eZ has introduced eZ Publish Enterprise, which provides a package of software and services in a integrated, pay as you go product. As an eZ Publish Enterprise product, you will get all the power of the eZ Publish community project, along with professionally supported software that includes additional Enterprise features and services. This release of eZ Publish Enterprise integrates all the Enterprise services into a Service Portal in the administration interface of eZ Publish, making administrators’ lives simpler. With version 4.4, eZ Publish provides users a range of features that will help them succeed in their day-to-day use of eZ Publish, whether they are end users, occasional contributors, editors or administrators. The brand new built-in Online Image Editor will provide a simple way for editors to perform the most common tasks of photo management in eZ Publish. New with this version is the native support for HTML5 video without need for advanced development. Publishing on mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad has been made easier. User Generated Content gets a helping hand with the addition of native support for reCaptcha, the Google-based free captcha service on the web, which helps prevent your website from being infested by spam. A new User Session handler gives more possibilities for the configuration of web servers. File system-based user session management multiplies the performance of eZ Publish servers when talking to a large audience of anonymous users. A new Archiving toolkit implements large volume archiving scenarios where old content can be moved to archive repositories, and can still be searched and rendered with the eZ Publish presentation engine. eZ Publish 4.4 improves section management, multi-site setup, and extension loading, but the biggest news is the Developer Preview of the forthcoming eZ Publish API. The eZ Publish API shows the way for developing remote applications for new devices. Connecting to eZ Publish and using its content and functionalities is easier than ever. The light-weight remote API makes eZ Publish the platform of choice for Mobile Content Management, whether you focus on the iPhone and iPad platforms, Android or Blackberry. The new Newsletter system, developed in collaboration with the CJW partner, an eZ partner and active member of the eZ community, is a prime example of community innovation. http://ez.no/
Category: Publishing & media (Page 22 of 53)
Authoring in a structured text environment has traditionally been done with dedicated structured editors. These tools enable validation and user assisted markup features that help the user create complete and valid content. But these structured editors are somewhat complicated and unusual and require training in their use for the user to become proficient. The learning curve is not very steep but it does exist.
Many organizations have come to see documentation departments as a process bottleneck and try to engage others throughout the enterprise in the content creation and review processes. Engineers and developers can contribute to documentation and have a unique technical perspective. Installation and support personnel are on the front lines and have unique insight into how the product and related documentation is used. Telephone operators not only need the information at their fingertips, but can also augment it with comments and ides that occur while supporting users. Third-party partners and reviewers may also have a unique perspective and role to play in a distributed, collaborative content creation, management, review, and delivery ecosystem.
Our recently completed research on XML Smart Content in the Enterprise indicates that as we strive to move content creation and management out of the documentation department silo, we will also need to consider how the data is encoded and the usefulness of the data model in meeting our expanded business requirements. Smart content is multipurpose content designed with several uses in mind. Smart content is modular to support being assembled in a variety of forms. And smart content is structured content that has been enriched with semantic information to better identify it’s topic and role to aide processing and searching. For these reasons, smart content also improves distributed collaboration. Let me elaborate.
One of the challenges for distributed collaboration is the infrequency of user participation and therefore, unfamiliarity with structured editing tools. It makes sense to simplify the editing process and tools for infrequent users. They can’t always take a refresher course in the editor and it’s features. They may be working remotely, even on a customer site installing equipment or software. These infrequent users need structured editing tools that are designed for them. These collaboration tools need to be intuitive and easy to figure out, easily accessible from just about anywhere, and should be affordable and have flexible licensing to allow a larger number of users to participate in the management of the content. This usually means one of two things: either the editor will be a plug in to another popular word processing system (e.g., MS Word), or it will be accessed though a thin-client browser, like a Wiki editor. In some environments, it is possible that both may be need in addition to traditional structured editing tools. Smart content modularity and enrichment allows flexibility in editing tools and process design. This allows the use of a variety of editing tools and flexibility in process design, and therefore expanding who can collaborate from throughout the enterprise.
Also, infrequent contributors may not be able to master navigating and operating within a complex repository and workflow environment either for the same familiarity reasons. Serving up information to a remote collaborator might be enhanced with keywords and other metadata that is designed to optimize searching and access to the content. Even a little metadata can provide a lot of simplicity to an infrequent user. Product codes, version information, and a couple of dates would allow a user to hone in on the likely content topics and select content to edit from a well targeted list of search results. Relationships between content modules that are indicated in metadata can alert a user that when one object is updated, other related objects may need to be reviewed for potential update as well.
