At the 2012 RSuite User Conference, Lisa Bos, CTO at RSI Content Solutions, will present "How Metadata Management is the Key Component of Findability:"

The origin of most online customer experiences is search---it’s a natural and productive first step. In publishing, making content findable and visible means managing metadata. If you don’t have metadata on your content, you won’t find it efficiently.  This presentation details how metadata management is the foundation to new product development, content discovery and re-use, and content enrichment. Lisa references customer use cases who harness RSuite’s metadata management tools as the key to unlocking content from siloed departments and repositories.

RSuite is a CMS for publishers that manages the entire content life cycle.
The RSuite User Conference is a forum for publishing and media professionals interested in learning how strategic content management and an XML-based workflow help deliver content in any format, to any channel, at any time.
You are invited to join hundreds of publishing professionals for this 1-day event.

...........................................................................

Thanks to the 2012 sponsors!
             

Save the date: September 20, 2012

Registration is now open for the 6th annual RSuite User Conference that takes place in Philadelphia, PA at the Hub Cira Centre.

RSuite CMS is a content management system used by the world's leading publishers to manage content, assets, and metadata throughout its entire life cycle.

You are invited to join hundreds of publishing professionals and hear the latest case studies of how publishers are using RSuite CMS as part of a strategic content management initiative.

Yesterday afternoon, June 26, a select group of publishing professionals gathered at the Dolby 88 Screening Room in New York City to preview the next iteration of RSuite CMS.

The software was prescreened to a packed audience of publishing professionals and a global online audience joined via a live streaming broadcast.

Christopher Hill, vice president of product management at RSI Content Solutions, highlighted key features of the 4.0 release and detailed how these changes are based on feedback received from  users over the years.

 

The flexible user interface offers a new user experience that is better organized with contextual menus that detail what choices a user has based on the current state.

 

All the fundamental content management capabilities remain that ensure publishers' and media organizations' content and assets are preserved to ensure long-term survival in one central and secure location. But a large and obvious improvement in RSuite 4.0 is the digital asset management (DAM) functionality that offers better visibility of digital assets that will aid content discovery and reuse.

 

 

 

 

The software screening was the first time an audience of C-level publishing professionals viewed the new user interface, which is spearheaded by Bryan Elliott, user interface architect at RSI Content Solutions. Attendees were invited to speak with members of the RSuite development team and CTO, Lisa Bos, following the software demonstration during a 2-hour networking reception.

 

 

 

 

 

The post-screening reception was packed with publishing and media executives. The main regret was that our global audience who watched the demonstration via a live stream online could not imbibe in the libations and food.

Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder at RSI Content Solutions, welcomed all and served as master of ceremonies for the event. Before the software demonstration commenced, he rolled out the changes of the impending release with a video highlighting the work he has directed over the past 12 years as well as the changes witnessed in the publishing, software, and media industries.

Enjoy:

If you were at the event and have any feedback for how we can improve, we welcome your suggestions!

Next Tuesday, June 26th, RSI Content Solutions will host an early screening of its next software release, RSuite CMS 4.0. This latest iteration of content management for publishers offers a new approach to creating, managing, and delivering content anywhere, any time, in any format.

There's a lot to see both from a user perspective as well as a developer perspective. The new fluent user interface benefits the user experience with contextual menus that detail what choices a user has based on current state.

A networking reception will follow this screening. If you are a publishing executive in the New York City area and would like to attend, please contact me for details.

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.

From Wednesday, May 30th to Friday, June 1st, RSuite CMS will be exhibiting at Society for Scholarly Publishing's 34th Annual Meeting in Arlington, Virginia at booth 213.

The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), founded in 1978, is a nonprofit organization formed to promote and advance communication among all sectors of the scholarly publication community through networking, information dissemination, and facilitation of new developments in the field.

Schedule your appointment with RSI today at the 34th SSP Annual Meeting and see how publishers have done the following things with RSuite CMS:

• Secure their content assets in one central repository
• Search, find, and re-use content
• Automate workflows
• Improved editorial and production processes
• Pioneer your digital publishing strategy

 

Tweet @RSICMS from #SSP.

We are often asked by publishers what they can do to get a content management initiative headed in the right direction. Following are 7 tips that all publishers can follow to ensure a successful CMS project.

1. Data conversion | Typesetting service providers. Define what role a conversion house or a typesetter will have in the project and communicate that to in-house staff and the service provider. Get them involved early and detail the business requirements to them as well.

2. Pilot content. Identify and select representative publications that you would like to use as test content. It's useful to have a range of content types from your publishing organization (eg, 1 journal, 1 textbook, 1 instructor's manual, etc). But keep the number of actual documents small so you can work out the data details. You don't want to spend too much time just massaging data and not implementing core features.

