• Pros and cons of transformation projects 
• Lessons learned from executing cross-organization and cross-functional projects 
• Best practices for meeting aggressive timelines

Publishers today are under increasing pressure to meet shorter time to market demands, build more products through content reuse, and automate the entire lifecycle of content development. HarperCollins has embarked on a transformation project to meet their long-term publishing strategy.

Mike McGinniss, Senior Vice President, Publishing Services from HarperCollins Publishers and Denis Wilson, Editor-in-Chief of Book Business will discuss:

• Pros and cons of transformation projects
• Lessons learned from executing cross-organization and cross-functional projects
• Best practices for meeting aggressive timelines

Whether you are just starting a digital publishing transformation project or plan on embarking on a project, you won’t want to miss attending this webinar.

RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, was recognized last week by SmartCEO Magazine with a Voltage Award at a ceremony held on Thursday, May 29, 2014 at The Ballroom at the Ben.  The event was attended by over 200 Philadelphia technology executives.  RSuite CMS was a finalist in the Emerging Innovator category. 

“We are very excited to be recognized with a Voltage Award,”  stated Barry Bealer, President/CEO, and Co-founder at RSI Content Solutions. “RSuite CMS has helped many of the worlds leading publishers completely transform their business and we believe our product is truly innovative."

RSuite CMS will exhibit at booth #11 at the Association for Educational Publishers’ Content in Context Conference (CIC) from June 2-4 in Washington, D.C. CIC aims to present a range of informative and practical sessions that address all issues relating to the development and distribution of high-quality learning resources.

“RSuite CMS provides an ideal foundation for the educational publishing community," stated Dave Saracco, vice president of business development at RSuite CMS.

RSuite CMS is a searchable repository where educational publishers store all content and assets, implement an XML publishing workflow, manage the ever increasing amount of learning objects and, of course, tag metadata. RSuite CMS is used by Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, Human Kinetics, and others.

Interested in learning how RSuite CMS can manage your educational content? Schedule a meeting with an RSuite CMS specialist at the AEP's CIC event by clicking here.

New Capabilities Unveiled at RSuite User Conference Today

RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, announced today at their annual user conference in Philadelphia the availability of new management dashboard features.  The new features include custom report and search widgets, drag and drop widget building, and flexible configuration and display.  These features are now available to all RSuite 4 clients.

“The vision behind the new management dashboard was to provide a way for individual users to monitor a host of actionable items in RSuite,”  explained Christopher Hill, Vice President of Product Management at RSI Content Solutions.

MarkLogic, longtime partner of RSI, began using RSuite as their content management system within their marketing department in 2014. Two weeks ago at MarkLogic World San Francisco, Christopher Hill, RSI's V.P. Product Management and Diane Burley, MarkLogic's Chief Content Strategiest spoke about how RSuite CMS and MarkLogic are the perfect match for data and search.

Christopher and Diane spoke specifically about how RSuite is both a Content Management System (CMS) and a Digial Asset Management System (DAMS). In today's world of rich content, you have to be able to manage both documents and digital assets. Christopher and Diane also spoke about how RSuite leverages MarkLogic by putting search front and center to the user. Listen in on their brief conversation in the video below and if you like what you hear, request a demo of RSuite CMS!

Software applications present some of the greatest design flexibility as it tends to lack many of the conventional constraints present in the physical world. In my last blog entry I wrote about some unintended ways even a good design can go astray. Similarly, customer requests have the same potential for creating problems with a product.

The customer is always right?

The first time I built an application was when I was moonlighting on database application development. In this case, the customer had space in their office where I worked. I could engage one of the users of the system any time and have them provide immediate, direct input as I went along. We rolled out the application and it proved nearly unusable. Because much of the design evolved organically focused on the details, the overall system proved unusable.

A lesson on context

I ended up discarding much of the work we had done and starting over. This time I now understood what the customer was trying to do. I also had seen firsthand how building features without a strong sense of context could create a system that was very difficult to use. I started to work in the off hours when the office was empty. Then every few days engaged directly with the customer. This ultimately proved successful.

Lessons learned

My early programming experience in many ways mirrors that of the software industry. New methodologies have been developed to develop applications that respond to a customer requirements in a productive manner

The redesign of RSuite 4 provided the opportunity for us to also revise our product development methodology. We now use the Agile methodology with shorter design cycles and more frequent updates so that product development efforts are validated quickly.

Agile allows us to be more responsive to customers. Instead of developing for months or years before putting development in the hands of users, AGILE dictates shorter development cycles usually measured in weeks. Priorities can be shifted rapidly if needed. Unexpected issues that might derail the timeline in a long development cycle are now incorporated into the normal product engineering routine.

