As with everything in life, it's all a matter of the lens you view things through.  Something can look rosey to one person while looking like a train wreck to another.  Often times the view of a legacy content management system is dependent on where you sit within your organization, and rightly so.  But many times the decision to not replace a legacy CMS is based completely on the false premise that everything is OK and IT has everything under control.  In our experience, many times the IT organization is overwhelmed with projects and maintaining a legacy system becomes more difficult with each passing year.  

In many publishing organizations that we speak with on a daily basis, legacy CMS' are patched together by one or two very key individuals within an organization because they happen to be the longest tenured staff and were around when the system was installed.  There is generally a knowledgebase of small system idiosyncracies that these individuals know to stay away from because of either a design flaw or through implementing the system incorrectly.  Having an IT person be a single point of failure is not a good business practice to begin with, but having little or no understanding of what the black box legacy CMS is doing is much, much worse.  Unfortunately these situation exist at major publishing organizations around the globe.  This is an outgrowth of publishers who don't want to face the reality that their system is in serious jeapordy of crashing and there is no recovery mechanism in place.  

So how does each management level within a publisher view a legacy CMS?  Here's an outsiders perspective:

C-Suite View - We have technology that is proven

From the top, everything looks calm, cool, and collected.  Think about the duck gliding across the pond.  Products are being produced, money is being collected, why do we need to change anything? Remember the duck is paddling like crazy under the water.

VP View - We can make this work with little investment

While there are issues we need to address, the technology is solid and has been proven for some time.  Our team does not have turnover issues and therefore they are well versed in the CMS.  Some investment might be required to patch things here or there, but we have no need to upgrade to a new CMS.  Throwing more staff or budget at the legacy CMS will take care of everytihng.  We should be fine to meet our strategy.

Director View - We are unable to keep up with daily issues let alone scale the system

The system has been working, but barely.  The fragile nature causes daily concern that one hiccup could bring the entire production process down.  Editorial is comfortable with the workflow, knows the editorial tools, but under the covers the CMS cannot be extended and is patched because the technology has not been upgraded in years.  Adding more content, integrating with other systems, or adding third party tools will be extremely difficult without a large budget and a sufficient timeline to complete.

Developer View - We are so screwed 

The application has been maintained by different people over time.  Nothing has been documented, we have not paid support and have not received CMS software upgrades, and the underlying database has not been upgraded in years.  If the system goes down, I may need to look for a job.

The Bottom Line

Every position and management level at a publisher has a different view of their CMS.  It's natural.  What consistenly surprises people is that a legacy CMS can only address the requirements from yesterday and potentially not address the strategy of multi-channel publishing or automated eBook creation or whatever objective because changes are difficult and the system cannot scale.  Legacy systems are generally proven, but they do not generally have the stability to support the long-term business objectives and must be replaced.

If your CMS is over seven years old, has been patched to keep it running, and doesn't support your strategy, let us show you why publishers from around the globe and over 10,000 publishing professionals use RSuite every day.

Every so often we get inquiries from our RSuite enterprise clients or prospects about why there are services required to implement our RSuite software if the pre-configured environment is pretty much useful out-of-the-box?  If one digs a little deeper and analyzes exactly what types of services are required, I think a publisher will be surprised that services related to customizing or extending the content management software are actually pretty small.  Sure there will be custom forms for metadata capture or custom search forms, but these are generally a few days worth of work at the most.  On the other hand, services related to content structure and workflow re-engineering have a huge impact on the services required for a content management product implementation independent of the software package chosen.

Content Engineering

Content engineering can be simply defined as understanding the structure of your content and putting a migration plan to make it adhere to some type of standard.  In some cases very large publishers have crafted a proprietary content standard, but many adhere to industry standards such as NLM, D4P, DocBook, etc.  The amount of services required to transform the content from one format to another can vary widely depending on the amount of file formats and complexity of content.  While this effort can be categorized as part of the content management project, it is not part of the content management software.  

Content structure and organization reflects how an organization has worked over time.  If the publisher was disciplined and remained in compliance with industry standards, the amount of services to get the content into the content management system is minimal at best.  Basically, if the publisher has well structured content that adheres to a DTD, then it should just work in RSuite or other systems.  The challenge surfaces when multiple products adhere to different DTD's and then the publisher wants to consolidate under one standard.  Again, a very good idea, but this is an issue beyond the content management software. Or the publisher has no DTD and wants to migrate all of their content to a standard.  Again, an excellent idea, but the effort to complete this should not reflect on the content management software.  As one of our engineers has said, "there is no magic button to transform the content, you either have the discipline to adhere to a standard or it will take some work to transform the content so that it does comply".  There is no simple solution.