It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no one model for XML or smart content creation and editing. Just as a carpenter may have several saws, each designed for a particular type of cut, a robust smart content structured content environment may have more than one editor in use. It behooves us to design our systems and tools to meet the desired business processes and user functionality, rather than limit our processes to the features of one tool.
A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing, The Gilbane Group’s Publishing Practice latest study, is due out any day now. One thing about the study that sets it apart from other ebook-oriented efforts is that Blueprint describes technologies, processes, markets, and other strategic considerations from the book publisher’s perspective. From the Executive Summary of our upcoming study:
For publishers and their technology and service partners, the challenge of the next few years will be to invest wisely in technology and process improvement while simultaneously being aggressive about pursuing new business models.
The message here is that book publishers really need to “stick to their knitting,” or, as we put it in the study:
The book publisher should be what it has always best been about—discovering, improving, and making public good and even great books. But what has changed for book publishers is the radically different world in which they interact today, and that is the world of bits and bytes: digital content, digital communication, digital commerce.
If done right, today’s efforts toward digital publishing processes will “future proof” the publisher, because today’s efforts done right are aimed at adding value to the content in media neutral, forwardly compatible forms.
A central part of the “If done right” message is that book publishers still should focus on what publishers do with content, but that XML workflow has become essential to both print and digital publishing success. Here’s an interesting finding from Blueprint:
Nearly 48% of respondents say they use either an “XML-First” or “XML-Early” workflow. We define an XML-First workflow as one where XML is used from the start with manuscript through production, and we define an “XML-Early” workflow as one where a word processor is used by authors, and then manuscript is converted to XML.”
Tomorrow, Aptara and The Gilbane Group are presenting a webinar, eBooks, Apps and Print? How to Effectively Produce it All Together, with myself and Bret Freeman, Digital Publishing Strategist, Aptara. The webinar takes place on Tuesday, September 28, 2010, at 11 a.m., EST, and you can register here.
In our recently completed research on Smart Content in the Enterprise we explored how organizations are taking advantage of benefits from XML throughout the enterprise and not just in the documentation department. Our findings include several key issues that leading edge XML implementers are addressing including new delivery requirements, new ways of creating and managing content, and the use of standards to create rich, interoperable content. In our case studies we examined how some are breaking out of the documentation department silo and enabling others inside or even outside the organization to contribute and collaborate on content. Some are even using crowd sourcing and social publishing to allow consumers of the information to annotate it and participate in its development. We found that expectations for content creation and management have changed significantly and we need to think about how we organize and manage our data to support these new requirements. One key finding of the research is that organizations are taking a different approach to repurposing their content, a more proactive approach that might better be called “multipurposing”.
In the XML world we have been talking about repurposing content for decades. Repurposing content usually means content that is created for one type of use is reorganized, converted, transformed, etc. for another use. Many organizations have successfully deployed XML systems that optimize delivery in multiple formats using what is often referred to as a Single Source Publishing (SSP) process where a single source of content is created and transformed into all desired deliverable formats (e.g., HTML, PDF, etc.).
Traditional delivery of content in the form of documents, whether in HTML or PDF, can be very limiting to users who want to search across multiple documents, reorganize document content into a form that is useful to the particular task at hand, or share portions with collaborators. As the functionality on Web sites and mobile devices becomes more sophisticated, new ways of delivering content are needed to take advantage of these capabilities. Dynamic assembly of content into custom views can be optimized with delivery of content components instead of whole documents. Powerful search features can be enhanced with metadata and other forms of content enrichment.
SSP and repurposing content traditionally focuses on the content creation, authoring, management and workflow steps up to delivery. In order for organizations to keep up with the potential of delivery systems and the emerging expectations of users, it behooves us to take a broader view of requirements for content systems and the underlying data model. Developers need to expand the scope of activities they evaluate and plan for when designing the system and the underlying data model. They should consider what metadata might improve faceted searching or dynamic assembly. In doing so they can identify the multiple purposes the content is destined for throughout the ecosystem in which it is created, managed and consumed.
