RSuite 4. New Look. Proven Engine.

Today, the newest version of RSuite CMS has been announced and we can't wait for publishers to experience all the new features and tools. RSuite 4 offers a redesigned, more intuitive user experience with action-oriented contextual menus, search-based content navigation, accordion-style search results, and a user interface (UI) with intentional color design. In fact we've found that the new UI provides greater productivity among editorial and production groups while drastically reducing the learning curve. This means your team will reap the benefits of contet management faster than ever.

“With RSuite 4, we’ve coupled a great user experience with very powerful content management. The unified search and browse experience helps users contend with large volumes of content and assets. This version of RSuite will make content management approachable to a wider range of users---marketing, new product development, and sales. This will further expand the opportunity for our customers to get even more value out of their investment in content management. We continue to focus our efforts to enable publishers to implement a strategy for multi-channel products readily adaptable to future market-driven needs.”  ---Christopher Hill, vice president of product management at RSI Content Solutions.

Read more about the latest features or schedule a personal demo today.

Most publishing companies have one of those folks on staff who is intimate with the content. Someone who knows all the images that were used in a previous edition or which drug monographs couldn't fit into the printed product in time for publication. I used to be one of those people..ask me the ghost words embedded in Tabers' Cyclopedic Dictionary, 18th edition*. Even with a photographic memory, today's proliferation of content makes this skill nearly impossible. I also like to bring up the lottery scenario risk: "what happens if Jim in Production wins the lottery and all that knowledge leaves your organization?"

To effectively manage content, organizations need a handle on what they have. Publishers using a Word document system simply can't be agile in today's environment. Think about a document sitting on some file server, with all its attendant assets—images, charts, chapters and paragraphs—buried within it, and the only way to know what content is in there is for someone in your organization to remember that it’s there.

Without enriching your assets with metadata and storing them in a repository that allows you to search and find content relating to a specific topic—say, tennis elbow or the Higgs boson—you could be duplicating work recreating assets you already own, wasting time searching for those assets, and missing huge revenue opportunities to sell content granularly as a custom bundle or a focused derivative e-product.

At this year’s MarkLogic World conference, Nature Publishing Group (an RSuite CMS customer) presented an explanation of how they support what I would call ‘virtual journals’. There are very specific segments of the scientific world that would not possibly justify the creation of a full-blown journal, but when you start to realize, ‘Hey, we have this very large repository of existing journals with some articles across all of them that appeal to this market, and if we gather these articles up from all these other journals, we’ve got enough content to be of interest to this marketplace.’ Suddenly you have the option to create an online-only product (for example) with very low internal costs that is of specific interest to this niche market that previously was too small to be worth going after. It’s a long-tail concept but without applying metadata consistently and systematically this simply couldn't happen.

Metadata isn't magic and it really isn't all that complicated---you need the proper tools, workflow, and people in your organization. And once you have that set up, the fun begins---new product development, automated distribution to new licensing channels, multi-channel output.

Download our latest white paper and learn how publishers are increasing revenue with strategic content management, including metatadata enrichment. The free white paper includes two case studies from Human Kinetics Publishers and Elsevier Health Science.

Download Now

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*While I no longer work at that publishing company, I won't ever tell!

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, makers of RSuite CMS, a content management system for publishers, will host over 150 publishing executives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for the 6th annual RSuite User Conference on September 20^th.

Now in its 6^th year, the annual RSuite User Conference provides a forum for members of the global RSuite community, and those considering RSuite, to interact, learn about content management, and network with other publishing professionals. RSuite CMS manages the full life cycle of content. From content creation through multi-channel distribution of print, ebooks, and licensed content, RSuite CMS is used by some of the world's leading publishers.

“We are always thrilled to host our RSuite clients in one location to communicate upcoming product plans, provide a forum to exchange ideas, and show through both case studies and demonstrations how clients are leveraging the power of RSuite,” stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder at RSI Content Solutions.

RSI Content Solutions would also like to acknowledge the generosity of our sponsors---SPi Global, MarkLogic, Scope eKnowledge, Yuxi Pacific, and ITC InfoTech.

To learn more about the conference and register, please visit www.rsicms.com/rsuc2012.

