Open Text Corporation, a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software, announced Rights Management Services (RMS) for the Open Text ECM Suite designed to safeguard confidential and sensitive information from unauthorized uses even after it leaves the content repository. Though the content may be stored in a secure repository, once users have the right to read a document and save it on their local drives, the content becomes vulnerable. Open Text Rights Management Services lets organizations augment their strategies with protection that remains with the content. Rights Management Services works by enforcing content protection constraints for documents and other content based on rules such as “do not email,” “do not print” or “do not save locally.” The application then encrypts the content and the publishing license together. The content and rights remain encrypted during transport, extending security to wherever the content travels. When a recipient opens rights-protected content, a request goes to a rights management server to validate the user’s credentials and usage rights. Round-trip scenarios are also supported allowing editing and uploading of new versions that retain the rights management constraints. As a shared service in the ECM Suite, Rights Management Services are also available to any content application in the organization. Protection spans Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 applications as well as PDF, HTML, engineering drawing file formats, image files, ZIP, archives among others. Users can also read and protect content viewed on BlackBerry smartphones. The Open Text RMS solution takes advantage of the Active Directory Rights Management Service from Microsoft. Open Text is also partnering with both GigaTrust and Liquid Machines, to add support for specialty content types such as computer-aided design (CAD) files, Visio, Adobe PDF, graphic files, and many other file formats, plus rights management support for documents available via BlackBerry devices. Open Text Rights Management Services for the Open Text ECM Suite is available now. Partner offerings are also available now directly through the partners. http://www.opentext.com http://www.gigatrust.com http://www.liquidmachines.com/
Category: Publishing & media (Page 24 of 53)
The Gilbane Group’s new web-based survey for book publishing professionals has just gone live. This “Blueprint” survey is one of the research mechanisms for our upcoming study A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing. The study will be published in June 2010, and all participants in this survey will have full access to the full-length study posted on The Gilbane Group website and through the websites of the sponsors of the report.
Please note: This survey is for high- and mid-level book publishing professionals. If this does not describe you, please do not take this survey.
This 10-minute survey seeks to gain detailed information about what is really happening among the full spectrum of book publishers related to ebook and digital publishing efforts, and will identify the "pain points" and barriers encountered by book publishers when it comes to their developing or expanding digital publishing programs. Issues such as royalties, digital format choices, and distribution difficulties are addressed.
For more information about A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing, or other activities of The Gilbane Group Content Technologies and Strategies practice, please email Bill Trippe.
The Gilbane Group Web-based survey of book publishing professionals is now active!. This survey is one of the research mechanisms for our upcoming study A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing. The study will be published in June 2010, and all participants in this survey will have full access to the full-length study posted on The Gilbane Group website.
This survey, which will take most participants between 10-to-15 minutes to complete, seeks to gain a clearer picture of ebook and related digital publishing efforts underway among the full spectrum of book publishers. Furthermore, the analyst team at The Gilbane Group seeks to identify a number of “pain points” or barriers encountered by book publishers when it comes to developing or expanding digital publishing programs, including areas such as royalties, digital format choices, and distribution problems.
Broadly speaking, A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Systems to Re-Invent Publishing is a professional education effort, and its utility will rely, in large part, on the active and open participation of the book professionals on the front lines of the digital transformation of books.
Please note: This survey is for high- and mid-level book publishing professionals. If this does not describe you, please do not take this survey.
TAKE SURVEY
Thank you for your participation!
At The Gilbane Group’s Content Technologies and Strategies service, we’re wrestling with what we think is one of the biggest challenges facing publishers moving to greater and greater involvement in the digital marketplace: How much impediment is found in publishers’ having insular line-of-business systems throughout their publishing processes?
Digital publishing’s revenues have been growing—a common marker is the statistics in ebook sales growth—and more publishers of all sorts are strengthening their digital publishing efforts. For many, the problem comes down to whether the publisher can make publishing in various ebook formats (or online aggregation, or other models) pay. It all comes down to how easy (read: cheap) it is to determine conditions like the rights associated with a publication, or part thereof, and how easy (read: cheap) it is to get the actual content into the right form.
Here’s a simplified example, assuming an existing print textbook. The textbook’s publisher will have to ascertain the status of and details for all seven publishing processes, from planning through to fulfillment, as follows:
- Market for and P&L of digital versions
- Form(s) and features of the digital textbooks
- State of rights and royalties for the textbooks, including, in all likelihood, various contributors and components, and quite possibly licensing or subsidiary rights constraints
- Location, condition, and availability of print edition production and/or manufacturing files
- Design, conversion, and format output requirements of digital versions
- Promotion and sales of digital versions
- Distribution and/or fulfillment of digital textbooks
There is need for planning and editorial to work together to figure out if the digital publications make sense; planning, royalties, and licensing to work together to provide planning with these costs and to work with sales and accounting to meet contractual obligations; editorial, production, and quite likely manufacturing to work together on the specific forms of and source material for the digital versions; production and manufacturing to work together with sales, distribution, and fulfillment, along with marketing and promotion, to get actual digital textbooks out to the end-user or aggregator.
The publishing processes most often have a lot of separate systems and platforms in play, of course. Which means when it comes to extracting money out of print titles by publishing digital editions, there are plenty of places for expenses to become significant.