Multipurpose content is designed with additional functionality in mind including faceted search, distributed collaboration and annotation, localization and translation, indexing, and even provisioning and other supply chain transactions. In short, multipurposing content focuses on the bigger picture to meet a broader set of business drivers throughout the enterprise, and even beyond to the needs of the information consumers.
It is easy to get carried away with data modeling and an overly complex data model usually requires more development, maintenance, and training than would otherwise be required to meet a set of business needs. You definitely want to avoid using specific processing terminology when naming elements (e.g., specific formatting, element names that describe processing actions instead of defining the role of the content). You can still create data models that address the broader range of activities without using specific commands or actions. Knowing a chunk of text is a “definition” instead of an “error message” is useful and far more easy to reinterpret for other uses than an “h2” element name or an attribute for display=’yes’. Breaking chapters into individual topics eases custom, dynamic assembly. Adding keywords and other enrichment can improve search results and the active management of the content. In short, multipurpose data models can and should be comprehensive and remain device agnostic to meet enterprise requirements for the content.
The difference between repurposing content and multipurpose content is a matter of degree and scope, and requires generic, agnostic components and element names. But most of all, multipurposing requires understanding the requirements of all processes in the desired enterprise environment up front when designing a system to make sure the model is sufficient to deliver designed outcomes and capabilities. Otherwise repurposing content will continue to be done as an afterthought process and possibly limit the usefulness of the content for some applications.
WebCollage, Inc. a developer in online content publishing, announced the release of the interactive tour builder within the WebCollage content publishing application, Content Publisher. The interactive tour builder allows one to design, build and publish interactive product demos with existing assets directly onto their retail partner’s product pages. Manufacturers can build then syndicate product demonstrations across their retail channel. Content Publisher’s new interactive tour feature is designed for marketing personnel to create interactive tours using existing assets staying within the Content Publisher application. The Content Publisher platform lets end users design and then syndicate the entire interactive tour, complete with tabs, buttons and call outs directly to their retail partner’s websites. Content Publisher is designed with an intuitive user interface that integrates with WebCollage’s patented syndication platform. The SaaS solution gives end users control of what and when to syndicate, to which retailer and how many and when to update. http://www.webcollage.com/
SDL, the provider of Global Information Management solutions, announced the availability of an integration between SDL Trisoft and Leximation DITA -FMx, the DITA plugin for Adobe FrameMaker. By providing a bridge between SDL Trisoft and Leximation DITA -FMx, SDL gives the ability to use SDL’s advanced Component Content Management capabilities with Adobe FrameMaker. The new integration combines technologies for authoring and managing structured content. Together SDL and Leximation share several major clients that want a joint solution. www.sdl.com www.leximation.com
TransPerfect, a large privately held language services and software provider, announced that it has completed a merger with AD-COM, a Montreal-based provider of technical translation services. The transaction expands TransPerfect’s presence in Canada, adding a Montreal production hub to the company’s three existing Canadian locations. AD-COM will become a division of TransPerfect and will continue to be led by Founder and President Claudia Cieri, who will join the TransPerfect senior management team. Cieri is a 20-year veteran of the translation and localization industry. http://www.transperfect.com/ http://www.ad-com.ca/
We—the analyst team behind A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Systems to Re-Invent Publishing, David R. Guenette, Bill Trippe, Mary Laplante, and Karen Golden—have been working up a sweat, and it isn’t just because there’s a heat wave on in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. We’ve been heads down and glory bound in our efforts to finish up this whopper of a report. We sincerely hope—indeed, strongly believe—that Blueprint will be of help to many, if only for its 39-page directory of book publishing-oriented vendors of technologies and services that can help make ebook and digital publishing more successful.
This study provides a guide for book publishers to discover where they are this moment regarding digital transformation, while offering specific case studies and analysis of how book publishers should approach getting to where they need to be to take advantage next year, and in the years ahead. We knew going in that the study was an ambitious one, although none of us suspected in would be ambitious to the point of exceeding 200 pages, but, well, I suppose that is what can happen when you decide to look at the full range of publishing processes in relation to ebook and digital publishing. Not to mention an art program with over 60 figures, many of the results from our extensive Web-based survey.
We’re also excited about our case studies included in the study, filled with substance and capturing the voices of the subjects we interviewed, providing a conversational tone to these stories of real hands-on work being done in the vineyards of digital publishing.
Hmmm… maybe the heat is getting to me.
We’re entering the final review stretch, so stay cool, and keep an eye open for the publication announcement.
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