David Saracco, VP of Business Development at RSI Content Solutions, will be speaking at The Challenges of Digital Online Publishing Management Seminar on January 15 from 11 AM to 12:30 PM E.D.T. The seminar will take place at the SUNY Global Center for Graduate and Executive Education, located at 116 East 55th Street in New York.

The purpose of this management seminar is to provide an overview of the rapidly developing technologies and new businesses for digital and online publishing for a delegation of Chinese publishers. It will present a review of recent developments that are taking place and how they will impact the publishing or information industry in the areas of editing entering data, storage and retrieval of information as new forms of the publishing business. The functions of searching, data storage and data mining, bookmarking, tagging, blogs, websites, social networks, and new business models will be presented as an intense management overview.

Click here to read the entire press release.

In the coming months, I’ll periodically be writing a bit about the design of RSuite 4. It has been very exciting to see the effort and thought we put in to the user experience translating into a much improved experience for our users.  

RSuite 4: Unnaturally Natural By Design

Many of our new customers starting out with RSuite 4 may not be aware of the effort required to put together such a natural design. It’s easy to forget that thousands of hours of thought, design, and refinement by many people are usually behind those interfaces that seem so effortless. Starting now and for several months I will be periodically posting this series of behind-the-scenes discussion of RSuite 4. Along the way you will have the opportunity to get a taste of some of the major challenges and opportunities when designing software user interfaces.

Indirect Action Traps Unsuspecting Users

Traditional content and asset management users might click on an image then scoot up to a toolbar or some menu to conduct an action.  You might find the preview button on the toolbar. Click it and the selected image is previewed for you.

This works fine if users operate with a clear understanding of what item they have selected as well as an action’s area of effect. Accidentally clicking the mouse or forgetting about a change of selection and users may find they've acted on the wrong item. With each mistake an inexperienced user’s confidence is eroded, often snowballing into more errors. Not only are inexperienced users struggling to get their work done, now they have to undo their mistakes. If they can find them...

Look at the RSuite 3 screenshot. The selected item is clearly identified with the orange highlighting. Bump the scroller on your mouse, however, and that orange item can slide out of view. The toolbar, though, remains visible and is still ready to act on the now-unseen item. If you are sure that the now-hidden item you want to act on is still selected then you can click the toolbar. Most users lack this surety and instead have to scroll around until they can double-check that the right item is still selected. 

After observing many types of users repeat such behaviors in a wide range of software applications, I suspect that users have become resigned to these error-prone designs. They aren't aware that this checking and double-checking is time consuming and directly impeding their ability to get work done.

Context Menus: A Step In The Right Direction

In the mid-90s mainstream computer software adopted context menus, menus accessed by right-clicking an item and selecting an action to take from a flat list of menu items. Context menus had the advantage of providing users a direct action interface. Right click an item and a list of actions relevant to that item are displayed. It was definitely a step in the right direction. Web applications like RSuite 3 typically offer context menus.

Context menus were great for users who figured out how to right-click something provided the action you wanted to take was present in the menu that appeared. But the flat menu design of context menus generally lacks the density of functionality of buttons on a toolbar. So the compromise of context menus is that some subset of available actions appear in the context menu.

A Context Menu or Scavanger Hunt

Most interfaces ended up with many actions available only in the toolbar or some traditional menu structure. It is common to also find a few actions that are only available in the context menu. There also might be additional menus hiding somewhere with the action we need. Inexperienced users struggle to memorize the interface or become a highly practiced scavenger hunters as they try to get their work done.

A careful UI designer will go to great lengths to design some logic into the interface to explain why some actions are in toolbars, others menus and still other in context menus. Unfortunately understanding the design logic usually requires a solid understanding of the application. So users who could be greatly helped if they could more easily act within the application lack the level of understanding of the software needed to interpret the design logic. 

