Really Strategies, Inc., provider of RSuite, a content management system for publishers, will host 150 publishing executives at the 5th Annual RSuite User Conference to be held October 25th 2011 at the Chemical Heritage Conference Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The RSuite User Conference is a forum for publishers who want to learn how content management is the key to building a successful digital publishing strategy. Attendees will hear case studies from some of the world's leading publishers, learning what works and what doesn't work when developing and implementing a CMS.

“We are very excited to be hosting our 5th User Conference and have presentations planned from some of the industry’s leading publishers and analysts, including Bill Trippe from Outsell and Evan Schnittman from Bloomsbury Publishing,” stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of Really Strategies.

The RSuite User Conference acknowledges the generous support of its sponsors Data Conversion Laboratory, ITC InfoTech, MarkLogic Corporation, Scope eKnowledge Center, and YuxiPacific.

Want to be a part of this greatly anticipated event?

At Really Strategies we are fortunate to work with a variety of publishers: journal, book, scholarly, trade, technical. Obviously each publisher has a different approach for navigating the digital publishing landscape.

What we often see are publishers who are creating loads of wonderful digital content yet their digital supply chains are heavily tied to the print medium. According to the American Association of Publishers,

“e-books have grown from 0.6% of the total Trade market share in 2008 to 6.4% in 2010. While that represents a small amount in the total market for formats, it translates to 1274.1% in publisher net sales revenue year-over-year with total net revenue for 2010 at $878 Million.”

This means content supply chains need to change in order to properly prepare for a digitally focused content marketplace. Download our latest whitepaper to understand best practices for a long-term digital publishing strategy.

Situation:  Publishers want a content management system to be flexible and adaptable at a low cost.

Reality:  Unlike desktop applications, enterprise content management systems change and sometimes pretty often.  Publishers are often surprised by the amount of changes a CMS requires after the initial implementation.  That is because a CMS changes to meet the way your organization wants to work, not force you down a path such as Microsoft Word.  Yes, Word can be customized, but a CMS can truly evolve as your organization evolves its processes and workflow.  In the pure definition of a system, it is one that never stops changing.  You can read between the lines here and either ignore the fact that a CMS will require a budget to make changes as your organization changes or you can budget the appropriate time and money to keep the system current and reflect user needs.  Systems don’t change by themselves and the flexibility you get with a CMS comes at a cost.  If you want a system that is inexpensive and inflexible, that is fine, but be ready for unhappy users.

Best Practice:  In our experience publishers who budgeted between 25% and 50% of the original project implementation costs for changes after the initial launch were able to respond to user change requests in a timely manner.   

Every publisher manages projects and budgets differently.  As a CMS vendor we understand that.  It is imperative for publishers to understand though that a system will require changes after it goes live and this is perfectly natural as a system is used by the staff.  Those publishers who budget for and plan out a period of time after CMS launch to complete user change requests will ultimately have higher user adoption across the organization.  Higher user adoption equals higher organizational efficiency. 

What are your experiences with system changes post-launch?

BSI recently licensed RSuite CMS (content management system) by Really Strategies, Inc. to manage its complex and extensive content and metadata assets and related editorial and production processes. BSI British Standards is the UK's National Standards Body. “BSI will take advantage of RSuite’s sophisticated workflow functionality to manage content in a range of formats and optimize its editorial and production processes,” stated Rob Diana,  director of product engineering at Really Strategies, Inc.

Click here to read more about BSI's selection of RSuite.

Book Expo America is coming up in just a few weeks and we’re so excited to be part of it. RSuite Cloud will be representing Really Strategies, Inc.

At Book Expo America, Book publishers can see RSuite Cloud and understand how it is helping some of the leading publishers:

• Increase revenues with faster time-to-market
• Produce pages in minutes not weeks
• Simultaneously output to print, web, ipad, and more
• Automatically Convert Word files to XML
• Translate and publish to more than 200 languages

People from all  around the world within the publishing industry will be there and we want to see you between May 24^th and May 26^th. We’ll be in the IDPF Digital Zone at Kiosk #2309. Schedule your time with us today!

Tweet about us at #BookExpo using the #RSuiteCloud hashtag.

