Really Strategies Blog

Chris Palma from Google Books To Keynote RSuite User Conference

Chris Palma is Strategic Partner Development Manager for Google, where he is responsible for Google Books partnerships in the Western U.S., India, Australia, and New Zealand. The Google Books Partner Program now has over 30,000 publisher partners world-wide, representing over 2 million full-text books discoverable from the Google index in over 70 international domains.

At the RSuite User Conference, Mr. Palma will share his insights and vision of Google Books Partner Program and Google Editions, detailing what publishers need to understand now and plan for the future and how this impacts content management at publishing organizations of all sizes.

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[Learn more about the RSuite User Conference]

Principles matter

Interesting article on this topic by Eliot, here.

Such discussions might seem esoteric, but they absolutely are not. The success of a software project (like a CMS implementation) is ultimately determined by thousands of individual choices made every day by team members - developers, PMs, analysts, and so on. Many of these choices are based on design principles with which business managers might strongly disagree but of which they are often unaware. Occasionally one of these decisions has inordinate impact - a complexity of design that results in a complexity of implementation, testing, and maintenance that is radically inappropriate relative to the value of the feature in question.

Managers who aren't deeply engaged with their teams tend to over-simplify such discussions by saying things like, "So-and-so engineer always makes things more complicated than they need to be." It's true some engineers are hard to manage (and that some managers start almost every new project with unrealistic expectations, and that some users won't give up complicated requirements). But I believe this difference in philosophy is also in play, and a PM or other manager would do well to understand and talk about how a team's varying philosophies impact its members' choices, and where change might be in order.

Two new webinars announced - Pay-Per-Page Publishing Service & Semantic Enrichment

Start > Automate > Create!
Pay-Per-Page^TM push-button publishing
September 22, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST

Are offshore conversion services unreliable?   Can you deliver content to the iPad without additional time and conversion costs? Want to re-use your content without paying your vendor to do it?

Join us for this free webinar and learn how some of the industry’s leading publishers are using Really Strategies, Pay-Per-Page Publishing Service to automate workflow from authoring through production. 

Starting with Word manuscripts and importing into the XML-based Pay-Per-Page Publishing System, we’ll see how publishers like Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group and the National Book Network are using this service to achieve

• Push-button publishing to print, iPad, and the web
• A streamlined and automated production workflow
• Multi-output formats from a single source
• Auto-indexing from tagged entries
• And more...

“It’s not rocket science!”
Applying CMS and semantic enrichment to transform book publishing
September 29, 2010 | 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST

As published in Gilbane’s recent Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation report, “ebooks are real, Virginia.” But it’s not simply ebooks that publishers must consider to transform book publishing processes, it’s the entire digital publishing landscape and the tools, processes, and people that support this dynamic landscape.  No matter the output (there are many) and no matter the reading device (there are many of those too), publishers require the proper ground work to achieve digital production and publication. Content management and semantic enrichment are two of the most important places for publishers to lay the foundation.

In this free webinar, Jabin White, Director of Strategic Content at Wolters Kluwer Health, Professional & Education, shares his approach to building the proper infrastructure to achieve a digital workflow and transform book publishing to provide readers the content they want, when they need it, and in whatever format on whatever device. Hint: “It’s not rocket science.”

Additional panelists include Mike Sherlock, Program Manager at Really Strategies, Inc. who provides insights on best practices and approach and Jake Zarnegar from Silverchair who will discuss leveraging semantically-enriched content in product and application development.

Looking for acceptance

When implementing a new or improved content management system, I find that many teams don't have time or the staff to perform what is known as "user acceptance testing (UAT)". But let's face it: end users are going to either accept or reject the system components eventually, and it's much less painful to get through this process in a controlled manner during the project than during production.

During project testing, participants expect to find bugs and issues. The development team is still available to fix the issues. The team can take disruptions in stride, since issues only disrupt testing, rather than production schedules. Failures are part of the normal process.

After the system is released into the wild, system end users who were not involved in the project start working and expectations are high: "This system has been released, so I’m assuming that everything works", they're thinking. Newly discovered issues are upsetting and disruptive to production schedules. The project developers may have been reassigned to other work already, and a team may need to wait for fixes, which exacerbates the problem.

So how do we balance the realities of resource constraints with the obvious need to test?

Let’s look at it in terms of quality. A generally accepted definition of quality is that something meets specifications ("is it what we ordered?") and is fit for use ("is it fast and intuitive?").

The UAT process runs in a tightly controlled environment and excels in proving methodically that all specifications have been met. It helps in answering the general questions "how will we know we're done?" and "how will we know we're successful?" This is ideal from a systems vendor or IT department perspective; because it allows a neat line to be drawn between the project and handoff. The project is nicely wrapped and packaged for delivery. For the end users, the disadvantage here is that everything rests on how well requirements were defined in the first place. It’s very easy to miss something that can cause trouble later on.

A team can also release a system as a beta version or as a pilot. Instead of a few people running dummy content through test scenarios, a sub-set of actual system users can move through an actual workflow using actual content. This approach helps the group move forward on their production schedules, while maintaining a relatively controlled environment. And, because it's a smaller set of users, the group's expectations can be set so that issues don't freak them out. Since the team is operating in a live environment, they can identify critical issues that may have been missed during the requirements gathering stage. A live environment is ideal for proving fitness for use.

However, it may not provide a very thorough quality check against the stated requirements, since there may be exceptions in the process that won't occur during the beta period, such as an end-of-quarter rollup, report, or content delivery. The pilot approach works only if the end to end process is sufficiently short enough to get through within project timeline and cost constraints. 

