Meet RSuite CMS at London Book Fair

Stop by the RSuite CMS booth, V535 in the Technology Section of the Digital Zone at London Book Fair anytime between April 8-10th.

Schedule an appointment with our digital publishing specialists to discover how RSuite:

• Allows for 50% Reduction in labor and production costs

• 100% automation of content processing and distribution

• 2x increase in production throughput

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.”

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.

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.

I recently read a post by CMS Critic's Holly Write which made me think. Today's content needs to be managed by more than just a straw man content management system. Content comes in all shapes and sizes because no one works from just one program or machine. Whether its an Adobe InDesign file or a Word file, the CMS that your content lives in needs to be more robust than ever. It needs to handle authoring, editing, production, distribution, and of course storage.

Until now, this type of content management system was nearly unheard of. Aside from it being flat-out non-existent, if it did exist, it would be clunky, ugly, and no one who needed to work in it would be able do so. It would simply be too hard for someone without a technical background to operate. Holly Write from CMS Critic stated, "One of the biggest reasons that companies invest in content management systems is to allow their less technical users to manage content." When a publisher explores the possibility of purchasing a content management system, among other things, they look for:

• ease of use
• minimal learning curve
• a beautiful user interface

Interested in seeing how RSuite CMS manages content for publishers? Schedule a demo now.

Barry Bealer, CEO/Co-founder of RSI Content Solutions, makers of RSuite CMS, will moderate the STM panel “Lessons For Trade Publishers From STM Publishers” at NAPCO’s Business Conference and Expo on Tuesday, September 24 at 11:05 AM EDT. This major event brings publishers dozens of sessions specifically geared toward book and magazine publishing executives.

This session will engage a panel of STM publishing executives to discuss the benefits of XML-early workflows, cultural changes necessary to adopt new technology, and barriers to change. Trade publishers will gain insight from decades of XML experience from the STM publishing community. Attendees will learn the main areas all publishers need to address to take full advantage of digital opportunities, how to determine where best to implement XML into your workflow, and gain ideas for successfully unifying content management and digital asset management.

RSuite CMS is a content management system for publishers to create, manage, transform, and deliver a digital future. Once again, we are excited to be attending the annual Frankfurt Book Fair at Stand 8.0 S31 in the USA Pavillion.

If you are responsible for managing content and digital assets, publishing workflows and transformations, or editorial and production processes, we would love to chat with you about our solution and some of our recent customer success stories.

Contact us to schedule an appointment.