With success comes growth and with growth complexity. Our client, a major global publishing organisation, decided to address complexity by standardising on effective publishing tools and efficient processes. The means to make it happen was an enterprise wide content management system and pervasive use of XML.

The solution involved a single distributed architecture enabling the capture of all content locally while making it globally accessible.

Authoring and layout

The project selected Adobe InCopy for content authoring, Adobe InDesign for layout tasks and Documentum as the central content repository. Based on a third party plug-in for the Adobe tools, Aptus implemented an editorial workflow with an interface to Documentum. This enabled users to collaborate on content, using the features in Documentum such as check-in/check-out and automatic versioning.

The repository was configured to keep track of instances of content modified for different channels. Thus, repurposed content would always be related to the original piece of content allowing for a structured overview.

Appropriate security measures were put in place to enable external access and participation in the authoring process. Workflows for freelance authoring and co-authoring were defined and the solution would track emails to extract attachments as new versions.

During  layout, content was imported as dynamic links thus reflecting changes to the underlying information.

Digital assets

The central repository was structured to store images as well as text and XML content. More than one million images were made available to be selected via automatically generated thumbnails. Conversion between different image formats on-the-fly was made possible. An early benefit of the central image repository was the elimination of courier charges.

Images were rendered automatically in low resolution for the layout process, only to be replaced with full resolution images for proofs and production runs. This reduced the load on the infrastructure while speeding up the layout process.

The solution allowed for all digital assets to be tagged with information about ownership and copyright. Business rules were implemented to enforce the management of intellectual property rights.

Use of XML

All output from Adobe InCopy was converted to the client's XML schema and stored in the repository. Documents and images were tagged with taxonomy information to enable searching and syndication.

A special challenge was the loose-leaf subscriptions to updates of the client's large journals, each comprising of multiple volumes. The content was broken down into XML segments representing paragraphs, sections, chapters and volumes. This XML chunking meant that a chunk requiring updating could be searched for and retrieved in seconds. Once updated, the modified chunk would be flagged as changed and, according to pre-defined business rules, despatched for publication.

Together, the use of XML and embedded business rules enabled a doubling in the journal update frequency.

Syndication

Linking every piece of content to the taxonomy meant that content subscriptions could be catered for with search filters. Supplying information to syndicatees was automated using a web service but less advanced customers could be catered for using facilities to export to a file system.