Vasont Systems announced the release of the next major version of their content management system, Vasont 12, that enables users to store multilingual content once for maximum reuse and delivery to multiple channels. Vasont 12 includes: Collaborative Review package provides effective virtual collaboration with colleagues. Internal and external reviewers markup content with changes and comments while seeing other reviewers’ feedback simultaneously. Accepted changes automatically update in Vasont, minimizing manual updates; Project Management tracks projects to meet publishing deadlines. The Project Management window provides overall statuses of workflow projects across multiple departments and highlights overdue projects. When needed, users can inquire for specific status information. Gantt charts provide a graphical view of project timelines; Translation package consolidates translation project information in one window. Vasont’s Translation Projects window provides tracking and status for each multi-language translation project. Translation coordinators submit projects to multiple vendors for quote or translation. Integrations with translation vendors automate content delivery and status information to/from Vasont; Preview feature provides a styled view of XML content. Vasont’s Preview displays content in a styled view to speed up editorial time by making content easy to read; Content Ownership increases content security. Specific pieces of content within a collection are restricted to alterations by its Content Owners while other users can only view it. Associate Administrators role provides flexibility to coordinate administrative responsibilities across multiple groups, and more. This release is available on May 1, 2009 for both the client/server and hosted (SaaS) models. http://www.vasont.com
Category: Publishing & media (Page 29 of 52)
… inside a widget window on your computer?
Browse Inside this book |
The 10th annual Buying and Selling eContent conference took place under sunny skies in Scottsdale, AZ, this week. The event brings together buyers and sellers of business information that drives decision-making within enterprises and supports research within institutions. There’s no doubt that the economic climate is putting pressure on the industry. But although budget cuts are certainly shaping 2009 packaging tactics, the industry faces far bigger challenges that will still exist when the economic pendulum swings back the other way. We spent much of the conference wondering when – and if – participants will make the commitment to innovation, roll up their sleeves, and begin the difficult work of transforming their businesses.
Anthea Stratigos, co-founder and CEO of Outsell, gave a stirring yet practical opening keynote. She used Outsell’s highly-regarded and well-researched annual outlook to explain why the industry isn’t simply experiencing a blip. She strongly reinforced the fact that things will be different on the other side. This isn’t news to industry watchers and participants. The need for fundamental change in the way the information industry works has long been acknowledged. We experienced the same buyer/seller tension at the NFAIS conference in February, where the “them versus us” attitude was right out there in the conference theme: “Barbarians at the Gate? The Global Impact of Digital Natives and Emerging Technologies on the Future of Information Services.” Gilbane’s own study on Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends and Best Practices (May 2008) looks at some of the important issues in those markets. The current worldwide economic situation simply brings the need for revamping the industry into even clearer focus. Sellers want the buyers to acknowledge the value of the content they provide and be fairly compensated for it. Buyers want the sellers to provide that value – and more – for a lot less money. And everyone wrings his or her hands over new entrants into the workforce who expect to have access to quality content for little or no money, with tools that are easy to use and freely available.
At the same time, there exists a wealth of technologies that can be brought to bear to address these problems and enable industry transformation. The BSeC program provided good exposure to some of these, including dynamic publishing capabilities, structured content creation, software-as-a-service platforms that enable low-cost experimentation, social computing tools, and cloud computing services. Although there was lots of twittering going on (see #bsec09), the gulf between the buyers and sellers in the audience and the technologies and services being discussed on the speaker platform felt quite wide at times. As analysts trying to fulfill our market education mission, we found ourselves wondering how to narrow that gap.
One answer lies in the willingness to experiment and then report on successes and failures. Marty Kahn from ProQuest described insights emerging from Project Information Literacy, the goals of which are to “understand how early adults conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and ‘everyday use’ and especially how they resolve issues of credibility, authority, relevance, and currency in the digital age.” Kahn showed the current working version of Summons, a Google-style interface for library data. It’s meant to aid students who perceive a higher value of information offered by a library, but are stymied as to how to get at those resources with quick, easy discovery. See a video on YouTube. John Girard from Clickability highlighted successful experiements by some of the company’s customers in paid-content markets, enabled by Clickability’s SaaS WCM solution.
Another answer lies in leveraging experience in other domains. While experiments get started and begin to show early results, the information industry can look outside itself to other content practice areas and seek experience from which it can learn. One such domain is technical documentation. One of the break-out topics for informal discussion was flexible content and how it can play a role in the transformation of the industry. It seemed like an early learning conversation for a number of the participants. The technologies and practices for creating, managing and publishing flexible content have been delivering value to technical documentation organizations throughout the world for some time. The information industry can leverage this deep expertise.
The tools to innovate are readily available. The know-how exists in other industries and content-centric business practices. The necessity to transform the industry is apparent. We’ll be watching to see who steps up to embrace the change and experiment with the business models that can drive a transformed industry.
Bill http://twitter.com/billtrippe has set up tweet poll:
What eBook device are you using today? http://twtpoll.com/31yn5r
#twtpoll
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. </>
Markzware, a developer of data extraction and conversion software and inventor of preflighting, released an upgrade to its conversion tool PUB2ID for InDesign CS3 and CS4. PUB2ID v2 (Microsoft Publisher to Adobe InDesign) is a plug-in that enables users to convert native-application Microsoft Publisher files (MS Publisher versions 2002 through 2007) to Adobe InDesign while preserving the content, as well as the styles and formatting. http://www.markzware.com
SDL announced that Adobe Systems is providing all its Adobe FrameMaker 9 users with SDL AuthorAssistant, the client component of SDL Global Authoring Management System. Adobe FrameMaker 9 software is an authoring and publishing solution that allows technical communicators to author, structure, review and publish complex and lengthy content. Starting with FrameMaker 9 and Adobe Technical Communications Suite 2, every user of FrameMaker can install SDL AuthorAssistant as part of the Adobe FrameMaker 9 environment, empowering them to create content for global markets and improve the quality of their content. SDL AuthorAssistant ensures adherence to style guide rules and consistent use of terminology. The software is also able to check against previously translated content, so that companies with global audiences can improve content reuse and reduce the downstream costs of localizing content. http://www.adobe.com, http://www.sdl.com
DPCI announced it has joined the Acquia Partner program at the Platinum level. Through the program, DPCI will expand its open source content management offerings by developing and delivering custom publishing solutions utilizing Acquia’s value-added products and services for the Drupal social publishing system. Additionally the program allows DPCI to leverage the Acquia Network for support, site management, and remote network services. http://drupal.org, http://acquia.com, http://www.databasepublish.com