Macmillan Higher Education (MHE) is widely recognized as publishers of high quality content with a strong focus toward innovation and course redesign. Macmillan Higher Education includes Bedford/St. Martin's, W. H. Freeman, Worth Publishers, Hayden McNeil, i>clicker, and Bedford, Freeman, and Worth High School. MHE recently licensed RSuite CMS by RSI Content Solutions. RSuite CMS is the leading content management system for publishers who want to manage, store, and deliver content to any channel, in any format, at any time.

RSuite CMS will integrate with a number of existing tools, such as Word and InDesign, to provide a secure centralized repository to store content, related assets, and metadata for the organization’s new publications.

“Macmillan Higher Education has the distinction of serving global markets with regional and specialized products,” stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder at RSI Content Solutions. “RSuite CMS will provide the Macmillan Higher Education publishing team with workflow tools and content discovery tools that serve their global mission to deliver precise content to specific markets.”

“We required a content management solution that honored our Word-based editorial workflow but still brought us the benefits of early XML,” explained Chad Crume, Director of Content Solutions at Macmillan Higher Education. “RSuite CMS will provide us with automated transformations to publish to multiple formats and products from a single source. Additionally, it will offer us the benefits of a central repository where staff can easily search content to find publication-ready pieces that can be reused in new products.”

To learn more about RSuite CMS, or to schedule your demo, please visit www.rsicms.com.

The term "content management system" means different things to different people. Sometimes, when discussing CMS, I'll realize that the term "web" is omitted from the conversation but absolutely implied. A web CMS is quite different than a CMS like RSuite. So when selecting a CMS, getting ready for a CMS project, or implementing a CMS it's important to establish your definition and communicate that to your team.

Teams struggle because there is not always a shared vision of what they are undertaking and, depending on perspective, team members have a different focus in mind. Some folks focus on the need to store all content in a common repository, others think about workflow management, and still others may be fixated on content structure and delivery.

With these things in mind, I define a content management system as the processes, technologies, and people involved in acquiring, preparing, and delivering content. This definition ensures that all aspects of content management are considered and ultimately leads to a better understanding of necessary technology components. You may find that there are process changes or organizational changes that are equally important as implementing technology.

Technology is an enabling device. Technology won't manage your content any more than a filing system will file your documents. Be prepared to think hard about the processes that make up your content management system and how people interact with the content and that process. There's no point implementing a Content Management System if you don't intend to manage your content!

How do you define CMS?

It's not often that the RSuite technical team gets to travel from their caffeine-laced lairs. But last week Rob Diana, director of product engineering, and Bryan Elliott, senior UI architect, attended the Emerging Technologies Conference in Philadelphia and reported back. The conference had record attendance and was sold out. Following are some of their thoughts on the various presentations.

Self Engineering, Chad Fowler (LivingSocial)

Bryan: The ideas presented in this talk were more life-hacking than tech-hacking---but the talk was inspiring. The premise was that of treating one's life goals as engineering problems, and using those principles---measurement, decomposition, analysis, iteration, etc.---to drive the goals forward.

Rob: The talk set the tone for the conference as a whole. Digging into other areas of the sciences can help with whatever you are working on. The measurement, analysis, improvement loop was a common theme in many presentations.

Javascript, Programming style, and your brain, Douglas Crockford (Yahoo)

Bryan: I didn't know what to expect from this talk but I am familiar with Crockford and some of his work. He proceeded to outline the motivation for creating JSLint and the reasoning behind some of the most restrictive cases, making a convincing case for each---citing reduction of common error frequency as the most common reason for most subsetting rules. I came away feeling humbled and knowing that I should probably lint 3.7 to, at least, understand where the failures were likely to be.

Ember.js: Attacking Boilerplate where it lives, Yehuda Katz (SproutCore, Ruby on Rails, jQuery core)

Bryan: Ember.js is a fairly lightweight (143k) framework that solves common problems in application development---the most notable being that of end-to-end data binding. That is to say, a single update to the client-side model of a ManagedObject would update every presentational instance of that Object with no further coding. This is the end result, but this result is enabled by an object model that includes many missing language constructs in Javascript; it can be, among other things, considered a "java.util.*" for Javascript.

