RSuite CMS is an enterprise content management system for publishers and is used by some of the world's largest publishers such as Elsevier Health Sciences, LexisNexis Pacific, and Macmillan Higher Education to create, store, manage, transform, and deliver content.

"I look forward to this year's PSP Annual Conference and think the theme of building collaboration, innovation, and sustainability is particularly important in today's publishing environment," stated Jeff Wood, vice president of business development at RSI Content Solutions. "I welcome the opportunity to speak with any attendees about how content management is a key component to securing value in the professional publishing industry."

For more than a decade, RSI Content Solutions (makers of RSuite CMS) has been a trusted content management services and solution provider to the publishing industry. Learn how organizations like Oxford University Press, Elsevier Health Science, LexisNexis Pacific, and many others use RSuite CMS and see the latest features of the software at www.rsicms.com.

John Corkery and Michael Edson from DETI Group will be the panelists for our February 20 webinar entitled, Truth of Digital Content Transformation and Conversion. This webinar will be an hour long and will begin at 1:00pm.

Revenue from digital products is set to soar in 2013. A recent study from Pew Internet & American Life Project states that one-third of the US population 16 and older now owns an e-reader. Ownership of tablets and e-reading devices has grown from 18% in late 2011 to 33% in late 2012. For the publishing industry this means a sustainable strategy to support digital and print products is the only option. It’s imperative for publishers to support a workflow that automates content transformation to digital formats for all titles moving forward and develop consistent plans for conversion projects to better monetize backlist titles.

Join publishing consultants Mike Edson and John Corkery from DETI Group in this free webinar. Mike and John will present strategies they’ve helped publishers implement to ensure that an epub strategy is an ongoing success that meets customers’ expectations while increasing publishers’ bottom line. They will separate fact from fiction and answer all your questions around epub, ebook formats, content conversion, XML, and more.

RSuite CMS is the software of choice for many of the world’s leading publishers. Publishing organizations of all sizes use RSuite CMS to search, store, manage, and transform content into digital products.

“According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project one-third of the US population 16 and older now owns an e-reader,” stated Marianne Calilhanna, director of marketing at RSI Content Solutions. “In fact, the revenue from digital products are truly set to soar in 2013 with the number of tablet or e-book reading devices having grown from 18% in late 2011 to 33% in late 2012. This means that publishers need a long-term strategy to produce e-books for both the frontlist as well as the backlist.”

A content management system is a publisher’s factory. The factory must be able to meet new revenue opportunities quickly and affordably. It must be more efficient in operations, especially for delivery to digital and print, and the factory must protect assets.

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RSI Content Solutions, a content management solutions provider to the publishing industry, has been named to the EContent 100 list for the 2nd year in a row. Now in its 12th year, this list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry is hand selected by EContent Magazine’s judges who are experts in the digital content industry. Additional companies on the list include Amazon, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, O'Reilly Media, and others.

“Submissions for this year's EContent 100 list were better than ever, and consequently our judges had their work cut out for them,” stated Theresa Cramer, editor, EContent.  “What truly makes a company successful in the digital world? That's the question we set out to answer with this year's EContent 100 list.”

RSI provides content management software to traditional publishers, media companies, and technical documentation teams. Its enterprise software solution, RSuite CMS, serves many global publishers and has become a trusted content management system.  RSuite CMS has proven to reduce the time to market for new product development by more than 50%, deliver packages of content in a fully automated fashion to licensees, and reduce content conversion budgets through multi-channel publishing.

 “It brings us great joy to be honored along with the other distinguished companies who are shaping the industry,” explained Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder of RSI Content Solutions. “Our staff puts great effort and dedication to support publishers and media companies as they navigate the digital landscape and discover ways to not only survive but also thrive during this exciting time.”

To learn more about RSI and how organizations like Oxford University Press, Elsevier Health Science, LexisNexis Pacific, and many others use RSuite CMS and see the latest features of the software, please visit www.rsicms.com.

Audible Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ:AMZN),  was founded in 1995 by Donald Katz. The company invented and commercialized the first digital audio player in 1997, 4 years before the introduction of the iPod. One of the few startups to survive the dot-com bust, Audible was designed to be a destination and a daily literary service for serious readers who wish they could read more—and for the huge population of would-be serious readers who don’t have the time to read what they want or need to read.

The company introduced one of the first digital audio players in 1997. The following year it published a Web site from which audio files in its proprietary .aa format could be downloaded. Today, Audible is the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio, entertainment, information, and educational programming. Audible is the exclusive provider of audiobooks to all Apple's iTunes Music Stores worldwide.

How to Increase Revenue?

In 2007, Audible saw an opportunity to improve sales if it could easily identify and share its products in the Internet space and provide open APIs to allow partners to easily integrate with Audible. A solid metadata foundation was the critical component to achieve these goals.

Content Management to Improve Workflow, Metadata, Content Distribution

RSuite CMS was selected to manage metadata used to create Audible's online product catalog. RSuite's metadata management and customizable user interfaces and APIs offered Audible the tools needed to effectively manage content and support workflow functionality. Audible completed a successful proof-of-concept project with RSuite CMS in which several use cases were identified. During this stage many business rules were also documented that were applicable to improving Audible's business opportunities. Audible worked with RSuite's developers to configure and deploy RSuite CMS after installation.

RSuite CMS became the framework upon which Audible crafted solutions to meet all its requirements: workflow, business rules validation, content aggregation and delivery, publisher feeds, audit trail, and product prototyping. In 6 months, Audible configured and implemented RSuite CMS to become both the database of record for its metadata content and its workflow tool that enables seamless transfer of content from publisher feeds to web site-ready files.