Workflow Analysis and Automation

Services related to workflow are generally consultative in nature whereby a business analyst sits with all parties to understand current "as-is" and "to-be" workflows.  In some cases publishers have done a very nice job documenting their current as-is workflows but have a difficult time envisioning the to-be workflows.  This is normal and can generally be addressed by creating some pilot workflows and showing the client how the software will help them.  In some cases though a publisher which has been doing business one way for the past 20-years can have cultural challenges to change to the to-be workflows.  This has been becoming less and less over the past 5-years as the need to embrace multi-channel publishing is critical to the sustainability of the publishing business.  In other words, optimizing workflows, creating efficiencies, and actually automating multi-channel publishing are no longer options.  It does mean in some cases that people within the publishing organization will have to be re-skilled or let go.  That is unfortunately the nature of the game right now for publishers.  Workflow equals efficiency which equals cost reductions which equals a reduction or reallocation of staff or an increase in production throughput.

A publisher that requires significant manual steps (e.g., a person needs to review and approve content) in their workflow will not realize the true benefits of implementing the workflow software.  Manual steps are still required in the editorial process, but minimizing them is key.  An automated step (e.g., content transformation) is the key to gaining the efficiencies that are sought by management.  Depending on the complexity of the automated steps, the amount of services required can vary widely.  The key is automating the highest value steps in the workflow and minimizing the manual steps.  Again, the more a publisher understands how they need to change their process, the less services will be required to implement the content management software.  The software will do whatever you configure it to do, but time spent understanding exactly what a publisher should be doing takes time and requires a visionary within your organization to think outside the box.

The Bottom Line

For both content engineering and workflow related services, the more a publisher is organized in these areas, the less services are required for a content management project independent of whether it is RSuite or not.  The painfulness of addressing years of neglect in a structured or disciplined production of content can require significant services to unwind the structure, business rules, or lack of adherence to standards.  Unfortunately this can be seen as a barrier to implementing a content management system.  

While a new content management system could offer tremendous value in content reuse, version control, and production efficiency, the new software cannot magically address the messiness of the content or undocumented workflow. If your team has been organized and have very structured content with a well documented and agreed upon workflow (even if you are using legacy technology), then services to implement a CMS should be relatively small.  

If you are embarking on a content management initiative, I would highly recommend that you have an honest assessment of your content structure and your workflow.  If these pieces are in order, then you have just increased your odds of a successful content management system implementation and reduced the required services to implement the software.

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.

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.

For the bulk of my 10+ years in various jobs involving content management I found myself routinely discussing metadata at work. I don't know if I ever recall the subject arising outside of that sphere. This month that has changed literally overnight. The breaking news on the National Security Agency's PRISM program - apparently focused on collecting metadata regarding telephone calls - has brought metadata to the attention of the general public. Suddenly I'm reading tutorials on the term metadata in newspapers and magazine, hearing it defined on network television, and finding opportunities to discuss metadata with my non-technical family, friends and acquaintences. I've often said that metadata can be just as important as the content it describes, and the PRISM program serves as an excellent example of this.

I find it sometimes dismaying that even today content management problems still neglect to give proper attention to the subject of metadata. Many of the RFPs I read have highly detailed inquiries regarding the ability to work with content including re-use, componentization, and other sophisticated capabilities. Most of the time, however, they make only a few cursory inquiries regarding metadata neglecting key capabilities that can adversely affect the ability to take advantage of some of these advanced content management capabilities.

Here are some of those neglected metadata capabilities that may have a major impact of your ability to solve your content management issues.

Extensibility

More times than I care to remember I have worked with systems that have very little flexibility to modify metadata requirements after they are deployed. These are often related to technical implementation issues relating to the underlying architecture. You know you are working in such a situation if adding a new metadata field requires system downtime, interventions of a team of database administrators, or the cooperation of a team of programmers.

In practice such systems tend to limit metadata to a few narrow cases and fields. This is sometimes tolerable with systems dedicated to specific tactical production duties or limited content repositories. But when trying to deploy solutions horizontally through an organization or adapt a production system to a broader set of requirements or tasks it is typically easier to just deploy another content management solution than adapt the existing one. 

When I worked for a semantic text mining company we provided a tool that could extract a list of all of the important metadata values from a piece of text. This included things like lists of people, places, companies, landmarks, events, etc. present in the text. There was no artificial limit to how many of these things might be present. Unfortunately, when we worked with many companies we found their systems could only deal with a predefined number of items, and the user interfaces were not well-equipped to present or manage these lists of items.

Look for a content management system that has the flexibility to be modified over time. Inquire about how metadata is stored and the provisions to modifying and expanding it. Can metadata fields have any number of multiple values? Try to uncover these limitations in both storage as well as user interface.

Selective presentation

Another problem that plagues many systems is their assumption that all metadata fields are important to all users equally. In reality, most users are only concerned with - or even prepared to understand - a subset of the metadata on a piece of content. Compare the key interests of your editorial staff to that of your marketing team or legal department. Are you able to selectively present each potential viewer of content with appropriate metadata that serves their needs, without wading through a lot of information that isn't important to them? I have sat through many analysis meetings where representatives of every stakeholder gather around a table and spend hours, days or weeks trying to agree upon a comprehensive set of metadata.

Instead, look for your content management system to provide the capability to selectively present relevant metadata to different audiences. This should include the forms to view and edit metadata as well as a means to provide different search tools that make it easy to filter based on each category of users' requirements.Then you can maintain a large body of metadata appropriate to a wide range of requirements without overwhelming an individual user.

Context sensitivity

Today it is common for organizations ask for a content management system to provide them with the tools to re-use content. Yet even when the requirement is specified and delivered, in practice the capability often goes unused. One of the hidden reasons for this is in the inability of most systems to allow metadata to vary based on context.

In many situations a user may want to re-use a piece of content in a few places - but requires different metadata values in each place. As a simple example think of a photo caption. A caption appropriate in a novel may not work when the photo is used in a news article. Digital rights may be secured for the same photo multiple times, each needing its own context-specific representation. In countless situations like these, the inability to have some of the metadata vary by context means that users are forced to copy and paste content and cannot take advantage of the re-use tools provided by a system.

Even if the initial deployment of a system will not require contextual metadata you will probably find yourself wanting the capability at some point in the future. 

Versioning... or not

Most content management inquiries will ask about versioning content. But what about metadata? In many systems, metadata is either a required part of the version history of content - meaning that every change to a metadata field creates a new version of the content. This may be desirable for many of the fields, but there are some cases where all of the versions created by metadata changes end up generating so much noise in the content's version history that those features become difficult or impossible to use. 

At the other end of the spectrum are systems that do not version any metadata values. For important metadata values, this can be risky as there is no way to determine when or even if a metadata value was modified. 

In reality, most organizations will have some metadata they want to keep in the version history and others that they do not. Unfortunately, it is generally after they have started putting a tool in production that most people find out the capabilties of their system.

These four metadata requirements are significant in their impact of content management and can have major implications on how a system is implemented and adapted over time. While not all of these are a necessity to a single solution, their absence may make it difficult or impossible to adapt or expand your system in the future. 

You may be thinking of some other neglected metadata requirements you've run across. If so I'd like to hear about them.

Half of all Americans now own some sort of smartphone or tablet device, according to a recent Pew Research initiative. This is roughly similar to the number of Americans who own laptop computers, but the transition has occurred in over very few years, and these numbers are expected to double in the coming years. This trend is largely what is driving most activity in the content business today. The ability to present meaningful content where and when it is requested and at a price that is acceptable is a major challenge. It is becoming increasingly clear that content that is not digitized is not as valuable as content that is.

Digitization has become a necessity for content driven businesses. Many publishers have developed digitization strategies mainly as a reaction to market trends. Some publishers have adopted a “wait and see” mindset betting that technology will improve and that prices will come down. This may have been a good strategy in the early adoption era. However, technology and software have evolved, and the pricing for both technology and offshore services are about as low as they are going to get.   Digitizing your content is one of the necessary costs of admission to be able to play in today's marketplace. 

Download our free white paper, "Content Digitization Strategy 101" and understand the following concepts, which must be part of any content management and publishing plan:

• How you develop content that has a high digital readiness factor

• Strategies for reclaiming content that does not have a high digital readiness factor

• Planning to upgrade legacy content that is not digital into digital readiness

• How you manage, store, and distribute your digital ready content

• How do you maintain a focus on business value as a guide to all these activities

  
  
  
  

Stresses on the educational publishing industry are profound. While the challenges of core curriculum requirements and state mandates have been part of the equation for many years, new expectations are adding to the pressures:

• Textbook pricing
• Flash-to-HTML5 conversion
• Exponential increase in asset management
• iBooks 2

All these factors have escalated the need to manage and organize content in a structured and strategic manner.

On April 25 from 2:00 to 3:00 pm, join Chad Crume, director of content systems at Macmillan Higher Education and  David Saracco, vice president of business development at RSI Content Solutions as they discuss the evolving educational publishing landscape and explore how a strategic approach to content management can serve educational publishers now and into the future. Eliot Kimber, senior solutions architect will also join the conversation as he details how his open source DITA for Publishers project streamlines content transformation and ebook production.

WEBINAR: Challenges of Educational Publishing and How Content Management Can Help 

An Interview With Chad Crume, Director of Content Systems at Macmillan Higher Education | Thursday, April 25, 2013 2:00  - 3:00 EDT

Publishing is no longer the linear process it once was. Create, edit, produce, and publish to print is an obsolete workflow. Today, publishing organizations must consider print and digital along with the many configurations of each.

Publishing the core product is also just one component. Ancillary texts, content-based apps, online-first articles, and web content are just as important as core text.  The pressure to do more is felt across departments---publishing organizations need to get things done faster, simpler, while spending less. Proper content management is at the heart of this issue and the starting point to create and deliver content on time and on budget. To have a smooth workflow, content needs to be organized, structured, and managed properly.

Our report, “3  CMS Strategies and How to Get Started” introduces a few examples of how to reduce, reuse, and refine your publishing process. With examples from Nature Publishing Group, Human Kinetics, and SAGE Publications, Inc., you'll learn how you can drive production efficiences by integrating content management into your dynamic publishing environment today.

Today, stresses on the publishing industry are more accelerated than most other industries. New expenses are added to reach publishing targets and those expenses don't always add to total revenue. A content management system (CMS) helps publishers manage, store, transform, and delivery content in a sustainable and economical way. A CMS is a publisher’s factory. 

Want to learn how your organization can benefit from RSuite CMS?