Our upcoming report, A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing, looks at, among other things, how these systems can work together, and already we are seeing a number of different strategies that make a lot of sense (read: cents).
We’ll be launching a Web-based survey for mid- and high-level book publishing professionals in about two weeks to gain a more detailed picture of the current state of digital publishing in fact, not theory. As more and more content technology is applied to book publishing, we think that it is important to ask how well or poorly the different publishing processes can interoperate, and for that answer we need to hear from those doing the real work of publishing.
Here’s an old joke of mine I’ve unearthed from the olden times when I was first a developmental editor and then an acquisitions editor at a professional resource and textbook publisher.
If you don’t think the joke is funny, you’re right. The feeling among those in publishing of being pressed to absurd extent is a very common one, what a good friend of mine calls “running around with your hair on fire.” Let’s face it: the practice of publishing, with its tight margins, immovable deadlines, and wide scope of responsibilities is fraught with demands on time. The Gilbane Publishing Practices group certainly sees this.
One of our ongoing efforts is the upcoming report, A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Systems to Re-Invent Publishing, where we’re defining the many systems common across many different kinds of publishing, and describe the technological and process barriers still facing almost every publisher as it moves toward building a successful digital publishing operation. And, yes, the demands already in place upon the various line-of-business departments are exhausting even to survey. Add the demands placed upon publishing organizations to create processes that make digital publishing a reasonably good profit center, and it can feel that there is barely time to breathe. Running around with hair on fire, indeed.
The Gilbane Group means content management, and the long-standing argument that the business of enterprises goes better when content is findable, retrievable, and usable has long been proved by the practices of innumerable enterprises. With the catchphrase “Every enterprise’s second business is publishing,” it is not surprising that Gilbane has a lot of clients not only in the CMS technology vendor space, but also in the publishing end-user/implementer space.
While there are many similarities between publishers and other enterprises that have a lot of content they need to manage, there are unique aspects too. Here are a couple examples of the differences: managing royalties and dealing with rights.
Yes, tracking royalties is a sort of accounting issue, and many enterprises—especially those dealing with a lot of rich media—need to take care with rights. But in publishing, royalties and rights are central to the business. How does a publisher integrate these key elements of the business with the technology platforms used in other parts of the business process?
Our upcoming report will be quite specific about the real state of opportunity in digital publishing, which means that we’ll need to answer many questions, including the ones about royalty and rights handling. So it is our turn to run around with our hair on fire, but we promise to still have time to read your comments and inquires about our latest efforts.
Of course, it goes without saying that if one doesn’t have time to read, one probably will be hard-pressed to take a survey: nonetheless, that is exactly what we’ll soon be asking publishers to do. The survey will be from the book publishers’ perspective and their experiences and concerns about expanding or starting digital publishing programs. Stay tuned for more specific information on this and for the survey kick-off.
For more information about our Publishing Practices consulting services and our multi-client-sponsored studies, contact Ralph Marto.
Amazon.com, Inc. announced “Kindle for Mac,” a free application that lets readers around the world read Kindle books on their Mac computers. The U.S. Kindle Store currently offers over 450,000 books, including New Releases and 102 of the New York Times Bestsellers. Kindle books can now be read on the Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC and Mac, and soon the iPad. Kindle for Mac features Amazon’s Whispersync technology which saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. With Kindle for Mac, readers can take advantage of the following features: Purchase, download, and read the many Kindle format books available; Access their library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free; Choose from 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line; Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read; View notes and highlights marked on Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle for iPhone; & Read books in full color including children’s books, cookbooks, travel books and textbooks. Several features will be added to the Kindle for Mac app in the near future, including full text search and the ability to create and edit notes and highlights. Kindle for Mac is available to customers around the world as a free download. http://www.amazon.com/kindleformac
In a move to strengthen reach in the Asian market, Adeptol announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with VersaPAC, a solution provider of information management systems and reseller of HP TRIM records management software. With the partnership VersaPAC is moving from a legacy viewing system to Adeptol’s document viewing technology embedded in its Saffron web front-end application for HP TRIM. Saffron is available through VersaPAC resellers in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, North America, and the United Kingdom. The integration allows Saffron to support viewing of over 300 file formats including documents from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, various image files, and Adobe PDF. Users will have access to the latest features such as document search, annotations, and document conversion to PDF – all from the viewer. Adeptol Document Viewer is a web-based viewer using Ajax technology, and is a built-in Information Rights Management (IRM) module that allows users to protect content by assigning policies to control the viewing, printing, navigating and saving of documents. http://www.ajaxdocumentviewer.com/ http://www.versapac.com.my/
pTools, a Content Management Software (CMS) provider, announced the addition of a range of embedded social media and networking features to its software. From within the pTools CMS, social media content can be re-distributed in many formats to other social networks and sites. A key feature is ‘TwitterDocs’, which allows users to post to Twitter as they publish content through the CMS. There is no need to separately login to Twitter, and the content-related Tweet is controlled and managed within the CMS and its workflows. In addition to Twitter, content can be presented on Facebook, LinkedIn, and indexed in live search engine results with no tweaking required. http://www.ptools.com/