Extensibility Is A Design Challenge

RSuite’s renowned extensibility usually requires integrators find places to extend the UI in order to interact with the user. Should I put a new button in the toolbar? In the context menu? Add to some existing menu? Or look somewhere else? Or maybe put it everywhere? Instead of focusing on the actual business goals, most traditional UI designs bog integrators down in decision-making, UI coding activities and design tasks that are not productive or efficient uses of their time.

In spite of an integrator’s best intention and effort, traditional integration projects can end up producing customized applications that feel more like trying to land a 1974 jumbo jet for the first time rather than doing my actual job. While it is easy to blame the integration team, sometimes you might find that traditional software design and integration points are complicit in the ineffective result.

RSuite 4: Consistent, Direct, Logical

RSuite 4 uses a direct action-based interface revealed by left-clicking on an item. Long toolbars filled with inscrutable icons are no longer present. Traditional menus are reserved for a few special cases. If a user wants to know what actions are available on any item in RSuite 4, just click it. Every available action for the item they click on is displayed clearly in an action menu.

Want to act on an image? Click it. A menu with icons and text clearly communicate all of the actions you can take. This simple approach means that no experience is necessary to discover what actions are available. Over time, as your implementation changes, users only have to understand the changes to the business-specific actions available. The UI remans consistent. 

Integrators have a clear, consistent design language for any extensions they care to add to RSuite. The application’s logical design greatly reduces the effort required for most common integration tasks. Adding to or removing from an action menu doesn't require any complex Javascript or other UI coding.

Would You Like To Know More?

With RSuite 4 we have worked hard to remove barriers that are still far too common in business applications. If your interested in seeing more check out our online video tour or visit our website to contact us for a demonstration.

RSuite CMS, the leading multi-channel Content Management System for the publishing and media industry, has been selected by HarperCollins Publishers and HarperCollins Christian Publishing as their workflow and content management system. HarperCollins is one of the world’s leading English-language publishers known for being a broad-based publisher with strengths in literary and commercial fiction, business books, children’s books, cookbooks, narrative nonfiction, mystery, romance, reference, pop culture, design, health, wellness, and religious and spiritual books.

HarperCollins needed a robust software system that can manage each aspect of their publishing process. RSuite CMS will configure the system to meet HarperCollins’s specific requirements such as their workflow and content development needs.

“HarperCollins had a business requirement for a cross-functional collaborative workflow platform to manage the publishing process,” stated David Saracco, Vice President, Business Development, RSuite CMS. “The trade book market is quickly evolving, and HarperCollins required a content management solution to better manage products across all platforms – both print and digital.”

RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, is now powered by MarkLogic 7, the industry’s leading Enterprise NoSQL database. RSuite CMS 4 provides an entirely new user experience through an intuitive user interface that minimizes actions required to execute complex searches across an entire set of content, globally apply metadata, dynamically organize content into collections, package and distribute content to licensing partners, and much more.

“RSuite and MarkLogic have had a wonderful partnership over the past seven years,” stated Christopher Hill, vice president, product management at RSI Content Solutions. “While MarkLogic provides the foundation, the RSuite toolset adds a robust set of capabilities that publishers can leverage to meet their multi-channel publishing goals.”

To read the entire press release, click here.

RSI Content Solutions, a content management solutions provider to the publishing industry, is pleased to announce that it has been named to the 2013 EContent 100 list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry for the third year in a row. Selection of the companies for the EContent 100 list falls to a team of judges including editors from Information Today, Inc., EContent magazine contributing editors, and other industry experts. Additional companies on the list include Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, O'Reilly Media, and others.

“In 2013, our task was to narrow down the ever expanding list of important players in the digital content industry to a mere 100 companies that matter most, a task that is becoming harder every year,” said Theresa Cramer, editor of EContent. “Consequently, the companies that do make up our list can be sure that they are in good company—and that next year, there will be a new crop of companies biting at their heels. This is great for the industry, and exciting for those of us who cover the space.”

Continue reading the press release here.

If I was asked to design an A-list American holiday, I would never have come up with Thanksgiving. As a kid I enjoyed a few Thanksgiving dinner staples, but would have traded them for a trip to Dairy Queen in a heartbeat.

