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Whether you publish commercially or internally, it is the commissioning of the content and how it is presented for consumption that really matters. Everything in between should be systematic and efficient and therefore lean and cost effective.
Content and presentation are the responsibility of publishers. The focus of this article is on the system in between.
The core elements of that system are as follows:
- Authoring, editing and approval
- Repository
- Publication assembly
- Online delivery
- Access control and security
- Subscription management
Most readers of this newsletter will have all or most of these elements. How many, though, have them fully integrated into a smoothly running system that is also flexible enough to be modified to meet changing requirements without needing a major overhaul?
If you have, then you have only to consider further tuning to squeeze maximum efficiencies from your system. Do any elements need updating? Is the integration fully effective?
If your processes are heavily reliant on human intervention to keep them moving then you might like to consider how that intervention might be minimised in pursuit of cost and time savings.
Catalysts have designed a number of bespoke integrated publishing systems for clients. Recounting some of the issues may be useful for you if you are considering going down a similar route.
For most the authoring tools have been a personal choice for both internal and external authors and therefore we have 'designed in' those choices. In some cases retraining authors onto, for example, XML authoring tools, has been seen as a step too far.
- In some cases we have developed scripts to handle the data transformations that have been required to get the author's output into deliverable formats.
- A document management system repository has featured in all cases with each implementation being tailored to suit. (We have focused on deploying Knowledge Tree's open source DMS). In some cases authors submit documents directly. In others publisher staff intervention has been specified.
- The repository used offers good workflow capabilities for the editing, approval, versioning, alerting and 'publish' stages. They have rarely been used. Old habits die hard it seems.
- We have designed a 'publication assembly' application to sit between the DMS based repository and the online delivery application (FAST's NXT in most cases though it does not have to be).
This allows a publisher to compile a 'Makefile' for every publication comprising all its component files in the right order. Files used in multiple publications are held only once in the repository. Once complete any publication can be 'published', on a key stroke, via an automatic 'build' process to a staging server for final approval before being sent to 'live'.
Catalysts is ready to help, advise on or implement any such integrated publishing systems. |
