased with the interest in our new report, Digital Platforms and Technologies for Publishers: Implementations Beyond "eBook." We have had hundreds of downloads already, the vast majority of which are senior people in the publishing industry. This tells us that the timing for the research is good and that interest is strong, and we are thinking about what to do next with this topic.

One idea we have thought about is helping publishers think through their eBook strategy. If our research (and other recent research) is correct, many larger publishers are jumping in with both feet, but some larger publishers, many medium-sized, and perhaps most smaller publishers are staying on the sidelines or testing the waters with pilots and low-cost and low-impact tests with third parties. Perhaps these efforts are part of developing a strategy? Perhaps some of you think the market is too nascent?

An eBook strategy would necessarily be multi-faceted, and would include input from sales, marketing, editorial, production, fulfillment, and others with a stake in the process. It would need to be informed by good market data, and with good understanding of what technology and channel partners can truly offer publishers. It would also need to be pragmatic, balancing the capabilities of your organization with a realistic assessment of the market opportunities you have.

We'd like to gauge interest in this kind of offering through the following simple poll. Just one question, and no requirement to log in or register. If you would like to talk in more detail about this idea, please email me with any questions.

Holiday weeks can be sleepy weeks in enterprise software news, but this week has seen one significant press release each day in the XML content management market, or component content management (CCM) market if you prefer.

• On Monday, SDL announced the acquisition of XyEnteprise, and the creation of a new business unit based on XyEnterprise and Trisoft called SDL-XySoft.
• On Tuesday, Really Strategies, the makers of the Marklogic-Server-based system RSuite, announced the acquisition of SaaS CCM provider DocZone.
• Today, Quark and EMC announced an integration of Quark XML Author with Documentum.

First, the necessary disclosures and caveats. Of the six companies mentioned, we've worked with all of them, I believe, and I actually worked for XyEnterprise back in the 1980s and early 1990s. That said, each of these announcements is significant.

SDL, through both organic growth and acquistion, has grown into a substantial business that spans globalization technology, globalization services, CCM technology, and WCM technology. My colleagues Mary Laplante and Leonor Ciarlone know them much better as a company, but I believe it is safe to say that SDL is in a unique position spanning essentially four markets, but four markets that make a great deal of sense under a single umbrella. The product support content managed in a CCM technology is the best point of integration for globalization/translation tools. A CCM technology is also an excellent underpinning for a global company's web presence or web precenses (the latter more likely, especially when one considers the need for localized web sites). And services are an essential piece of this puzzle. It's the rare company that staffs heavily for localization, and even when they do, very few would staff full time to cover all of their language needs. Is SDL in a position to represent one-stop shopping for large companies with complex product content that needs to be localized into many languages? Again, my colleagues could answer that question more precisely, but it's not a crazy question to ask.

Mary has more on SDL XySoft over in the globalization blog.

The acquisition also breathes new life into XyEnterprise, a company with highly functional, mature technology and excellent executive leadership. We take it as a very positive sign that XyEnterprise CEO Kevin Duffy will become the CEO of the newly combined business unit, reporting to Mark Lancaster, Chairman and CEO of SDL.

The Really Strategies acquistion of DocZone is on a smaller scale of course, but it is is significant in that these two companies represent two leading trends in the CCM marketplace--management of component content in native XML repositories (MarkLogic Server for RSuite and Documentum Content Store for one version of DocZone) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Count me among those who have been skeptical at times about SaaS for CCM, but DocZone, under Dan Dube's leadership, has made it work. Really Strategies, in the mean time, has developed an impressive CCM offering on top of Mark Logic Server, and they have quietly built up a strong customer list.  We think the combined companies complement each other, and the new management team is excellent, with Barry Bealer as CEO, co-founder Lisa Bos as CTO, Ann Michael in charge of services, and Dan Dube as VP Sales and Marketing.

Which brings us to Quark and EMC. Both companies have been developing more CCM capabilities. EMC acquired X-Hive, and a lot of XML expertise along with it. They have since added more XML expertise on both the product management and engineering side. As they have integrated X-Hive into the Documentum platform, they have logically looked to build out more capabilities and applications for vertical markets. The integration with Quark XML Author makes perfect sense for them, giving their customers and prospects a ready mechanism for XML authoring in a familiar editorial tool.

For Quark's part, the move is a logical and very positive next step. They had previously announced this kind of integration with IBM Content Manager, which has a strong presence in the manufacturing space. With EMC, Quark now has a strong partner in the pharma space. Documentum has long dominated pharma, and Quark XML Author, under Michael Boses and previous owner In.Vision, had built up a long list of pharma customers. Boses and his team know the pharma data structures inside and out, and it will be interesting to see the details of how Quark XML Author will integrate with Documentum and its storage mechanisms. (I am sure both EMC and Quark see the potential as more than just the pharma market--government is also a good target here--but the pharma angle will be fruitful I am sure.)

So, what news is on tap for tomorrow?

Sort of.

I am making some edits to our upcoming report, "Digital Platforms and Technologies for Publishers: Implementations Beyond eBooks" and decided to create a Wordle based on the text. Click on the image for a larger view.

You can create your own Wordle at http://www.wordle.net/.

We created a quick poll on Twtpoll, asking what eBook device are you using today. Click here to respond.

Anyone who works with XML has probably had to "sell" the idea of using the standard instead of alternative approaches, whether as an internal evangelist of XML or in a formal sales role. We have developed some pretty convincing arguments, such as automating redundant processes, quality checking and validation of content, reuse of content using a single source publishing approach, and so on. These types of benefits are easily understood by the technical documentation department or developers and administrators in the IT group. And they are easy arguments to make.