3. Business rules. Define the essential business rules that the system needs to reflect. What are the high-level business process workflows? Keep the business process as simple as possible yet still document useful tracking and management. This usually means reflecting the key development, review, and approval steps. Don't necessarily model each little thing each actor does in the process. Shoot for the 30,000-foot view.  Typical RSuite customers require

• permissions
• data validation
• approvals

4. Metadata and search. Pinpoint the key discreet pieces of metadata that need to be captured to enable searching, reporting, and general management of content objects. Think about how you'll want to be able to search and find things from various users' perspectives. Also consider what you'll need to report on from a management and tracking aspect. Typical metadata fields include

• ISBNs
• DOIs
• author names
• classifying metadata
• controlled vocabularies
• approval statuses

5. Key deliveries. Determine what the system needs to deliver and export in order to demonstrate success.  Some key deliveries RSuite customers require include

• input to page layout
• XML for aggregation
• HTML for a Web site
• EPUB

6. System integration. Consider what systems the CMS will need to interact with now and in the future. Create a thorough list of systems that your editorial and production staff use. Obvious systems include page layout systems such as Typefi or InDesign. What about peer-review systems? Will your CMS deliver content to your web site? 

7. User roles. Specify all types of users of the system and define their roles. Will users interact with the CMS on a daily basis? What are the logical job roles? Will you need to provide for "casual" users of the system?

The main idea is to get your staff thinking about content management and CMS before you embark on an actual CMS implementation. Define, document, and communicate to internal staff, decision makers, stakeholders, and service providers. Have any other tips to add? How do you measure the success of your CMS implementation?

Compromise Will Set You Free: Lessons Learned From RSuite CMS Implementations

RSI Content Solutions' Lisa Bos will speak at the 2012 MarkLogic World Conference next week in Washington DC. Lisa serves as the CTO and EVP of publishing solutions with primary responsibility for the RSuite CMS product vision and engineering. Lisa is a recognized industry professional and an expert in the design of XML-based content management systems.

Her presentation at MarkLogic World, “Compromise Will Set You Free,” presents lessons learned during RSuite CMS implementations about simplifying projects. Lisa explains

“Our customers invest significant time, energy, and money to collect their assets into a central content management system. They do so with vital strategic goals in mind—single-source publishing, content discovery, and rapid product evolution. But many sabotage their efforts by resisting compromises intended to reduce the complexity and inconsistency of their systems, workflow processes, and content. Instead, they get bogged down with painful specifications and conversions—from Word to XML, from XML to InDesign, and so on—and they are distracted from the goals that are truly key to their success."

Lisa will share ideas and customer experiences that will inspire publishers, media companies, and content-centric organizations to make some tough decisions that result in simpler, more successful projects and that make them wonder why they resisted compromise in the first place.

The 2012 MarkLogic World Conference is May 1 to 3 in Washington, DC. It is the premier event for organizations looking to collaborate with and learn from leading industry experts, partners, customers, and MarkLogic employees on how you can turn “Big Data” into “Big Ideas.”

Eliot Kimber, senior solutions architect at RSI Content Solutions, spends most of his days helping publishers implement RSuite CMS, proselytizing DITA For Publishers, testing XML-to-EPUB3 conversions, and tending to his brood of hens and rooster. In his spare time he wrote a book: DITA For Practitioners, Volume 1, Architecture and Technology published by XML Press. On behalf of all his co-workers, congratulations Eliot!

Eliot has spent the past 25 years entrenched in generalized markup languages. He was one of the founding members of the XML Working Group, a co-editor of the HyTime standard (with Charles Goldfarb and Steve Newcomb), a long-time member of the XSL-FO working group, and most recently, a founding member of the DITA Technical Committee.
The goal of this book is to provide a detailed look at DITA aimed at engineers, tools builders, and content strategists – anyone who designs, implements, or supports DITA-based systems – as well as experienced DITA authors who want a deeper understanding of the technology they are using.

 

Click here to see all articles in this series.

Welcome to the first installment in a multi-part series where I look at how well-intentioned IT departments may be causing more problems than they prevent in their approach to deploying web browsers in their organization.

This installment provides some of the context that lead me to explore this topic.

The Web Browser: Mission Critical Infrastructure
RSI Content Solutions fields two product lines reliant on the web browser as client software: RSuite CMS and DocZone. Managing products that operate in the browser presents challenges when trying to balance functionality against the need to support a wide range of browsers and their versions. Browser developers have been under increasing pressure to provide rapid updates to remain competitive and deal with ongoing security concerns. Users have become more reliant on a range of browser-based tools and applications. Almost every category of traditional desktop applications now have browser-based alternatives available. It can become a real challenge to find that magical browser release that supports the range of platforms and technologies in use today.

I've worked as a vendor in the browser-based application space for more than five years. In that time, I have encountered a range of responses from IT departments dealing with browser deployments. Some exert little or no control, often providing guidance but ultimately letting the users decide what browser to employ and when to upgrade it. Some IT departments have locked things down so tight they only give their users access to a single approved browser. While this may be sufficient for a fairly narrow use case over some finite period of time, the inflexibility is often stifling their ability to take advantage of the latest tools and technologies.

It's ironic that the mission critical role of the web browser has lead to defensive policies in many organizations in seeming ignorance of the rich variety of available tools. In the interest of ensuring a "perfect" technology deployment, it is tempting to lock the organization to a functional set of tools. Just don't blink lest your heavenly solution suddenly show its shortcomings and leaves you mired down.

Over the next several days I will be inviting you to consider your approach to supporting the web browser in your organization. In the next installment, we will look at the various approaches browser developers have adopted regarding updates and support. I'll also tell you about two strategies that have seduced many an IT department astray only to find they're worse off than before. 

Installment number two discusses how browsers are updated today and why acting like a B-movie scientest or wishing on a monkey's paw is not the right response.