I’ve spent my share of Thanksgivings trying in one way or another to adhere to the holiday’s intended design, usually with the same cast of regulars from my daily life. 

On occasion I’ve celebrated the holiday in a house of strangers, save for the friend or two who dragged me along. One Thanksgiving I spent in The Hague, Netherlands, at a training course. I dined on my first Indonesian meal with my classmates, the only American at the table of near-strangers.

The Thanksgiving that gives me some of the warmest memories I spent alone in my room in a deserted dormitory in Minneapolis. How could a roast beef sandwich, fries and medium Coke be so memorable? The clerk who prepared it was friendly and wished me a happy Thanksgiving as I left with the bag of food. But when I discovered the promotional gold-rimmed holiday glass at the bottom of the bag - usually requiring an extra charge on a large soft drink - the clerk transformed the modest meal into a memorable feast. It remains one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories.

Something about Thanksgiving's design seems to work well even when circumstances would not seem conducive to a positive experience.

Thanksgiving's ability to create these strong feelings are not easily identified on paper. Imagine if it were invited to an RFP selection process:

American Holiday rankings:

1 Christmas (38)
2 Easter (31)
3 New Year’s Day (28)
4 Independence Day (26)
5 Valentine's Day (25)
6 Thanksgiving (24)
7 Labor Day (19)
 8 Halloween (16) 

This isn't even close to how, outside of a feature matrix, I would rank the holidays. I suspect most Americans would say the same.

A number of assumptions are inherent in this type of ranking process that produces results incompatible with our actual experience.

Do all of these features have equal importance and rank?

If I don’t intend to eat candy or decorate my home in holiday lights, should I include these features “just in case” I might want to do that someday?

We forget that adding unwanted/unneeded features to our matrix might be detrimental. Imagine being the only person not in costume at a Halloween celebration or an atheist at an Easter service.

If I had put this scoring system into my RFP, Thanksgiving would not even rank in the top half of the holidays. It turns out that Thanksgiving’s subtle design choices are easy to overlook when insulated from any actual experience.

I know that regardless of how the food turns out this evening, today is already a highlight of my year as I reflect on the many personal and professional things I have to be thankful for. 

If today you are also celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope yours is happy and memorable too.

I'm going to see a movie tonight called "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire". It's a movie that derived from a book. You may or may not have heard about it, but seeing as you're on a website that sells content management systems for publishers, the chances are very high that you're familiar. In the first movie (spoiler alert) the story revolves around children and teenagers who are put in an outrageous dangerous environment and must fend for themselves until one "lucky" player survives and is released at the very end of the game and lives their lives in luxury...not to mention reoccuring nightmares on a consistent basis for the rest of their lives.

At RSI Content Solutions, we have seen some Hunger Games-like ways of managing content. Over the years, we have found many publishing companies that don't even know where their content is stored which means you don't have the source files for your publications. Imagine a situation which your content is in numerous amount of files that are stored in multiple places, and no one really knows where to find them. There is ultimately no real way to universally search in one place for what you're looking for and even if you did have a way to search, how is the content managed?

That's what we at RSI Content Solutions consider the Hunger Games of Content Management.

We have been helping publishers manage their content since the year 2000 and RSuite CMS, the content management system for publishers, is our bow and arrow for the world of confusing content management. With your choice of cloud or deployed CMS, we have a content management system that stores your files from simple Word files to your digital assets.

Over the past ten years, I have been working with educational publishers, large and small, helping them with their digital publishing needs from building ancillary products both online and on CDs and DVDs, online course ware, digital assessment programs, online e-textbook selling sites, and hundreds of other educational products.  For the past year, my focus here at RSI is to help educational, academic and media publishing companies with their content management needs and content preparation for concurrent, multichannel publishing.  At most meetings with educational publishers these days, a good deal of the discussion is focused on how RSuite can help in the increasingly daunting task of properly tagging their content for discovery both internally and externally. 