Even so, that leaves a lot of people who can benefit from the technology but may never need know that XML is part of the solution. The rest of the enterprise may not be in tune with the challenges faced by the documentation department, and instead focus on other aspects of running a business, like customer support, manufacturing, fulfillment, or finance, etc.. If you tell them the software solution you want to buy has "XML Inside" they may stare off into space and let their eyes glaze over, even fall asleep. But if you tell them you have a way to reduce expensive customer support phone calls by making improvements to their public-facing Web content and capabilities, you might get more of their attention.

I have been around the XML community for a very long time, and we tend to look into our belly buttons for the meaning of XML. This is often doen at the expense of looking around us and seeing what problems are out there before we start talking about solutions to apply to them. Everything looks like a nail because we have this really nifty hammer called XML. But when CD-ROMs were introduced, people didn't run around talking about the benefits of ISO 9660 (the standard that dictates how data is written to a CD). Okay they did at first to other technologists and executives in big companies adopting the standard, but rarely did the end consumer hear about the standard. Instead, we talked about the massive increase in data storage, and the flexibility of a consistent data storage format across operating systems. So we need to remember that XML is not what we want to accomplish, but rather how we may get things done to meet our goals. Therefore, we need to understand and describe our requirements in terms of these business drivers, not the tools we use to address them.

Part of the problem is that there are several potential audiences for the XML evangelism message, each with their own set of concerns and domain-specific challenges. End users want the ability to get the work out the door in a timely manner, at the right quality level, and that the tools are easy to use. Line Managers may add sensitivity to pricing, performance, maintenance and deployment costs, etc. These types of concerns I would classify as tactical departmental concerns focusing on operational efficiency (bottom line). 

Meanwhile Product Managers, Sales, Customer Service, Fulfillment, Finance, etc. are more geared toward enterprise goals and strategies such as reducing product support costs, and increasing revenue, in addition to operational efficiency. Even stated goals like synchronizing releases of software and documentation, making data more flexible and robust to enable new Web and mobile delivery options, are really only supporting the efforts to achieve the first two objectives of better customer service and increased sales, which I would classify as strategic enterprise concerns.

The deft XML evangelist, to succeed in the enterprise discussion, needs to know about a lot more than the technology and processes in the documentation department, or he or she will be limited to tactical, incremental improvements. The boss may want, instead, to focus on how the data can be improved to make robust Web content that can be dynamically assembled according to the viewer's profile. Or how critical updates can be delivered electronically and as fast as possible, while the complete collection of information is prepared for more time consuming, but equally valuable printed delivery in a multi-volume set of books. Or how content can be queried, rearranged, reformatted and delivered in a completely new way to increase revenue. Or how a business system can automatically generate financial reporting information in a form accurate and suitable enough for submission to the government, but without the army of documentation labor used previously.

At Gilbane we often talk about the maturity of XML approaches, not unlike the maturity model for software. We haven't finalized a spectrum of maturity levels yet, but I think of XML applications as ad hoc, departmental, and enterprise in nature. Ad hoc is where someone decides to use an XML format for a simple process, maybe configuration files driving printers or other applications. Often XML is adopted with no formal training and little knowledge outside of the domain in which it is being applied.

Departmental applications tend to focus on operational efficiency, especially as it relates to creating and distributing textual content. Departmental applications are governed by a single department head but may interact with other groups and delivery feeds, but can standalone in their own environment.  An enterprise application of XML would need governance from several departments or information partners, and would focus on customer or compliance facing issues and possibly growth of the business. They tend to have to work within a broader framework of applications and standards.

Each of these three application types requires different planning and justification. For ad hoc use of XML it is usually up to the individual developer to decide if XML is the right format, if a schema will be needed, and what the markup and data model are, etc. Very little "selling" is needed here except as friendly debate between developers, architects and line managers. Usually these applications can be tweaked and changed easily with little impact beyond local considerations.

Departmental application of XML usually requires a team representing all stakeholders involved in the process, from users to consumers of the info. There may be some departmental architectural standards, but exceptions to these are easier to accommodate than with enterprise applications. A careful leader of a departmental application will look upstream and down stream in the information flow to include some of their needs. Also, they need to realize that the editing process in their department may become more complex and require additional skills and resources, but that these drawbacks are more than offset but savings in other areas, such as page layout, or conversion to Web formats which can be highly automated. Don't forget to explain these benefits to the users whose work just got a little more complicated!

An Enterprise solution is by definition tied to the business drivers of the enterprise, even if that means some decisions may seem like they come at the expense of one department over another. This is where an evangelist could be useful, but not if they only focus on XML instead of the benefits it provides. Executives need to know how much revenue can be increased, how many problem reports can be avoided in customer service, and whether they can meet regulatory compliance guidelines, etc. This is a much more complicated set of issues with dependencies on and agreement with other departments needed to be successful. If you can't provide these types of answers, you may be stuck in departmental thinking.

XML may be the center of my universe (my belly button so to speak), but it is usually not the center of my project's sponsor's universe. I have to have the right message to covince them to make signifiaccnt investment in the way their enterprise operates.  </>

If you don't know Project Guttenberg--and you should--it's well worth spending your time over there to familiarize yourself with its contents and the way it has gone about creating the collection.

I keep track of it through the RSS feed of recently added books, which is updated nightly. That's where I find out about new books like, The Pecan and its Culture, published in 1906, which includes the photo shown at left.

On their own, the one image and the one title are perhaps not so interesting or so significant (though I for one love these little snapshots of Americana, especially such primary material). What is significant of course is the mass nature of the digitization, and the care in which it is undertaken.  I compare this care with the sometimes abysmal scanning work being done by Google (and with much more fanfare). The fruits of Project Guttenberg are much more openly available, much easier to access, and much easier to migrate to reading devices like the Kindle.

So as we look at all the eBook and digitization efforts underway today, let's not forget Project Guttenberg.