Really Strategies is pleased to add The American Institute of Physics to its growing list of STM and journal publishers who are using RSuite to manage content.

"The American Institute of Physics selected RSuite to manage and store its vast amount of content, including metadata, full-text XML, PDFs, images, and multimedia assets,” stated Evan Owens, AIP’s Chief Information Officer, Publishing. “We see RSuite as a key technology that will allow us to implement industrial strength content management, including version control and automated content distribution, to best support our digital publishing program."

Click here to read the official press release.

Address the top 3 digital publishing challenges with XML. Most content producers no longer rely on a single channel for content distribution. To efficiently and competitively expand digital offerings, publishers are looking to re-use existing content to create new products. Whether creating new content “mash-ups” out of existing content repositories or ensuring consistency between publications that share information, content re-use is a powerful capability allowing content to achieve its maximum value. XML provides an anchor for coping with a diverse and expanding number of channels.

Download our latest white paper, "Make XML a Solution Instead of a Challenge."

I ran across an interesting blog post by Stephen Arnold who is a longtime industry analyst and consultant that spells out the hidden costs of a SharePoint implementation.  The post is here.  While free always looks better than paying for software, I think Stephen hits the spot with his assessment.  A free software framework such as SharePoint is great if you plan to keep requirements very simplistic.  As we all know from our own experiences with implementing content management, that is easier said than done.  If you have more complex requirements, maybe a packaged solution such as RSuite makes sense.  Your company's approach to projects, culture to build versus buy, and several other factors need to be considered before selecting a technology and embarking on a content management project.  Whatever approach you take, just be cognizant of hidden costs as Arnold pointed out.  Free software does not always mean it will be cheap to implement and maintain in the long run.

We recently hosted a great webinar titled, "The Digital Integration: Your Content Anywhere, In Any Format, Anytime." We learned that a large number of publishers are still struggling with how XML fits into their organization.

While we view XML as the primordial soup in the publishing world, the reality is that a large number of publishing organizations do not have an XML early (or XML at all) workflow.

We can help.

Schedule a meeting with us at the nation’s largest event for book and magazine publishing executives: Publishing Business Conference and Expo and let us show you how some of the leading publishers are using RSuite and RSuite Cloud to stay ahead of the digital revolution.

Hint: XML is involved but you don't have to tell any of your authors or editors!

This Salon interview with Geoffrey Nunberg about Google Books' unfortunate use of metadata is fascinating as an illustration of why a publisher implementing a CMS should focus as much (maybe more) on metadata as on anything else. Bad metadata leads to all sorts of problems, and unfortunately it's a self-reinforcing problem - bad leads to worse as users repeat mistakes, act on inaccurate search results, and ultimately come to distrust the system. By "focus on metadata" I mean publishers implementing CMS should take care in:

• modeling metadata
• the creation of controlled lists and taxonomies
• the design of automated and manual tools for assigning metadata
• the development of automated validation tools to ensure quality
• the development of search that leverages metadata
• user interface design to make metadata easily visible in various contexts (browse, edit, search results, ...) to encourage consistent usage and metadata correction/entry whenever it's convenient to the user

Here's Nunberg's original article in the Chronicle of Higher Education from August 2009 and a related blog post. This topic is obviously fascinating at face value as well - as it relates to the usefulness of Google Books for different usages by different users with different expectations. The comments to Nunberg's article/blog posts illustrate effectively that smart, well-intentioned people strongly disagree on the value of metadata or of particular types of metadata as compared to the benefits of "simply" making content available through fulltext search. This basic disagreement often shows up during design projects for RSuite CMS implementation. Leaders within a publisher need to reach agreement about which metadata will truly be of value internally and to readers and about which types of usage are most important to support. They also need to determine the cost/benefit ratio (metadata is often relatively expensive to do right). If they can't reach such agreements, then it's also unlikely they will consistently and usefully build and leverage tools for metadata in the first place - thus leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the fulltext-instead-of-metadata advocates.

Of course, there's also a role here for the technology vendor like Really Strategies - we need to make it as easy as possible for publishers to take the steps on the bulleted list at the top of this post, so that the human effort required to make metadata really valuable is also really efficient.