Just beyond HTML5: Device APIs with PhoneGap, Brian Leroux (PhoneGap)

Bryan: (Web) Device APIs are an ongoing set of independent projects going on at the W3C, Mozilla, several Cell manufacturers and service providers. They are simply ways for a browser to get access to the device's hardware in useful ways. While the projects are all starting to converge now - and standards emerging - there are significant problems yet to be solved. Most notable of these are a common security model that asks the user for permission to perform a task in a way that is both not annoying ("may coolthing.com do this, please?" every 5 seconds) and not cursory (like the install-time permissions for Android apps, resulting in a “yeah whatever you like” response from most users).

Abstracting CSS for Sustainable UI, David Kaneda (Sencha)

Bryan: CSS can quickly become a mess for even the most basic web application. Less, Sass/Scss, and Stylus are CSS preprocessors that enable simple, abstracted style rules to be constructed that produce complex CSS. I had already considered using Less with the RSuite product, and this talk convinced me.

The Evolution of CSS Layout: Through CSS 3 and Beyond, Elika J. Etemad (W3C)

Bryan: This was a brief walk down the history of CSS, the technical challenges inherent in describing the CSS level 3 2d layout spec. Fascinating and lots of political intrigue, but not much meat to report on.

Emerging Programming Languages: A Tour of the Horizon, Alex Payne (Simple Finance)

Rob: There is a ton of work going into developing new languages. Whether it is a better Java or JavaScript, or something completely different like new querying languages. Alex tried to focus on languages people mostly have not heard of, so the direct applicability is not readily apparent. However, he essentially gave an overview of the various types of languages that are available and what to use them for.

Building Real-Time Web Applications, Aaron Mulder (Chariot Solutions)

Bryan: Discussion of Web Sockets and Web workers as enablers of real-time applications in a browser. Web Sockets are especially interesting to me to enable the server to push notifications out to the browser, rather than rely on polling. Web workers are less interesting to be in the context of RSuite: while they enable serious client-side processing without interupting the interface thread, the hardest thing RSuite does is parse JSON and XML - and because webworkers have to communicate via serialized data, that's hardly a help.

The Coffeescript Edge, Trevor Burnham (Author of CoffeeScript: Accelerated Javascript Development)

Bryan: CoffeeScript is a terse language that compiles into clean Javascript. I was aware of it before, and I may seek to learn it now. Integrating it into the CMS build process and the build for our plugins would be fairly trivial, and may be useful for writing better code but I don't intend to use it in RSuite unless a compelling case can be made, and even adding the feature may just be the urge to Kitchen Sink in every cool thing.

Javascript Testing: Completing the BDD Circle in Web Development, Trevor Lalish-Menagh (Comcast, EnvJasmine)

Bryan: Unit testing of Javascript code was not something I had considered to be feasible. I had always approached the UI testing question as an end-to-end matter: use Selenium to test your final product. This talk gave an example of how to unit test Javascript at build time, and enable UI developers (i.e., me) to notice a build break before commit, rather than after; how to integrate a platform like EnvJasmine into Maven or Ant; how to run a CI such as Jenkins. Being able to TDD my Javascript will be a nice change.

Storm: Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Realtime Computation, Nathan Marz (Twitter)

Rob: Realtime data collection and processing is a hot topic right now and Storm is an open source product from Twitter. Twitter uses Storm for much of their analytics tracking, so it is required to be a distributed solution. Basically, it is like Hadoop for realtime data.

The Programming Ape, Coda Hale (Yammer)

Rob: “Software needs to fit the human mind.” The basic idea being our brains are wired to do some things better than others. Pattern matching is one thing humans do well. As an example, a graph showing some performance metric might show a spike at some points, but what is the context and is it really a problem. Baselining the information and potentially showing a colored based chart is intuitively easier for humans to process.

SQL, NoSQL or NewSQL, Chris Richardson (SpringSource)

Rob: Simple comparison of some of the NoSQL solutions (MongoDB and Cassandra) as well as NewSQL tools (VoltDB) and why they can be used instead of a traditional RDBMS. MongoDB looks very interesting and could be useful for storing internal metrics. Cassandra is widely used but querying the data just sucks. NewSQL is really an RDBMS but with distributed scaling built in. VoltDB does not look ready for production use.