Case Study: Automating Content Distribution at SAGE Publications

SAGE's publications include titles for scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students in the areas of business, humanities, social sciences, science, technology, and medicine. SAGE is the premier service source for societies who need to compete effectively in the online academic market but lack the publishing infrastructure.

SAGE uses RSuite CMS to push content and related assets through multiple workflow routines and delivery processes. Using RSuite CMS, SAGE is now producing more than 600 journals without addition of staff to its journal publishing technologies team. To date, SAGE has more than 700,000 articles in RSuite CMS.

Come learn the business drivers that led SAGE to select RSuite CMS and hear the astonishing gains that have been achieved over the past 5 years.

RSI Content Solutions, a leading content management system software provider, announced the addition of David Saracco as vice president, business development to expand the RSuite CMS sales team and help further develop key publishing markets. He brings more than 20 years’ experience having worked at global publishing companies as well as publishing service and technology companies. David will be based at the RSI Content Solutions headquarters in Audubon, Pennsylvania.

“David brings a wealth of publishing technology experience having held leadership positions at Elsevier Health Science in their production department as well as other publishing service and technology providers throughout his career” stated Barry Bealer, CEO and co-founder at RSI Content Solutions. “We expect David to hit the ground running and very much drive our business development efforts in key markets.”

“I am thrilled to join such an accomplished team” said David Saracco. “RSuite CMS is the best content management system for publishers on the market today and I look forward to helping RSI grow the business even more.”

The term "content management system" means different things to different people. Sometimes, when discussing CMS, I'll realize that the term "web" is omitted from the conversation but absolutely implied. A web CMS is quite different than a CMS like RSuite. So when selecting a CMS, getting ready for a CMS project, or implementing a CMS it's important to establish your definition and communicate that to your team.

Teams struggle because there is not always a shared vision of what they are undertaking and, depending on perspective, team members have a different focus in mind. Some folks focus on the need to store all content in a common repository, others think about workflow management, and still others may be fixated on content structure and delivery.

With these things in mind, I define a content management system as the processes, technologies, and people involved in acquiring, preparing, and delivering content. This definition ensures that all aspects of content management are considered and ultimately leads to a better understanding of necessary technology components. You may find that there are process changes or organizational changes that are equally important as implementing technology.

Technology is an enabling device. Technology won't manage your content any more than a filing system will file your documents. Be prepared to think hard about the processes that make up your content management system and how people interact with the content and that process. There's no point implementing a Content Management System if you don't intend to manage your content!

How do you define CMS?

It's not often that the RSuite technical team gets to travel from their caffeine-laced lairs. But last week Rob Diana, director of product engineering, and Bryan Elliott, senior UI architect, attended the Emerging Technologies Conference in Philadelphia and reported back. The conference had record attendance and was sold out. Following are some of their thoughts on the various presentations.

Self Engineering, Chad Fowler (LivingSocial)

Bryan: The ideas presented in this talk were more life-hacking than tech-hacking---but the talk was inspiring. The premise was that of treating one's life goals as engineering problems, and using those principles---measurement, decomposition, analysis, iteration, etc.---to drive the goals forward.

Rob: The talk set the tone for the conference as a whole. Digging into other areas of the sciences can help with whatever you are working on. The measurement, analysis, improvement loop was a common theme in many presentations.

Javascript, Programming style, and your brain, Douglas Crockford (Yahoo)

Bryan: I didn't know what to expect from this talk but I am familiar with Crockford and some of his work. He proceeded to outline the motivation for creating JSLint and the reasoning behind some of the most restrictive cases, making a convincing case for each---citing reduction of common error frequency as the most common reason for most subsetting rules. I came away feeling humbled and knowing that I should probably lint 3.7 to, at least, understand where the failures were likely to be.

Ember.js: Attacking Boilerplate where it lives, Yehuda Katz (SproutCore, Ruby on Rails, jQuery core)

Bryan: Ember.js is a fairly lightweight (143k) framework that solves common problems in application development---the most notable being that of end-to-end data binding. That is to say, a single update to the client-side model of a ManagedObject would update every presentational instance of that Object with no further coding. This is the end result, but this result is enabled by an object model that includes many missing language constructs in Javascript; it can be, among other things, considered a "java.util.*" for Javascript.