 "RSuite has become a very critical system very fast!" 

--Art Zegarek, Director of Data Architecture, Audible, Inc.

How Can Content Management Help Your Organization?

RSuite CMS is used to by the world's leading publishers to create, store, manage, and deliver content. Contact us to learn how publishers are using RSuite CMS to deliver content to licensing channels, automate ebook production, streamline common editorial and production tasks, and much more.

Educational publisher Triumph Learning knew that digital products would be the ticket to offering great products to its customers as well as being in a position to compete against some of the larger educational publishers in the industry. But to bring digital products to market, it was understood that step one was centralizing content.

Chief business development officer, Robert Methven, shares how in just 1 year Triumph Learning has been able to centralize, inventory, and reuse more than 25 years' of assets to create "Readiness for the Common Core." 

We now have a whole new business line that may generate tens of millions of dollars for us based off of being able to leverage our assets that we put into CMS that we now converted and delivered into a new product offering. A year ago we didn’t even have that idea on our product roadmap.

Get started on content management

1. Centralize your content

2. Inventory and understand your assets

3. Develop new digital products quickly

4. Refine digital products based on customer feedback

The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) is the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and development professionals. ASTD’s members come from more than 100 countries and connect locally in more than 125 U.S. chapters and with more than 20 international partners. Members work in thousands of organizations of all sizes, in government, as independent consultants, and suppliers.

On an annual basis, ASTD publishes approximately 20 books, 150 monthly newsletters, a monthly and a quarterly magazine as well as 5 research reports in addition to numerous conferences. While a member organization, ASTD is also a niche market publisher. ASTD needed to find a better way to publish and provide content to its members.

ASTD hired RSI Content Solutions to provide both a content management platform as well as a digital publishing strategy that would bring content to the market in a timely manner. RSuite CMS provided an enterprise metadata framework that allowed ASTD end users the ability to find content based on standardized metadata fields as opposed to using text search applications as they did in the past.

Business Goal:
• Find a better way to publish and provide content to its members.

Results:
• Ability to build new businesses beyond just publishing.
• Can now apply metadata tools to tag documents in a highly contextualized manner.
• Tagged more than 2,000 chapters of books and 2,000 magazine articles drastically reducing production.

"RSuite provides to me and to my organization, a really strong core. That means I can really, really quickly iterate and make very fast changes that are going to drive the value within my organization"

--Anthony Allen, Director of Digital Media, American Society for Training & Development

A couple years ago there was an article from wsj.com under the Cubical Culture section that struck a chord with me: “Management to IT: We don’t like you either.” As evidenced by the title, the inherent conflict between IT and management is never ending. And even though the article was published 5 years ago, we still see the conflict arise in many publishing and media organizations.

Management today at many companies expect more out of IT organizations than in previous years. It's no longer acceptable to request an 18- to 24-month project life cycle and not show a return on investment quickly. If IT continues to do these types of things, they will render themselves useless and out of a job. The old days of “we can build it better than any product on the market” is long gone.

For publishers I have seen a shift over the past 5 years related to this build-vs-buy mindset. If your IT organization is still touting that they can do it better, cheaper, faster by building a critical system (e.g., CMS) from scratch… run, run away as fast as you can. Given the wealth of tool sets available and the openness of many products on the market, why would an organization ever take the build-it-from-scratch approach? I'm genuinely interested in this and welcome your dialogue in the comments section.

I’m not biased when I make these statements. I’ve seen a renewed interest by publishers to license a product and show a return on investment quickly. This has been our mantra since day one with RSuite CMS. Our goal was to make a highly configurable CMS that can manage any content and be operational in a short period of time (under 12 weeks) to meet core requirements. Yes, there will be some organizations that require 12-month projects to migrate from one system to the next, but overall the trend has been implementing a new system, even for larger projects, in a much shorter time frame. The only way IT will be able to handle this shortened timeline is to license a software product that meets 70% of their core requirements pretty much out of the box such as RSuite CMS.

I can certainly understand why IT organizations at publishers want to build their own CMS. First, it’s fun to build software. Second, it gives more of a feeling of accomplishment than integrating third-party software. Finally, a programmer can have a job for life just making endless changes to the software (ok, that was a cheap shot).

Management today needs to understand that IT does have value and IT needs to understand that management has the right to ask questions. Reducing the stress between these organizations is critical to publishers making the right technology choices and implementing new systems on time and within budget.

Let us show you how RSuite CMS satifies management's desire to demonstrate ROI on CMS investment and IT's desire to play with cool technology.

RSI Content Solutions has been recognized by the Philadelphia Business Journal as a best place to work in the Philadelphia region. This is the 8^th time the company has received this recognition from its staff and the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The Philadelphia Business Journal’s Best Place to Work program receives hundreds of entries each year and only ten companies in each of five categories are recognized.  Each company is evaluated on overall benefits and creative employee programs. Results from an extensive employee survey are calculated to determine recognition and ranking.

“Co-founder Lisa Bos and I made a commitment to our employees and our clients when we started this company,” stated Barry Bealer, president and CEO at RSI Content Solutions.  “We wanted to offer a stimulating and rewarding work environment that would parlay into outstanding publishing solution software for our customers. Recognition like this leads me to believe we are on the right path.”

The Philadelphia Business Journal's research partner, Wichita, Kansas-based Quantum Market Research tabulated the results of thousands of online surveys completed by employees to establish the rank order. Common themes among top companies focused on work-life balance; respect and caring for employees; recognition of accomplishments; feeling empowered; good teamwork and commitment to community.

To learn more about RSI Content Solutions, please visit www.rsicms.com.