Emerging Languages, Alex Payne (Simple Finance)

Rob: There is a ton of work going into developing new languages. Whether it is a better Java or JavaScript, or something completely different like new querying languages. Alex tried to focus on languages people mostly have not heard of, so the direct applicability is not readily apparent. However, he essentially gave an overview of the various types of languages that are available and what to use them for.

Behind the Scenes with Spring Batch, Josh Long (SpringSource)

Rob: Spring Batch is yet another framework for batch processing. I am not sure if it would fit with our background processing or scheduled job frameworks, but definitely something to look into. I did not stay for the whole session.

Effective use of FindBugs in large software development efforts, Bill Pugh (inventor, Skip Lists; lead, FindBugs)

Rob: I joined this session half way through. FindBugs is a static analysis tool that can find potential errors in your Java code. He talked about prioritizing issues, customizing FindBugs, sharing issue data and using annotations with FindBugs. There was some mention of plugins but I would rather not worry about the structure of a class file and how to manipulate Java bytecode.

HTML5 Apps in Java and Scala with Play, James Ward (Heroku)

Rob: Not much about HTML5, but plenty of discussion about Play, a web development framework. Essentially, Play is a hybrid of Restlet and some of the Spring Controller ideas. I had hoped to see more information about the breadth of Play but it is definitely something I will be looking into for upcoming RSuite releases. Also, this was one of many sessions to talk about Scala, a newer language built on the Java VM. I will be looking at Scala to determine if it fits into our architecture and whether it would benefit us at all. Akka is another framework, used for actors and event-driven applications, mentioned fairly often and supposedly integrates with Play.

Building Applications with Functional Domain Models, Event Sourcing and Actors, Debasish Ghosh (Author, DSLs in Action)

Rob: This was a difficult presentation to follow. Slides were text heavy. However, the content was interesting and complex. Modeling functions or behaviors in the system as opposed to modeling objects is becoming more popular in the mainstream. By modeling behaviors, event-driven applications become much simpler to implement as they have a direct relation to your domain model. This was another presentation using Scala and Akka.

Kanban, Lean and Large-Scale Agile, James Shore (Author, The Art of Agile Development)

Rob: First, large-scale agile is really just more than one team using agile processes. Kanban comes from the Toyota production systems, where a Kanban is an empty bucket or bin. The basic idea is that we are trying to no significant backlog of work products. This means, no huge pile of requirements documents, but giving a partial set of requirements to the design team. This can be extrapolated to all of the groups on a project where they are assured of having a small list of things to be working on, and all of the teams are working in parallel.

Creating a Cross Platform Experience, Doug Bellenger (Movitas)

Rob: Movitas develops mobile applications for the hospitality industry. The apps have to run on various platforms, like the web, tables, blackberry, iphone and android. They created layers of abstraction when some things needed similar functionality, but the user interface or skin needed to be different. Knowing where the abstractions should be is difficult. There was not a lot of coding detail in the presentation, mostly just some high level concepts.

Webinar Series on the Business Case for Digital Content

RSI Content Solutions and Data Conversion Laboratory are kicking off a 6-part webinar series next week that will address the many myths associated with the world of XML, CMS, and eBooks.

The six part webinar series called ‘Reality Check’ features experts in content management and publishing who lead the series and detail how to manage information and transform content to work within eBooks, browsers, and mobile platforms.

Following are the webinars in this series. You can read more here.