Just beyond HTML5: Device APIs with PhoneGap, Brian Leroux (PhoneGap)

Bryan: (Web) Device APIs are an ongoing set of independent projects going on at the W3C, Mozilla, several Cell manufacturers and service providers. They are simply ways for a browser to get access to the device's hardware in useful ways. While the projects are all starting to converge now - and standards emerging - there are significant problems yet to be solved. Most notable of these are a common security model that asks the user for permission to perform a task in a way that is both not annoying ("may coolthing.com do this, please?" every 5 seconds) and not cursory (like the install-time permissions for Android apps, resulting in a “yeah whatever you like” response from most users).

Abstracting CSS for Sustainable UI, David Kaneda (Sencha)

Bryan: CSS can quickly become a mess for even the most basic web application. Less, Sass/Scss, and Stylus are CSS preprocessors that enable simple, abstracted style rules to be constructed that produce complex CSS. I had already considered using Less with the RSuite product, and this talk convinced me.

The Evolution of CSS Layout: Through CSS 3 and Beyond, Elika J. Etemad (W3C)

Bryan: This was a brief walk down the history of CSS, the technical challenges inherent in describing the CSS level 3 2d layout spec. Fascinating and lots of political intrigue, but not much meat to report on.

Emerging Programming Languages: A Tour of the Horizon, Alex Payne (Simple Finance)

Rob: There is a ton of work going into developing new languages. Whether it is a better Java or JavaScript, or something completely different like new querying languages. Alex tried to focus on languages people mostly have not heard of, so the direct applicability is not readily apparent. However, he essentially gave an overview of the various types of languages that are available and what to use them for.

Building Real-Time Web Applications, Aaron Mulder (Chariot Solutions)

Bryan: Discussion of Web Sockets and Web workers as enablers of real-time applications in a browser. Web Sockets are especially interesting to me to enable the server to push notifications out to the browser, rather than rely on polling. Web workers are less interesting to be in the context of RSuite: while they enable serious client-side processing without interupting the interface thread, the hardest thing RSuite does is parse JSON and XML - and because webworkers have to communicate via serialized data, that's hardly a help.

The Coffeescript Edge, Trevor Burnham (Author of CoffeeScript: Accelerated Javascript Development)

Bryan: CoffeeScript is a terse language that compiles into clean Javascript. I was aware of it before, and I may seek to learn it now. Integrating it into the CMS build process and the build for our plugins would be fairly trivial, and may be useful for writing better code but I don't intend to use it in RSuite unless a compelling case can be made, and even adding the feature may just be the urge to Kitchen Sink in every cool thing.

Javascript Testing: Completing the BDD Circle in Web Development, Trevor Lalish-Menagh (Comcast, EnvJasmine)

Bryan: Unit testing of Javascript code was not something I had considered to be feasible. I had always approached the UI testing question as an end-to-end matter: use Selenium to test your final product. This talk gave an example of how to unit test Javascript at build time, and enable UI developers (i.e., me) to notice a build break before commit, rather than after; how to integrate a platform like EnvJasmine into Maven or Ant; how to run a CI such as Jenkins. Being able to TDD my Javascript will be a nice change.

Storm: Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Realtime Computation, Nathan Marz (Twitter)

Rob: Realtime data collection and processing is a hot topic right now and Storm is an open source product from Twitter. Twitter uses Storm for much of their analytics tracking, so it is required to be a distributed solution. Basically, it is like Hadoop for realtime data.

The Programming Ape, Coda Hale (Yammer)

Rob: “Software needs to fit the human mind.” The basic idea being our brains are wired to do some things better than others. Pattern matching is one thing humans do well. As an example, a graph showing some performance metric might show a spike at some points, but what is the context and is it really a problem. Baselining the information and potentially showing a colored based chart is intuitively easier for humans to process.

SQL, NoSQL or NewSQL, Chris Richardson (SpringSource)

Rob: Simple comparison of some of the NoSQL solutions (MongoDB and Cassandra) as well as NewSQL tools (VoltDB) and why they can be used instead of a traditional RDBMS. MongoDB looks very interesting and could be useful for storing internal metrics. Cassandra is widely used but querying the data just sucks. NewSQL is really an RDBMS but with distributed scaling built in. VoltDB does not look ready for production use.