Community input

Before beginning the redesign we launched a new community support site for our customers. This site handles the traditional support issues and made it much easier for our customers and support agents to track and resolve issues. It also serves as a "database" that the product management and engineering teams can reference when prioritizing new development.

A corporate memory of customer issues provides a historical backdrop to better understand areas that challenge users. Active, unresolved issues can also be evaluated immediately. At times we will identify an issue that we are in a position to address quickly. Already we have made UI changes that may not have been formally brought to the team's attention. Potential product improvements may be discovered whenever a customer contacts support to use a feature.

Community tools

The support community also offers customers community forums. Documentation as well as formal and informal information about RSuite can be found in our forums. Some forums are entirely made up of official information from us. Other forums are dedicated for customers to make and comment on suggestions, request advice, or offer their feedback to other customers or us. There are forums for both end users as well as integrators and developers. Having this communication available is a valuable source of direct and indirect feedback for us. 

Implementation reviews

Implementations of RSuite are also an important input into the product. We review implementations, conduct customer visits, and also host an annual conference so that we can maintain engagement with our customers and understand how they are using the product. Regular meetings occur between product management & engineering and the project managers. RSuite imposes no theoretical limitation on how the product can be extended. When we look at how solutions were implemented, we sometimes identify things that will help improve the efficiency of future projects. We can also verify our best practices are being followed and determine areas for improving communication.

Responsibly responsive

Customer feedback is an important consideration in keeping RSuite's evolution responsive to our customers' needs. Users of software may have suggestions about a specific product modification or addition. Sometimes these suggestions can be implemented as requested. To be sure it is important that we also understand the motivation and requirements behind the request. We must then consider the best strategy to address that need. Sometimes that may not exactly match the initial request. But it will likely lead to a superior result if it is contextualized with a broader product vision.

I had the pleasure to attend MarkLogic World 2014 last week. This event is always interesting and this year was no exception. I particularly found David Gorbet's day 2 keynote one highlight of the event.

Is your data center data-centered?

During the talk David discussed how too many data centers are focused on applications instead of data. Lacking a central data strategy, many organizations deploy applications as isolated silos of information targeting a single purpose use. With each new application, maintenance of the infrastructure as well as the quality of each data store is an increasing challenge. Tying data together in a meaningful way requires great effort when repositories have been designed solely around a specific application.  

MarkLogic is working to provide organizations with a way to create a true data center, with the ability to not only store data in a variety of ways like XML, JSON and binary documents. Even their licensing, training and technical announcements were presented as ways to improve MarkLogic's ability to support a data-centered data center.  

What about your content?

MarkLogic's vision for data closely aligns with RSuite's vision for content. With a canonical representation of all available content, an RSuite system can support a wide range of strategic content initiatives as well as serve as a content center for a variety of other applications. New opportunities can be pursued more quickly even as resources and risk are reduced - opportunities including new print or digital presentations, mobile apps, mash-ups, content syndication, expanding markets and new technologies for content distribution.  

RSuite brings content to your data center  

RSuite's MarkLogic-powered content management capabilities can play a key strategic role in making your content part of a data-centered data center. There has emerged a proliferation of options for creating content silos: file shares, cloud storage, NAS storage, or the myriad of other content stores offered by various tools and technologies. RSuite offers capabilities helping you bring your content and its management into a data-centered data center.  

With the ability to not extend your content with additional layered metadata and present subsets of metadata in forms targeting a range of applications and users, new requirements can be addressed without new silos. A foundation for data and content is an important tool to enable your organization to respond with agility to new challenges and opportunities in publishing.   

Maximizing the value of your content  

It's exciting to see how organizations who have invested in such strategic initiatives are recouping their investments not only through greater efficiency but also their ability to pursue new opportunities and explore ideas without undue risk. It's rewarding to have the opportunity through my work with RSuite to see organizations move to maximize the value of their content.

RSuite CMS a leading content management solution and TEMIS, a market leader for Semantic Content Enrichment solutions, announced today at MarkLogic World 2014 a technology partnership that brings to market a semantically-enabled content management platform for Publishers, Governments and Corporations.

RSuite CMS provides an intuitive user interface that minimizes actions required to execute complex searches across an entire set of content. The solution can globally apply metadata, dynamically organize massive amounts of documents into collections, package and distribute content to licensing partners, and enables customers to meet their multi-channel publishing goals.

You're invited to see how The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), based in London, is using RSuite to manage their books, journals, standards content, and ONIX metadata.

Please join us at 11 AM EDT on Thursday, April 3rd for a joint webinar.

RSuite CMS is the leading content management system for publishers and media companies and has been the publishing solution for The IET since 2012. IET is a world leading professional organisation sharing and advancing knowledge to promote science, engineering and technology across the world. IET has more than 150,000 members worldwide in 127 countries.

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!