Most publishers today have begun to understand the importance of rich metadata.  The selling of ebooks through the retail outlets has certainly brought an elevated focus to having your metadata robust, available, flexible and up to date but that metadata only scratches the surface for educational publishers.

According to that “great” source in the clouds (Wikipedia), Metadata is usually categorized in three types:

• Descriptive metadata describes an information resource for identification and retrieval through elements such as title, author, and abstract.
• Structural metadata documents relationships within and among objects through elements such as links to other components (e.g., how pages are put together to form chapters).
• Administrative metadata helps to manage information resources through elements such as version number, archiving date, and other technical information for purposes of file management, rights management and preservation.

Standards-based metadata models are being hyped to help address educational objects discoverability in the marketplace such as the recently released Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) (backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and the Achievement Standards Networks (ASN) (which essentially enables content creators to describe the objective of learning and teaching resources in terms required by each state). There’s the existing standards such as the Learning Object Metadata model supported and managed by the International Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set to name only a few.

According to the LRMI’s mission, all of these initiatives are meant to “facilitate personalized learning by…” giving publishers the capability of tagging the content so learners can have “…the right content at the right time” and also to address the demands of states for standardized descriptions of learning resources. 

The key requirements for exploiting educational learning object metadata are to:

• Understand user/community needs and to express these as an application profile
• Have a strategy for creating high quality metadata
• Store this metadata in a form which can be exported as LOM records
• Agree a binding for LOM instances when they are exchanged
• Be able to exchange records with other systems either as single instances or en masse.

How do you currently manage the process of tagging your content?

While RSuite CMS can certainly help publishers efficiently and effectively manage the complex metadata requirements for today’s educational publishers, I would like to understand your challenges by commenting on the questions below or bringing your own questions to the table…

• Did you build your own taxonomy and system to add the tags to your content? 
• Have you adopted one of the “standards”? 
• Are you tagging your content with any metadata that will facilitate users finding and purchasing your content much less difficult than it is today? 

Do you create, edit, or manage content? You might need a content management system.

Even in 2013, publishers both large and small don't yet have a grasp on benefits of a content management system and how much easier it can make their publishing process. Then again, what do you, as a publisher, consider to be "content"? For different publishers, content means different things. Do you consider it to be a Word document? Is content a PDF, ePub, or something else? Dare I ask if you consider video a piece of content? Truthfully, the word "content" has morphed over the last few years and for publishers and therefore, content has truly become everything from a Word document to a video.

So, let me help clear any confusion and give you, the publisher, a few benefits of what content management system for publishers can do for you:

1. Streamline your publishing workflow. With RSuite CMS, there's no need to switch back and forth all day between your email and your content. Upload your content to RSuite, assign it to the next person in your publishing process, then edit it all from within our system.
2. Speaking of editing, do you use Microsoft Word when composing and editing your content? Bring your process into RSuite. Transform the Word document into XML automatically to meet your multi-channel publishing goals. RSuite handles the entire end-to-end process.
3. Package your content in an automated fashion and distribute it to your licensing partners. In many cases this process can be 100% automated based on the business rules that you define.

As part of our ongoing customer engagement, we're planning a series of webinars for current users of RSuite CMS. Our goal is to deliver customer-focused webinars which set the stage for our customers to drive the priorities for the next generation of the RSuite application.

This past Wednesday, October 30, we hosted our quarterly RSuite Customer webinar and this quarter's topic was the future of RSuite. We had great attendance accompanied by great questions. The main theme within each question happened to be about upgrading to our latest version, RSuite 4. This got me thinking about software features that we, in the publishing industry, come in contact with.

We are always interested in what the marketplace is asking for. For instance, which features in a content management system matter most to you and your organization? Do you prefer your content management environment to be hosted in the cloud, deployed in your office, or perhaps you don't have a preference?

We've heard from our clients regarding hosted and deployed environments and now we'd like to hear from our followers. Please participate in the the poll above or comment in the section below.