Emerging Languages, Alex Payne (Simple Finance)

Rob: There is a ton of work going into developing new languages. Whether it is a better Java or JavaScript, or something completely different like new querying languages. Alex tried to focus on languages people mostly have not heard of, so the direct applicability is not readily apparent. However, he essentially gave an overview of the various types of languages that are available and what to use them for.

Behind the Scenes with Spring Batch, Josh Long (SpringSource)

Rob: Spring Batch is yet another framework for batch processing. I am not sure if it would fit with our background processing or scheduled job frameworks, but definitely something to look into. I did not stay for the whole session.

Effective use of FindBugs in large software development efforts, Bill Pugh (inventor, Skip Lists; lead, FindBugs)

Rob: I joined this session half way through. FindBugs is a static analysis tool that can find potential errors in your Java code. He talked about prioritizing issues, customizing FindBugs, sharing issue data and using annotations with FindBugs. There was some mention of plugins but I would rather not worry about the structure of a class file and how to manipulate Java bytecode.

HTML5 Apps in Java and Scala with Play, James Ward (Heroku)

Rob: Not much about HTML5, but plenty of discussion about Play, a web development framework. Essentially, Play is a hybrid of Restlet and some of the Spring Controller ideas. I had hoped to see more information about the breadth of Play but it is definitely something I will be looking into for upcoming RSuite releases. Also, this was one of many sessions to talk about Scala, a newer language built on the Java VM. I will be looking at Scala to determine if it fits into our architecture and whether it would benefit us at all. Akka is another framework, used for actors and event-driven applications, mentioned fairly often and supposedly integrates with Play.

Building Applications with Functional Domain Models, Event Sourcing and Actors, Debasish Ghosh (Author, DSLs in Action)

Rob: This was a difficult presentation to follow. Slides were text heavy. However, the content was interesting and complex. Modeling functions or behaviors in the system as opposed to modeling objects is becoming more popular in the mainstream. By modeling behaviors, event-driven applications become much simpler to implement as they have a direct relation to your domain model. This was another presentation using Scala and Akka.

Kanban, Lean and Large-Scale Agile, James Shore (Author, The Art of Agile Development)

Rob: First, large-scale agile is really just more than one team using agile processes. Kanban comes from the Toyota production systems, where a Kanban is an empty bucket or bin. The basic idea is that we are trying to no significant backlog of work products. This means, no huge pile of requirements documents, but giving a partial set of requirements to the design team. This can be extrapolated to all of the groups on a project where they are assured of having a small list of things to be working on, and all of the teams are working in parallel.

Creating a Cross Platform Experience, Doug Bellenger (Movitas)

Rob: Movitas develops mobile applications for the hospitality industry. The apps have to run on various platforms, like the web, tables, blackberry, iphone and android. They created layers of abstraction when some things needed similar functionality, but the user interface or skin needed to be different. Knowing where the abstractions should be is difficult. There was not a lot of coding detail in the presentation, mostly just some high level concepts.

We’ve heard the allure of digital revenue for more than a decade. Yet many publishers still report that print supersedes digital. And a majority of publishing organizations continue to structure people, processes, and tools to support a print-first environment. In 2012 the rules have changed. Having worked with hundreds of publishing professionals during the past 10 years, we've observed organizations that implement a strategic content management initiative and converted backlist titles into XML are the ones who are seeing digital revenue exceed print.

RSI Content Solutions and Data Conversion Laboratory are hosting a series of webinars this year that examine today’s publishing landscape. This webinar series will step back and differentiate fact from fiction. We'll present success stories that demonstrate how publishing organizations are navigating the world of XML, CMS, and ebooks to meet and exceed customer demands.

The first webinar of the series is moderated by Darrell W. Gunter, CEO, Gunter Media Group. Register for this free webinar and hear the truths about what your organization can do to recognize true digital revenue.

Webinar: Reality Check: The Truth About Digital Revenue Streams
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2012 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Moderator: Darrell W. Gunter, CEO, Gunter Media Group