• April 26 | Truth of Digital Revenue Streams
  Panelist: Darrell W. Gunter, CEO, Gunter Media Group
  Having worked with hundreds of publishing professionals during the past 10 years, we've observed organizations that implement a strategic content management initiative and converted backlist titles into XML are the ones who are seeing digital revenue exceed print. Join this free webinar and hear the truths about what your organization can do recognize true digital revenue.
• May 9 | Truth About Automation
  For publishers and media companies, automating editorial and production tasks is necessary to keep pace with customer consumption as well as the competition. While many knowledge workers view automation as a threat to job security and an impediment to editorial quality, this webinar illustrates the truths around automating common editorial and production tasks. Indeed automation can free staff to focus on better content development.
• June 9 | Truth About ROI
  Panelist: Christopher Hill, VP Product Development, RSI Content Solutions
  Publishers understand that content management and data conversion is a pivotal piece in today's publishing environment. Yet budgeting for these initiatives can quickly scale to the point where executives question why they should stray from the status quo. In this free webinar, DCL and RSI Content Solutions, will lead a panel of publishing professionals who will discuss how they made their business case and received enthusiastic executive buy-in for content management and data conversion in their organizations.
• August 29 | Truth About DIY CMS and Conversion
  Panelist: Pat Sabosik, Elm City Consulting
  While using internal resources to develop a homegrown content management tool or convert your backlist to XML sounds like a cost-effective approach, the reality is that 82% or IT projects fail. This webinar focuses on the real concerns you need to address so that your organization can make educated decisions based on truths and not what simply seems will work.
• September 19 | Truth About Quality
  Panelists: Mike Edson and John Corkery, The DETI Group
  The premise of all publishing organizations is to provide quality content in a format that customers desire. Ask any copy editor about house style and you can anticipate a lengthy and thoughtful response. Authors too expect nothing but perfection when transforming intellectual property into a print or digital product. So how do successful publishing organizations blend automation into workflows without sacrificing quality?
• November 19 | The Truth From the Publishers' Perspective
  Panelists: Barry Bealer, CEO, RSI Content Solutions and Mark Gross, CEO, Data Conversion Laboratory
  Throughout the year, DCL and RSI Content Solutions have polled a large number of publishing and media executives to understand where they are in terms of strategic XML content management. We’ve asked tough questions around true revenue numbers, quality-control issues, content automation, and ROI. In this webinar series join CEOs Barry Bealer, RSI Content Solutions and Mark Gross, Data Conversion Laboratory who share not only the results of our 10-month polling but also their views on what the metrics mean.

No matter the allure and depth of digital products in today's world, publishers still need to print well-designed pages. At the last RSuite User Conference, we asked attendees what feature they found most useful. The ease of content transformations ranked high on the list of responses. Check out the following description about how RSuite CMS can automate content transformation to InDesign, HTML, EPUB, and PDF.

Want to learn how publishers are using RSuite to automate XML transformation to InDesign? Download our latest white paper: DITA For Publishers: How Successful Publishers Deliver Content

 

RSuite CMS Will Provide LexisNexis Pacific with the Tools to Efficiently Manage its Vast Collection of XML

Audubon, Pa.—March 27, 2012—LexisNexis Pacific provides world-class content and leading-edge technology designed specifically for professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, accounting, and academic markets. LexisNexis Pacific recently licensed RSuite CMS by RSI Content Solutions. RSuite CMS is the leading content management system for publishers who want to manage, store, and deliver content to any channel, in any format, at any time.

RSuite CMS will replace several legacy internal editorial systems in use at LexisNexis Pacific and provide a consolidated and editorial system to manage its vast collection of XML, DTDs, metadata, and other content.

“LexisNexis Pacific has a wealth of great content and products,” stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder at RSI Content Solutions. “RSuite CMS will provide the LexisNexis Pacific team with workflow tools and content discovery tools that stay true to their mission of putting the right information into the right hands and giving people the power to change the world.”

“We required a content management solution that leveraged our investment in MarkLogic Server,” explained Andrew Squire, project manager at LexisNexis Pacific. “RSuite CMS is not only deployed on top of MarkLogic Server but it has the added workflow functionality that will enable us to centralise and normalise our content across all product chains.”

Last week's O'Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) event in New York had a theme of Change/Forward/Fast.  Based on the keynote presentations, I think the publishing industry heard loud and clear that they need to change....and now!  However, the other underlying theme for the conference was also articulated by the hosts as "we are confused."  Needless to say, these two themes are in conflict with one another.  How can you change if you are confused?  Confusion generally leads to paralysis and that is what I have seen with publishers over the past few years. 

While publishers heard success stories about building audiences before publishing a title and on-going interactions with that audience, what was suspiciously absent was how publishers are delivering content to the various devices.  Maybe it was the wrong venue, but I suspect many of the success stories started once content was in a sellable format rather than how easily the content was created and published in their content management system.