Ideally, we’ll use both approaches. At a minimum, it’s smart to spend some time with at least a couple of team members to take the system for a "test drive" assuming multiple roles, to ensure that all specifications have been met and the pilot period starts smoothly. Then following that with a pilot enables the end users to determine fitness for use.

I'm always looking for the right balance. What's your experience?

DocZone selected as finalist for ECM Connection's ACE Award

ECM Connection revealed the finalists for the ACE Awards and DocZone, our SaaS XML content management solution made the list.

This year, ECM Connection wanted to honor the true ambassadors — the vendors and their solution providers that have gone above and beyond the call of duty to help their clients achieve the best results possible from their ECM implementations.

Winners will be announced in the September issue of ECM Connection.

Publishing, Analytics, and the Cloud

Let me start this post with some disclosure. Outsell Insights is a paid subscription service that generally provides excellent information. However, a recent article is spreading FUD without really looking at the problem, because the summarization of various articles and blog posts does not tell the whole story.

The main point of the article is based on a blog post by Tom Chavez regarding the difficult position publishers are in with the change in the advertising industry. The Outsell article talks more about analytics as a whole, but the two concepts are related. How do publishers (or anyone dependent on advertising in the past) meet the challenges of the online industry? Initially, these challenges are focused on the wealth of data and how to manage it. Tom Chavez talks about one of the biggest problems:

Publishers, meanwhile, are left with dated platforms architected to manage ads, not data. Existing publisher systems simply don’t scale to accommodate the avalanche of audience data...

I would agree that the publishing industry will need to figure something out, but it is not nearly as difficult as both articles make it sound. The first question everyone should ask is "should we build a system that can help us manage the data?". This is more a question of scale, because the basic functionality in these systems is not terribly hard to implement. On the other hand, scaling this functionality is more of a black art. If your existing systems, and IT knowledge, are focused on managing advertising, should you try to branch into web analytics? Again, this can be seen as a question of scale because web analytics produces data at a very rapid pace. But, do you really need to be that concerned with scale?

First, the sites that require "100 million impressions per day" are few and far between. As an example, Compete.com measures CNN as having just over 175 million visits per month in the US, and Alexa.com has CNN getting over 3 pageviews per user. This means that CNN, one of the top sites in the world, has almost 600 million pageviews per month, or about 20 million pageviews per day.

I am not sure that many traditional publishers would have that type of traffic problem. So, that type of scale is not needed. However, web analytics data is still generated at a much higher rate than most other systems. What if your current IT staff does not know how to manage that type of data? The simple (and very popular) answer is, look to the clouds. There are several (at least 25) free analytics vendors, like Google Analytics, that are readily available and easy to implement though some have traffic limitations that most sites can live with. If you insist on storing your own analytics data, that list also has some self-hosted platforms as well. If you delve into ecommerce and the various bits of tracking desired in that industry, then there are at least a dozen commercial vendors that you can implement with only a small amount of pain, but may require a significant amount of money. Google Analytics and some of the other free providers also have some free ecommerce tracking if you are under their tracking limits.

Because of the availability and price of the cloud-based offerings, there is typically no reason for a company to worry about analytics in terms of the amount of data that gets generated, only that you include the tracking code which is normally just a few lines of JavaScript. I would not call this a fork in the road as much as the publishing industry needing to ride the same train as everyone else. For publishers making the move online with an ecommerce strategy, there are plenty of consultants that can help them with the analytics implementation, email marketing campaigns and assorted other online marketing strategies, all within the span of one quarter. The only real problem could be cost if you implement one of the commercial analytics platforms.

Many of the cloud-based analytics systems also provide the ability to export data as well. So, if you wanted to use the analytics data with some internal data, you have many possibilities as well. In reality, there is no reason to start tracking some basic web analytics right now. This does not mean you know what the data means. In some cases, it may be easier to hire an analyst that is experienced with web analytics data. Overall, there is no need to fear web analytics. There are several excellent books and plenty of information on the internet regarding what the analytics data means and how to plan your web analytics strategy.

Advertising is a completely different problem, and not one that fits into a short blog post.

RSuite User Conference registration is open

Registration is now open for the RSuite User Conference this fall.

We'll kick off the conference with a publishers' reception on October 19th from 6 to 8 pm followed by a full day of exciting conference events.

Click here for more information and to register.

Save the date > > October 19 & 20 > > RSuite User Conference 2010

The 2010 RSuite User Conference is scheduled for October 19 and 20 at The Hub Cira Centre in Philadelphia, PA.

More details to come...

The Oxford University Press Licenses RSuite

  We are delighted to add the Oxford University Press to the RSuite customer list.

Oxford University Press (OUP) is using RSuite to transform its publishing operations. RSuite offers OUP the tools and the facility to automatically ingest and store content from its authors and other content suppliers. RSuite also allows the delivery of OUP content both manually and automatically to multiple targets in various formats. Examples of content delivery range from XML documents that are converted to Word and sent via email for editorial updates to batch delivery of XML and media files based on user selection and other criteria for web site updates.

[Full press release here.]

A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation

The Gilbane Group's web-based survey of book publishing professionals has just gone live.

The survey is one of the research mechanisms for Gilbane's upcoming study: A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing.

The survey takes about 10-to-15 minutes to complete and seeks to gain a clearer picture of ebook and related digital publishing efforts underway among the full spectrum of book publishers.

All participants will have full access to the full-length study, which will be published in June.

This survey is for high- and mid-level book publishing professionals.