I also suspect that many in the audience were from the business side of publishing and the TOC event makes them pause and think about their business.  TOC did not, for me anyway, tackle the more difficult challanges of multi-channel publishing using home grown or antiquated technology.  Sadly, that is what many publishers are wrestling with today.  Once they are able to get content in ebook format, they can do really cool stuff with it.  Until publishers address the content management side of the equation, I don't see how they will efficiently meet time-to-market demands.  The reality is that most ebooks today are created by publishing services vendors because they are converting various flavors of legacy files.  Most publishers today are not multi-channel publishing but sticking with the print paradigm and then, through various publishing services vendors, creating ebooks for distribution.  Publishers who are stuck with this publishing process need to "change/forward/fast."

I will say that overall the TOC conference appears to be rejuvinated.  Two years ago the conference seemed to have run its course, but I believe it is back to being an event that publishers will want to attend to learn how the newbies are doing it without the "burden" of print.  Pushing the envelope is what TOC is best at and I hope they continue to push the industry's thinking along the way.

Come visit DocZone Book Publisher at stand 31 at Digital Book World Conference and Expo 2012 and learn how book and trade publishers are simultaneously publishing to print and ebook, while saving time and off-shore production costs.

Publishers are struggling with strategies to make the big switch from print-centric to digital-first book publishing. DocZone Book Publisher is the only cloud-based book publishing technology platform that can publish your digital content to print and digital formats, in any language, with the click of a button.

DocZone Book Publisher is an end-to-end publishing solution that provides:

• online editorial tools
• workflow
• language translation
• automated output to print-ready PDF, HTML, and eBook formats.

Digital Book World Conference is the only conference that offers trade publishers hard data on the state of the book business as well as actionable, proven strategies for taking immediate advantage of opportunities as they develop in today’s publishing industry.

Schedule your appointment today and see how DocZone Book Publisher can help you economically create and deliver digital content to the next generation.

Really Strategies was recently recognized as a winner of the 2012 Philadelphia SmartCEO/ Clifton Gunderson Future 50 award. The award recognizes the area’s 50 fastest-growing companies based on employee and revenue growth over the past 3 years. The impressive group leads companies that boast $10 billion in collective revenues and manage more than 55,000 employees in the Greater Philadelphia area.

In addition to the group of Future 50 winners, SmartCEO recognizes Emerging Growth and Blue Chip winners. Emerging Growth companies generate $1 to $5 million in revenue, but have experienced significant revenue and employee growth over the last 3 years. Blue Chip companies generate more than $500 million in revenue, have demonstrated steady growth, and have a reputation for providing high-quality management, products and services.

“While the past 3 years have been economically tough all over, Really Strategies has consistently maintained that publishers can increase profit growth through better content management. Our award-winning software helps publishers accelerate revenue, which in turn strengthens our company and commitment to our product line."
- Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder, Really Strategies, Inc.

“Comprehensive growth is applause-worthy in healthy economic times. This year’s group of winners has ignored the recession and created innovative new avenues for growth. The business community is healthier and stronger due to their efforts.”
- Craig Burris, president and co-founder, SmartCEO magazine

Implementing XML-Early Workflow Allows Publisher to Respond to Market Needs

Human Kinetics leads the world in providing information related to physical activity. That information takes many forms: textbooks and their ancillaries, consumer books and journals, online courses, software, and audiovisual products. Human Kinetics recently licensed RSuite CMS.

RSuite CMS will deliver several business benefits to Human Kinetics, including the ability to

1. reuse content components across its many publishing pipelines
2. integrate information across business systems
3. streamline publishing workflows

A Word-based editorial workflow in RSuite will transform Human Kinetics’ content into XML and enable further transformations into ePub, mobi, HTML, and PDF formats.

"Human Kinetics selected RSuite CMS as the central repository to store content, related assets, and metadata. RSuite will provide improved search and discovery of content for reuse and provide the underlying structure to automate the creation of both print and digital products.”
- Christopher Hill, VP of product management at Really Strategies, Inc.

“Finding an easy way to implement an early-XML workflow allows us to achieve a single-source multi-channel publishing workflow. Our organization’s digital publishing strategy depends on having tools in place that allow us to be nimble and respond to market demands.”
- Holly Gilly, vice president of product development at Human Kinetics.

Want to learn how RSuite can transform your publishing organization? Click the button below: