by Maxwell Hoffmann, Desktop Publishing, Localization, Globalization and Sales Training Veteran

Really, how long can anyone really read long chapters on that tiny screen? The answer is “for hours, and hours and hours”

A few weeks ago I got a Tweet that sent me straight to downloads-ville. A “free” Kindle Reader app for my Blackberry! As a used-book store addicted Baby Boomer who color codes all of his hard copy books with highlighter pens, might I be the perfect guinea pig for this latest content delivery platform? Could an old school guy like me get used to reading literature or technical manuals in chunks smaller than 3×5 cards?

The answer surprised even me.

So I downloaded Kindle reader for both Windows laptop and Blackberry. I was skeptical at first. Really, how long can anyone really read long chapters on that tiny screen? The answer is “for hours, and hours and hours”. Why? Kindle on Blackberry has crisp, readable screen display (with adjustable fonts), bookmarks are created with ease, navigation is fast, and everything from eBook downloads to synching with other platforms is quick and pain-free. As spell out below, I could consume a lot of virtual pages, swiftly. By the end of my first day of I thought the only limitation to this form of digital content consumption was battery power on my Blackberry. Thank heavens for those laptop draining USB cables.

And guess what kids, Amazon’s Kindle Store starts you out in thriftsville with tons of books for FREE, ranging from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf to Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson (later serialized on PBS as “Mapp and Lucia”).

On Blackberry’s tiny screen I read the first 5 chapters in less than 90 minutes. I found myself hitting “P” a lot to reread the previous page again.

On my second day I bit the bullet and actually shelled out more than $9 for a “real” book, The Museum of Innocence by my favorite living author, Orhan Pamuk. If you’ve never been lucky enough to visit Istanbul, reading Pamuk’s sensual text is as close as you’ll ever get. On Blackberry’s tiny screen I read the first 5 chapters in less than 90 minutes. It could have been faster if it were a guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. (Hey, where’s Ann Rockley’s DITA 101 on my Kindle list? Stay tuned.) Some or Pamuk’s passages were so beautiful that I found myself hitting “P” a lot to reread the previous page again.

[FYI – Istanbul by Pamuk will give you great insights into Turkish national character, a good thing to have as Turkey emerges as a global and economic power throughout the rest of this century. Read The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman, which I read in the paperback version purchased at my favorite brick and mortar bookstore. I work in the translation industry, and Turkish is quickly becoming the most popular “new” language for many of our clients, especially in Life Sciences.]

But, I digress. Soon, I hungered for more, and found myself frustrated with the current limitations of most eBooks. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and YouTube have put most of us in the habit of sharing “samples” of content with others. And PDF files reviewed in Acrobat have put us in the habit of making marginal comments in digital ways. Kindle (and most other eBooks) don’t have copy/paste functionality, there is no highlighter pen, and no way to make a simple annotation. And, if there is, it’s not easy to find and use this functionality, which is a problem. All I wanted to do was extract legally correct, small samples to upload somewhere (isn’t there a “YouRead” community yet?) … and I wanted to mark content in multiple ways. Shucks, I just wanted to “color code” text to find favorite passages based on different needs.

To gain wide acceptance, eBooks and eBook Readers will need to allow us to do things we're accustomed to doing with traditional books, but in more meaningful, interactive and community-based ways.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting eBook Readers to double as a word processor, (or to become the next copy/paste Wikipedia to let college students whip out quickee term papers). I suspect that most users will also miss the ability to put their fingerprints on content like we do nearly everywhere else.

Ironically, the ability to “personalize” content is one of the things that I love the most about real, physical books. We can dog ear (upper or lower corner to code importance); we can underline, circle, or highlight sections of text we want to reference later. (In college I was nicknamed “nerdanada” for the 4 colors of highlighter pens constantly sprouting from my polyester shirt pockets). And of course, real books allow us to make marginal notes. I consider these physical highlights and doodles our “finger prints” on physical content.

My Kindle Read / eBooks Wish List

Digital versions of these old paper-based mark up methods (based on XML, or more specifically, DITA attributes, or course) should create persistent and personal “finger prints” on our personal Kindle or eBook copies that could make the world a better place in several ways:

• We could quickly locate content that mattered to us personally, based on different criteria.
• Amazon (or other providers: think Apple) could track our individual buying habits on an even more granular level. Instead of recommending books based on previously purchased titles, the vendor can use community driven social networks to recommend further eBooks for purchased based on the sections of the book that we related to the most.
• For the first time in history, publishers and authors would know exactly what portions of content turned readers on (or off) the most. (Today the most we can do is post a comment on Amazon, or elsewhere, and rarely do we cite individual pages, paragraphs or passages).
• Imagine the power of having a constant consumer survey occurring, page by digital page, all driven with uploadable “highlighter pen” passages! And imagine the apps that could interpret smart content and metadata embedded by our highlight selections, to graphically display consumer response to specific portions of content! I visualize a sort of daily Dow Jones line chart mapped to the book which has longer lines for chapters or DITA topics that got the most “hits” or reader embedded fingerprints.
  • FYI – although Kindle reader offers a “book mark” feature, it is really only useful for general navigation.
• The ability to track the changing hot spots of readers via “fingerprints” over time would also give sociologists and historians the ability to impact a book’s changing impact over several generations. Would it be great to see how graphical representation of reader response to The Next Hundred Years by Friedman had changed 20, 40 or 60 years from now, as we approach the end of the time that he documents?
• And if there is ever a way to “will” your Amazon/whomever library to someone else, your heirs could not only thumb through static pages, they would see your fingerprints, sense your personality, and know what mattered to you at the time of your reading.
• Consumers commenting and sharing digital eBooks would leave an incredible legacy.

the locked, protected content of eBooks precludes us from sharing with others.

This last point has been one my biggest misgivings about the “one-way” aspect of current digital media: the locked, protected content of eBooks precludes any way for us to share our content-specific comments, annotations, whatever, with others. If I “will” my Kindle library to some designated heir, he/she has no way of knowing what turned me on. On the other hand, I have a shelf full of carefully selected books from my grandmother’s estate that achieve that goal beautifully.

Grammie was a red pencil/underline addict (highlighter pens didn’t exist yet) and her personality is evident on every page of what mattered to her. From marginal “stars”, single/double/triple underlines, little balloons around key words, and, best of all, marginal notes like “you’ve got to be kidding!”, I can literally hear her voice as I read what mattered to her.

After death, eBooks could allow your heirs to not only thumb through static pages, but they could also learn more about you by reading your digital fingerprints, helping them to sense your personality, and know what mattered to you at the time of your reading. Artwork: Secret Diary 18: "Up to speed" (2005) by Angela Moll

She was the woman who more responsible than anyone on the planet for who I am today. (OK! So now you know who to blame!) Incidentally, you can get a glimpse into this remarkable woman through a blog I wrote about the discovery of her 100 year old journals, written last year. I have Linked In contacts from Germany who connected with me after reading about what Grammie wrote in 1912. Now that’s what I call persistent fingerprinted content! These remote Linked In contacts are really connecting with her, through me.

Will my Kindle-driven wish list ever come true?

So, is there any hope that the publishing industry (and copyright lawyers) will smell the coffee and make my wish list of interactive features come true? I attended the Intelligent Content 2010 Conference in Palm Springs, CA where a roster of the “smartest guys/gals” on the subject gave us all a realistic whiff of the future of content. (Hint: DITA DITA DITA).

Dev Ganesan of Aptara (a digital publishing and XML content conversion services firm) gave a highly dynamic presentation on “Reimagining the Book: How Intelligent Technology is Changing the Publishing World”. His depiction of the future of the book far exceeded my Kindle-driven hunger for new features. Dev is actively involved in shaping the evolving EPUB standard, a free and open eBook standard designed for reflowable content, meaning that the text display can be optimized for the particular display device. Dev demonstrated “beyond engaging” DITA-driven intelligent and interactive content that runs on anything from a laptop to a Blackberry, iPhone, or most effectively, on the iPad.

The Q&A session was lively, with much discussion about Kindle being the lone wolf on sticking to its proprietary format, which Tim O’Reilly thinks this is a bad idea. The recently launched iPad is “intelligence” ready for what’s coming down the pike. Many of the questions opened up the whole can of worms regarding how do authors, artists and publishers flexibly copyright their assets without creating an impenetrable “glass box” that drives consumers away. (Follow Scott Abel’s tweets on this issue, he is more on top of this than anyone I know and will soon be presenting to a select group of Alpha Dog investors to clue them in).

What will it take to get the ePubs world to “wake up” and create the fingerprint and sharing tools we all crave?

If a dead chocolate icon can make individual “topic level” content available for a modest purchase price, why can’t newspapers, eBooks and other media creators who are quaking over broken copyright laws?

Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) had the answer during the Q&A session for his closing presentation Intelligent Content 2010. “When the lawyers finally realize that publishers can parse book content down to the chapter, or DITA topic level, and sell that content for pennies, and as with iTunes, do this millions and millions of times, then it will happen.” In other words, Amazon and other eBook publishers are sitting on a content gold mine. But they are trying to sell you the entire glass display of See’s Candies when you only want to buy a Marzipan Honey almond paste, a Light Chocolate Truffle and a Dark Bordeaux. (If your itchy fingers clicked on the link in the previous sentence, you will see that even old lady See has wised up and lets you do exactly that!) If a dead chocolate icon can make individual “topic level” content available for a modest purchase price, why can’t newspapers, eBooks and other media creators who are quaking over broken copyright laws?

In the closing conference session, Scott also revealed a future Trival Pursuit question. Name the most popular app on the iPhone right now? Kindle reader and other eBook readers. The future is here. All we need is the intelligently structured content to go with it. And I will think of my grandmother’s red underlines every time I highlight eBook sections and upload it to some future eBook community site. Grammie would have loved this stuff.

‘And this affects me how?’, you ask

So how does any of this affect you? If you are creating content that must be published in multiple formats (including formats that don’t exist yet), get on the DITA wagon and start structuring your content now. Find out what intelligent content is and how to embed it usefully in what you produce. Closely follow webinars, tweets and especially blogs from Ann Rockley, Scott Abel, Joe Gollner and the crew of visionaries that presented at the Intelligent Content conference.

Why? Because the projected pixels displayed at the posh Parker Meridian resort in Palm Springs this week portend the world that we will all soon be living in. The old adage for college professors used to be “publish or perish”. Perhaps the new adage should be “embed intelligence in your structured content, or watch it evaporate.”

*** About the Author

Maxwell Hoffmann started his career as a graphic artist and typesetter before working for a variety of publishing software vendors. He has over 20 years of scalable desktop publishing and 15 years of localization experience. His specialties include content analysis, consulting and sales training. He currently serves as Director of Documentation Globalization for Globalization Partners International. Follow Maxwell on Twitter.

By Alan J. Porter

Alan J Porter

[This post is part of a planned series of articles that examine how the traditional book industry could benefit from adopting XML.]

In order to prosper, publishers must re-engineer their processes and focus on creating content, not books.

A few days ago I saw a job posting from the publishers of my first book, who were looking for an editor for one of their imprints. What caught my eye was that the posting emphasized that the new editor should have experience and skills in using the same software that had been used to produce my book. A book that was published in 1997 – thirteen years ago!

Technology has changed a lot in thirteen years and so has the way that content can be created, handled and made ready for publication. But this publisher is far from being alone in sticking with old processes. My experiences working on other book projects in the last few years have just reinforced my belief that the vast majority of the traditional publishing market still works around a production system designed to do one thing – move paper.

A process that, despite changes in tools, has changed little since the dawn of the printing press.

For centuries the traditional publishing workflow has been:

• The author writes a manuscript (first on paper, then typewriters and more recently word processor software – these days usually Microsoft Word)
• The completed manuscript is then sent to the publishers for editing. Editing involved marking up, with either pen, or now using track changes and comments in the word processor, although sometimes it is just an email list of things to change. The editing phase can go through several iterations before everyone is happy and ready to go to publication – and by publication I mean go to print.
• The book, article, pamphlet or whatever is then recreated in the publishing tool. In the days of the mechanical printing press this meant manual typesetting, then with the emergence of desktop publishing tools it meant importing and converting the content from one for to another. The end result was the same however. Once the content is at the print ready staged it is locked into the format and layout of the physical page. Changes at this stage become costly, time consuming and rarely get reflected back into the source content.
• If the content is going to be published in more than one format, say a paperback and a hardback version, then a whole parallel production process has to be created.
• As systems and software are changed, as inevitably happens, the content becomes locked in multiple different software formats meaning that it either becomes unusable and the book goes ‘out of print,” or that multiple parallel production processes have to be maintained and coordinated for different titles based on when they were originally published.
• Even where publishers are now producing eBooks they are still setting up separate parallel production processes by taking the source content and having it converted into yet another layout driven format, that still uses a page-based paper-like model.

The best way to leverage the power of XML for any project is to use it from the start. This means using XML writing tools during the content creation process.

As I started to write this blog post I received an email from an editor of a magazine I contribute to on a semi-regular basis, who had attached a copy of my latest article for last minute edits and a request to use MS Word version tracking so that any last minute changes I made could be “replicated in the InDesign file.” Another example of a process where the content is locked by the format of the deliverable, even though the magazine in question is now delivered electronically rather than as a print copy.

Once the content is locked into the deliverable format like this, it loses any potential to add value.

As I outlined in my last post, using XML allows the publisher to add real value to the content; it also allows them to fully separate the content from the publishing process allowing the content to be reused and republished many times over in different formats and on different delivery platforms without having to lock the content into the physical design of a page.

With XML the strictly linear production process that we are used to can also change allowing for more flexibility and reduced time between creation and publication.

There are several ways that the XML mark up can be applied to the content, either at creation or as part of a post-creation conversion process.

An XML publishing workflow requires authors to create structured content using XML-enabled authoring tools.

The best way to leverage the power of XML for any project is to use it from the start. This means using XML writing tools during the content creation process. The problem is that most authors (and I’ll include myself in this statement) just like to start with a blank sheet and let the words flow without having to worry about tagging and structure; another throw back to the parchment / typewriter approach. This is the reason why the vast majority of documents created in MS Word use the default normal.dot template.

A well configured XML editor can give the same sense of freedom, by having a well thought out schema (mark up template) applied and installed before the author starts.

In the comments section of my last post publisher Richard Hamilton suggests that the biggest issue with getting authors to use XML is that it is perceived as ‘too technical’ and that implies both a step learning curve and a restriction in flexibility and style.

He makes some valid points. The truth is that the XML can be hidden from the author behind a template or a series of basic styles. If this were presented as a specific publisher’s Style Guide, rather than as XML Tagging it would make it easier to accept and implement for a non-technical writer. Most authors are used to working with different style guides from different publishers; working with XML should be no different.

Another approach is to develop the XML markup as the book is being written. In the sprit of full disclosure, Richard Hamilton, mentioned above, is the publisher of my upcoming book “WIKI: Grow Your Own For Fun And Profit”. In keeping with the book’s subject I am writing the book on free wiki software, (PB Works). Once I had a couple of chapters drafted in a totally free form way, Richard then developed a test page on the wiki to map the underlying wiki markup to XML, and associated that with basic styles such as:

Here is the Chapter title (Format = Heading 1)
Here is another heading (Format = Heading 2)

I, as the author, could then apply this style to my ongoing work without having to worry about the mark-up underneath.

By using just the first two chapters of the book we have developed both the required markup, as well as the end page layout and format for the print version. The book design is completed before I have finished the writing task greatly reducing the production time. It also means that changes can be made very close to publication date. The same source will also be able to be used to produce multiple versions for different delivery platforms without locking it into any one production process.

It's no more costly to send your content out for conversion to XML than it is to create and manage it in the inefficient ways most publishers do today.

Another alternative is after-the-fact tagging. Once a manuscript has been delivered it could be sent out to specialist companies for conversion to XML. This could be an off-shore process or an in-house one. It is no more costly than importing, cleaning up and replicating edits in a tool like InDesign or applying existing typesetting markup languages such as LaTeX and the potential payoff is even greater.

It may be that to take advantage of XML and the added value it can bring that a book’s production ‘team’ will need to expand from the author / editorial / print to now include intelligent content and multi-media specialists working with the original author or adding value on behalf of the publisher. The production team will become more akin to a movie production with relevant specialists bought in on a per project basis. There may be an incremental increase in initial cost using this approach, but the pay off can be so much greater as instead of just a couple of print versions and maybe a basic eBook page turner, you can now deliver the same content as a full multi-media experience that not only works on today’s emerging technology, but will be positioned to take advantage of tomorrow’s technology too.

Switching to XML does not mean getting rid of paper in favor of eBooks, it means that paper becomes just one option among many. Most importantly it means changing the business model from shifting paper, to delivering intelligent content with real value.

[In the next post I’ll look in more detail at how XML can be used to add value through multi media and different presentation and delivery models.]

About the Author

Alan J. Porter a 20 year veteran of the corporate communications industry is founder of 4Js Group LLC a consulting and services company that specializes in combining creative talent with business expertise to help companies tell their story. He is also the regular writer of the monthly Disney*Pixar “World of CARS” comic book series.

His latest book, “WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit” will be published by XML Press in May 2010.

Blog: THE CONTENT POOL http://4jsgroup.blogspot.com
Email: ajp@4jsgroup.com
Phone: 512-968-7362
Twitter: @4jsgroup

By Richard Hamilton, special to The Content Wrangler

According to the Open Dictionary, a book is: “Sheets of paper bound together to hinge at one edge. If blank sheets of paper this is commonly referred to as a notebook, however most books are printed material.”

The book is evolving. What will it look like in 10 years?

The definition above is remarkably consistent across dictionaries, but while this is the “dictionary” definition, it is not a true picture of what most of us think of when we think of a book. Over the hundreds of years that make up the history of books, we have built up a set of expectations that go far beyond the dictionary definition.

This expectation even carries over to the blank book. If you’ve ever owned a bound, blank book – and judging from the space given over to blank books in book stores, a lot of us have – I’ll bet that you treat it differently from the way you treat a spiral bound notebook or pad of paper. You probably don’t use it for shopping lists, reminders, or other ephemeral writings. Almost unconsciously, we place a higher standard on what we put into a book.

To explore what a book means, beyond “sheets of paper bound together,” let’s look at the process used to create a book from material that is already published. I’ll use as my example Joel Spolsky’s two books, Joel on Software and More Joel on Software, both published by Apress. Spolsky publishes a blog titled, Joel on Software, and over nine years he has published more than 1,000 articles. These two books compile a selection of his articles.

Looking into the process that created these books from his blog can help us understand what differentiates a “book” from “content,” and provide insight into what authors and publishers need to focus on as we move into the world of electronic publishing. The process of creating these books required the following steps:

Selection

There are two aspects to the question of selection. A publisher, in this case Apress, had to select Spolsky’s books over other potential publications. Secondly, Spolsky had to select which of his 1,000 articles to use for the book.

Joel Spolsky Organized His Book in the way that books have been organized traditionally, not the way blogs are organized on the web.

This a major function of publishers and one reason why brand-name publishers have an advantage. If they are good, they have built a reputation for selecting material that sells – a smaller number have even built a reputation for selecting quality material.

Organization

Spolsky organized the articles into chapters with themes, for example, “Managing Large Projects,” or “Starting a Software Business.” We expect that the material in a book will be organized in a manner that will make it easy to use. Most readers would be disappointed if Spolsky had arranged the articles by publication date or alphabetically.

Editing

Spolsky didn’t just dump content into the book. He and the editors at Apress went through the book and edited it for content (are things out of date, should there be references to other material in the book, etc.) and for detail (copy editing). In addition, they created an index.

While you can make a pretty good argument that editorial standards have slipped – no author expects the kind of editing Maxwell Perkins did for Hemingway and Faulkner – I think it is still fair to say that we expect the material in a book to meet a higher standard than we would expect from a newspaper article, letter, blog entry, or other more casual communication.

Packaging

The Spolsky books have a good, readable book design and interesting covers. We expect that from a book, and we are generally disappointed if we get a slapped together design and packaging.

Distribution networks like iTunes and the iBook Store are revolutionizing digital product distribution.

Distribution

The Spolsky books are distributed through traditional book channels and web retailers in print and ebook formats, another reasonable expectation for most books, though this is changing.

As you can see, even a book that is simply a compilation of existing blog articles carries with it a set of expectations that go well beyond the dictionary definition of book. If Spolsky and Apress had not met those expectations, I believe these books would have sunk without a trace; instead, the first is still in the top 100 software engineering books on Amazon as I write this article, nearly 6 years after publication, and the second is not far behind. Even as we shed the physical definition of a book with e-books and other electronic means of distribution, we still need to honor the process described above in order to produce books that people will choose to purchase.

The second part of this two-part article will look at the question, “why does the definition of a book matter?” and the relevance of that question to authors and publishers. As a teaser, I’ll offer that it matters because none of the items listed above goes away when you publish in electronic form; they are all still critical when you are trying to assemble something that you want people to pay for. But, every one of them is changing; if you ignore them or think you can go on treating them the same way you always have, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

About the Author

Richard L. Hamilton is Founder and Publisher of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, and marketers. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the upcoming 2nd edition of Norm Walsh’s DocBook: The Definitive Guide, to be published in collaboration with O’Reilly Media.

XML Press is the publisher of Anne Gentle’s Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, and in 2010 will publish new books by Brenda Huettner, Alan Porter, and Zarella Rendon.

This two minute video demystifies eBook production and highlights the five things publishers must get right to profit from eBooks. The video was created by digital publishing solutions provider, Aptara, a firm that helps publishers — and today, that’s basically every organization on earth — distribute content in any format, to any device or platform, including eBook readers like the iPad, Kindle and Sony eReader as well as on smart phones like the iPhone and Android.

Half of all organizations use a commercial content management system (CMS), according to a recent survey of content professionals. Just over 17% of survey respondents said their organization created their own, home-grown CMS, while 10.1% said an open source platform was in use in their firm. Interestingly, 15% of respondents said the organizations for which they work do not have a content management system of any type.

The survey, conducted by The Content Wrangler, and sponsored by e-Spirit, makers of the FirstSpirit Content Management System, examined the opinions 336 content professionals — knowledge workers involved in the creation, management and delivery of corporate content of all types (marketing, sales, human resources, operational, technical, training, medical, scientific, regulatory compliance … basically, all types of content needed to run a business). Content management systems manage content that organizations provide to internal customers, external customers, partners, affiliates, shareholders, regulators and many other audiences.

While the majority of survey participants said their organizations have a content management system of some type in place to manage their business content assets, 15% of respondents said their organizations do not have a content management system of any type.

James Robertson, founder and Managing Director of Two Step Designs, a vendor neutral consultancy located in Australia, says content management systems are increasingly needed to help organizations create, manage, distribute, publish, and make discoverable business critical information. Robertson cites several benefits of using a CMS, including, but not limited to: streamlined authoring process, faster turnaround time for new content and changes, greater consistency, improved site navigation, increased site flexibility, support for decentralized authoring, increased security, reduced duplication of information, greater capacity for growth/innovation, and reduced content maintenance costs.

“Many organizations have already selected and implemented content management systems, and by learning from their experiences you can better guide your project,” Robertson says on his popular website. “The key thing is to look beyond just what product they chose, as they will have different needs and requirements than does your organization. Instead, you are best served by focusing on the techniques and approaches they used, and how effective these were.”

“Choosing a content management system (CMS) is not just about finding the product with the right functionality,” Robertson adds. “It’s also about dealing with a vendor who can support your needs for the lifetime of the solution. You need to be confident that there will be more than just help-desk support – the vendor should offer regular (trouble-free) product upgrades, a clear development plan, and good mechanisms for handling the needs of each CMS customer.”

About the survey

The intent of the research was to help us better understand the content management landscape in the organizations for which the respondents work. The survey used a series of questions designed to collect both quantitative and anecdotal information from respondents based on a guided survey approach. Responses were recorded in percentage values and we often rounded up (e.g. 3.1999 becomes 3.2) for ease of use by readers of this summary report. A significant number of anecdotal comments were provided by respondents, some of which we share with you in future summary articles.

Respondents came from numerous industry sectors, with the highest percentage (9.8%) coming from the Software Development sector, followed by the High Tech arena (3.5), the Life Sciences industry (2.3), and the Manufacturing sector (2.0). While respondents work for organizations of all sizes, more than 25% are employed by large, multi-national organizations with more than a 1,000 employees; 10.4% work for medium-sized organizations with 501-1000 staffers; 16.7% work for smaller organizations with 101-500 employees; and, 30% work for organizations with fewer than 100 employees.

The nation with the highest amount of participation in this survey was overwhelmingly the United States, with additional representation from respondents in Canada, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Finland, Denmark, Mexico, Slovenia, South Korea, India, and Italy.

About e-Spirit

e-Spirit is the manufacturer of FirstSpirit, a content management system (CMS) for companies with high expectations of their solutions. e-Spirit is an internationally-oriented product supplier with global brands in all sectors. International clients such as Pentland, Airbus, Trelleborg Sealing Solutions, Commerzbank, and the Schaeffler Group are all using FirstSpirit as a CMS platform within their IT infrastructure. FirstSpirit is increasingly becoming the integration platform of choice, replacing existing content management technologies in large businesses.

e-Spirit was founded by former members of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and System Technology (FhG ISST) in 1999. e-Spirit is headquartered in Dortmund with branch offices in Europe located in London, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt.

Successful Global Content Management (Webinar) February 18, 2010: 7-8:30pm CET; 6-7:30pm GMT; 1-2:30pm EST; 10-11:30am PST

As products move beyond borders the need for global content increases and with that comes the critical requirement for global content management. Global content management allows you to ensure brand consistency, implement a global content strategy, and manage content on a global basis.


Management of a single site is a sometimes complex task, but management of multiple global sites is even more complex and requires a well thought out plan, appropriate technology and clear processes.


Join The Content Wrangler February 18, 2010 for “Successful Global Content Management”, our free, 90-minute webinar in which content management guru Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group, will share with you the ten steps necessary to launch a successful global content management initiative. You’ll also hear from the CEO of e-Spirit, Joern Bodemann, why content management system usability is a “must have”, not an option.


Register tody!

The Making of a Mashup: Aurally Volume 1 - By Scott Abel, The Audio Wrangler

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, aka The Audio Wrangler

What do you get when you cross Pink Floyd with Christina Aquilera? How about a little Elvis with your Public Enemy? Or some Cher on top of This Mortal Coil? Although it may sound a little frightening, pairing musical groups and vocalists together in unorthodox ways can yield some pretty incredible audio sensations.

Known commonly as mashups (or bastards), these bootleg musical creations are user-generated derivative works created by blending two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental version of another. This technique makes it possible to create a new music product by combining, for instance, the a cappella version of “Hurt” by Christina Aquilera with the instrumental “Is there anybody out there?” by Pink Floyd. The result, when done well, yields a beautiful new audio product – in this example, a mashup entitled “Is There Anybody Hurt There?” by the mashup artist Okiokinl.

I use music mashups in conference presentations, workshops, and during consulting assignments, to teach my clients (organizations struggling to get a grip on the documents, web pages, marketing brochures, and other information products they produce) about content reuse, XML authoring, component content management, and content personalization. I use music mashups as an example because it’s the easiest way to help people understand these concepts and it’s something most — if not all — humans have experience with in one way or another.

How do you make a music mashup?

There are various ways to make a music mashup based on two songs. They can be created digitally on a personal computer using software designed to facilitate the mixing of music files together such as Apple Garage Band, which allows user to mix and record music from multiple sources. Music mixing software — of which there are many varieties at varying price points — provides a granular level of control that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain using traditional music mixing methods.

Numark iDJ2 iPod Mixing Board

Mashups can also be created using a more traditional remixing approach. This method requires two turntables (or two CD players), a dj mixing board (a type of audio control panel that provides the dj control of what music is being played, its volume, bass, treble, midrange, as well as its tempo, calculated in beats per minute or bpm), headphones, and a recording device like a CD burner. Inexpensive modern mixing boards like the Numark iDJ2 provide an iPod interface, allowing you to mix music directly from your iPod (without the need for CD players, turntables or other music inputs) onto the recording device.

More complex mashups may involve a hybrid approach that utilizes a variety of approaches and may even incorporate other techniques including live vocals, music, and spoken voice.

How I created my mashup compilation

Aurally Volume 1 - A bouillabaisse of sound, jam-packed with songs you may recognize, but in new and unexpected ways. A downtempo mashup continuous mix by DJ Scott Abel.

Aurally Volume 1 is a mashup compilation – a series of mashups (created by other artists) that I weaved together using the Numark iDJ2 mixing board, a home stereo system (amplifier, CD recorder, speakers), a video iPod, a MacBook Pro, and a series of carefully selected mp3 files (the mashups).

The art of selecting, sequencing and mixing the tracks together to create the final product is what I enjoy when making a compilation. It’s an art form that relies on timing, feelings and emotions, as much as musical knowledge and technical ability. It’s not something everyone can do well. In fact, the mashup databases are littered with good examples of bad mashups. Here’s an example. It’s called “Bringing Back Sexy Knights” (Justin Timberlake vs Knight Rider Theme Remixed) by DJ Skip .

To create my compilation, I first determined the theme (or flavor) of the mix. I decided to deviate from my comfort zone. Usually, I tend to create hiNRG, continuously mixed dance compilations, which involve a technique known as beat-matching. But this time around I decided on a downtempo vibe — a collection of mellow songs, with the occasional uptempo track included for good measure. The goal of a downtempo mix is to create a listening experience by weaving the tracks together in a way that is both interesting and musically pleasing.

To create my continuous mashup mix compilation, I performed the following tasks:

1. Scanned online mashup databases for mashups
2. Listened to each mashup and downloaded those that were candidates for inclusion in the compilation into iTunes
3. Recorded metadata about each mashup I planned to use. (Note: I recorded this metadata in iTunes, but you could do it in a spreadsheet or on a piece of paper). Metadata included:
   • Name of mashup artist/dj who created the mashup
   • Name of mashup (usually a combination of the original song titles repurposed to create a new mashed up title)
   • Titles of the original songs and artists included in the mashup
   • The total length of the mashup in minutes and seconds
4. Created a draft line-up (the order in which each mashup would be included in the mix); I use a piece of paper for this, but you could use a spreadsheet or a text document to accomplish the same goal
5. Played each mashup, paying special attention to the beginning and ending of each mashup in order to identify places where the mashup had a natural break, or a change of tempo, that might make a good place to introduce the next mashup in the mix — aka seque
6. Recorded the exact time (in minutes and seconds) of the seque on my draft line-up
7. Fired up the mixing board and my iPod
8. Rehearsed the mashup following the draft line-up, making changes to the segues and switching the order of the mashups in the line-up until I was happy with the final product
9. Created the final line-up
10. Recorded the final mashup compilation mix (as documented in the final line-up) onto compact disc
11. Copied the compilation file (an .mp4 file) to iTunes
12. Listened to the entire compilation
13. Satisfied with the end result, I used iTunes to convert the .mp4 file to .mp3

Finding mashups

Finding the mashups to include on a compilation is a time-consuming process. I searched music libraries, peer-to-peer networks, music industry blogs, Facebook and MySpace pages, and websites dedicated to cataloging and writing about mashups. I downloaded hundreds of mashups – a more difficult and time-consuming task than you might imagine. Some sites provide an ability for you to download a mashup with one click. Others require you to right-click, then select a destination for the file. And still others trick you into thinking you’re going to download the file with a single click, but they really are trying to get you to register for (and often purchase) a service. To add to the frustration, many sites are advertising-based. They display a series of never-ending pop up ads, some of which start off by playing bandwidth hogging video that sometimes causes your browser to crash, forcing you to start all over again.

Once I accumulated a large selection of mashup files, I began the screening process. This is perhaps the most time-consuming part of making a solid compilation as it requires you to listen to each track and determine if you have an interest in keeping it, or whether you should delete it. If you’re like me, you can get wrapped up in the music and lose track of time, so it’s best to try and stay focused on the task at hand.

The Ingredients in Aurally: Volume 1

Here’s a listing of the mashups I included in my compilation (including the metadata described above):

1. “Strictly Safe From Rock-n-Roll” by Apollo Zero
   • Ingredients: Bent “Strictly Bongo”, Britney Spears “I Love Rock-n-Roll”, Christina Aquilera “Beautiful”, Paris Hilton “Nothing in this World”, Simple Minds “Belfast Child”, Massive Attack “Safe From Harm”, K-Tel Records “Dance Lesson Intro”.
2. “Turn Up The Club Ghetto” by Okiokinl
   • Ingredients: Elvis Presley “The Ghetto”, Public Enemy “Bring the Noise/Terminator X”, and DJ Rob “Clubbed to Death”.
3. “Is There Anybody Hurt There?” by Okiokinl
   • Ingredients: Christina Aquilera ”Hurt” and Pink Floyd “Is There Anybody Out There?”.
4. “Safari Love” by Loo & Placido
   • Ingredients: The Beatles “Because the World is Round”, Aretha Franklin “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?”, The Pixies “Where is My Mind?” and Elton John “I Want Love”.
5. “You Won’t See You’re All That I Need” by DJ Nite
   • Ingredients: Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel “You’re All I Need to Get By” and The Beatles “You Won’t See Me”.
6. “If This Isn’t Numb” by Ministry of Mashed Sound
   • Ingredients: The Pet Shop Boys “Numb” and Jennifer Hudson “If This Isn’t Love”.
7. “Apologize Life” by Winkar Lopez
   • Ingredients: One Republic featuring Timbaland “Apologize” and Julie McKnight “Diamond Life”.
8. “Jude’ll Fix It” by Phil Retrospector
   • Ingredients: The Beatles “With a Little Help From My Friends”, Jim Sturgess “Hey Jude” and Coldplay “Fix You”.
9. “Walk on By ‘Cuz I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone” by Matt Bland
   • Ingredients: Dione Warwick “Walk on By” and Duffy “Stepping Stone”.
10. “Sunshine on My Foolish Ocean” by Apollo Zero
    • Ingredients: John Denver “Sunshine on My Shoulder”, This Mortal Coil “Song to the Siren”, Sheena Easton “Foolish Heart”, Cyndi Lauper “Come on Home”, Dolly Parton “God’s Coloring Book
11. “Funk That Shit: Believe in Glorybox” by Funk That Shit Productions
    • Ingredients: Cher ”Believe” and Portishead “Glory Box”.
12. “Bootiful Prudence” by Autopilot
    • Ingredients: The Beatles “Dear Prudence” and Christina Aquilera “Beautiful”.
13. “Nancy Gets Banged” by Phil Retrospector
    • Ingredients: Nancy Sinatra “Bang Bang” and Ryuichi Sakamoto “Railroad Man”.

Selecting the mashups to go on a compilation generally means finding a dozen or so songs that go well together. This is the tricky part. It involves understanding the emotional and dramatic impact of music, it’s tone, tempo, style, vibe, and flavor. These are not things you can easily learn. I think, like being able to sing, paint, sculpt or draw, it’s something you either have inside you — or you don’t. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn the techniques used by djs, mashup artists and remixers. They can come in handy for a variety for purposes.

Elapsed time to create this compilation…well, we won’t go into that. Let’s just say, it was days, not hours. Your mileage may vary. It’s a creative endeavor that involves lots of emotional judgements that are hard to describe. Suffice it to say that artists can’t be rushed when they are practicing their craft. Sometimes it comes to you quickly and other times, it’s a painful process — a trial and error experiment.

Aurally: Volume 1

Here’s the final product. Give it a listen. Then, let me know what you think by leaving a comment at the end of this article. If you like what you hear, join my DJ Scott Abel (The Audio Wrangler) fan page on Facebook where you can listen to and download my other mashup mixes.

In future articles, I’ll discuss how to make an original mashup, how to use social networks to promote your mashups (and get to the top of the charts), and I’ll interview some of the most famous mashup artists. Until then, enjoy the music.

Interview with Joe Gollner by Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

The Content Wrangler: Joe, thanks for agreeing to chat with us today. Tell us a little about yourself and your experience in the content industry.

Joe Gollner, Content Philospher

Joe Gollner: I began tinkering with content, using open markup technologies, in 1987 while still a grad student at University of Oxford. The tinkering has never stopped. Tapping on another side of my background, the military side, I was deeply embroiled in the CALS initiative – where we applied open markup technologies to the most complex documentation scenarios imaginable -– within the NATO defense community. I was even given the delightful, as well as official, title of “CALS Philosopher”.

Over the years, I have been entangled in a bizarrely large number of projects and in sectors as far afield as aerospace and education, health care and telecommunications, academic publishing and oil engineering. I formed an XML solution integration company in 1998; sold that company to Stilo International in 2004; and chaired, for many years, the XML World series of conferences. So you could say I have been immersed in the content business for a long time –- so long that perhaps it is time to change my title again, this time to the “Content Philosopher”.

The Content Wrangler: Tell us a little about your firm, the markets you serve, and the products and services you offer.

Joe Gollner: Currently, I am assuming new responsibilities for Stilo International as the Chief Solutions Architect (Intelligent Content Technologies) and my specific role is to initiate and lead solutions projects for customers who need to elevate the IQ of their content and the associated content processes and information products. These efforts dovetail naturally with the technology products side of Stilo, with the venerable OmniMark content processing platform being the foundational offering. Go to almost any large scale content environment that you would be tempted to identify as an example of intelligent content at work and there is a better than even chance you will find OmniMark at work as well. Specifically, OmniMark is used to build conversion, enrichment, validation and publishing processes that bring intelligence to the vast stores of content. OmniMark is used to put in place publishing processes that make something of that new found intelligence.

At Stilo, we use this technology to build highly sophisticated content management and publishing environments. It turns out that we can also build new services that organizations will be increasingly able to access “in the cloud” (or in their environments, if they so choose) – with these being cases where these customers can leverage the power of OmniMark without necessarily jumping in with both feet and mastering what is admittedly a highly specialized field.

For the last couple of years, we have been working on an on-demand conversion portal, known as Migrate, and after collaborating with a number of organizations a new release is fast approaching.

New for 2010, I am also dedicating a larger portion of my time to research and publishing, with a book in the works that focuses, resolutely, on the subject of “intelligent content”. Under my research and publishing agenda, I am approaching the question of “intelligent content” from a number of angles and identifying design patterns that have, over the many projects in my history, seemed to produce the best results. These efforts will lead to a book, as mentioned, but I also expect it will produce some new methodological tools, learning resources, and even, looking further downstream, technology components. These activities are being organized under Gnostyx Research. Most recently on the publishing front, I contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book on Information Management Best Practices which I see is getting some good press at KMWorld.

The Content Wrangler: Intelligent Content is a hot topic today, but many people don’t understand what it is or why it matters. From your perspective, what is intelligent content? What makes it so smart? And, why do organizations need it?

Joe Gollner: I might be the last person you want to ask that question. Not because I don’t have an answer – but because I have too many answers. In fact I have been circling the question of “what is intelligent content” on my blog including a recent post that resurrected some of the memories from Intelligent Content 2009 (very positive memories) and that looks forward to this year’s event.

In essence, the definition I put forward last year in my whitepaper, The Emergence of Intelligent Content, still holds water, I believe:

“Intelligence refers to the ability to acquire and apply knowledge (normally a quality attributed to people but not exclusively), or to a collection of information of value in a particular context (OED). Content can be considered intelligent when it expresses, in an open way, the full meaning underlying a communication such that the data, information and knowledge being expressed can be easily accessed and effectively leveraged by both people and the software applications that support them.”

There is quite a bit packed into this definition. In practical terms, intelligent content is about upping our game in the content business – identifying the content that is the most important to a given business, ensuring that this content is created, managed and leveraged in the smartest way possible, and putting in place the mechanisms whereby these high-value assets and services can evolve in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Chef Gordon Ramsay sees that the right dish is delivered to each customer — prepared, just they way they asked for it.

OK, I should be able to make this more tangible than that. Picture intelligent content is an array of ingredients that can be used to satisfy every customer request as they make their way to your counter. One says, “I want a beautiful reproducible PDF that I can send to my print media supplier.” The next one says, “I want ePub output that is tuned to each of the main eBook viewing platforms.” Then one shows up and says, “I need dynamic help, that is filtered on-the-fly for an almost unlimited number of configuration scenarios.” Finally one says, “I need to glean the best morsels of this content for marketing material which will be arrayed across a number of media channels and delivered individually to each of our customers and prospects.” The purveyor of intelligent content is like Chef Ramsay, who with a few well-timed barks, sees that the right dish is delivered to each customer — prepared, just they way they asked for it.

At Intelligent Content 2010, I will be speaking about Intelligent Content Management. I explain how this content kitchen needs to be organized and how it needs to work. In an effort to make the subject both accessible and entertaining, I am leveraging the motif of a famous spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, to address the three sides to intelligent content and the management demands that arise around each and, more importantly, around their integration. I am now thinking that there maybe a little Chef Ramsay involved as well.

The Content Wrangler: Creating intelligent content certainly seems like a good idea. Can you share with us a few examples of how intelligent content can help an organization to be faster, leaner, make more money, reduce expenses, reduce risk, or serve its clients better?

Joe Gollner: On the subject of examples, I could go on forever. I will touch on a couple. Before I do, I want to stress that creating intelligent content and integrating it into business processes and offerings of an organization can be very hard work. I am bald for a reason. I mention this not to put anyone off but only to remind people to start small and evolve their “intelligent content capabilities” incrementally. For reasons that I will go into in Palm Springs, where intelligent content is involved the “big leap forward” might well be your last.

In the chapter I contributed to “Information Management Best Practices: Volume 1″, I recount a case study where we dug deeply and greedily into the various benefits that intelligent content can deliver. And this was done on a relatively large scale so what benefits were realized translated to some very big numbers. Perhaps the most important benefit, at least in terms of returning concrete financial savings and fundamentally improving the quality of the information services being provided, was the dramatic reduction of content redundancy.

Content in most organizations exists in a state of unbridled redundancy. If there is one version of a warning statement being managed and translated there will likely be a hundred. In this case, there were often thousands of identical components being managed and translated in parallel. Eliminating this redundancy, making it leaner, saved over a $100 million dollars a year in this one example. And the dollars saved were not the only story. By eliminating the content redundancy the number of documentation errors was dramatically reduced. By eliminating the content redundancy and raising the intelligence of the managed content components, a fundamental change could be introduced that would see content processes fully integrated with the system engineering processes that were continually modifying the equipment platforms the documentation needed to describe.

My favorite anecdote from this case study pertains to the publication of a large parts manual which historically took 18 months to republish. This manual, in being managed the old not-so-intelligent way, was, as you can imagine, almost completely useless because it was always a couple of years out-of-date. When questions arose, the mechanics would typically phone headquarters to ask the equipment lifecycle management office about what parts they should use or order. Once the content was rendered “intelligent”, the republishing of this manual went from taking 18 months to 18 minutes. And the people responsible for providing up-to-date parts information to the field units joked that the 18 minutes coincided with the amount of time they spent on coffee break, because their process produced an online reference tool that was “continually up-to-date” automatically. That’s intelligent content in action.

The Content Wrangler: Are there any examples you can point to of intelligent content on the web?

Joe Gollner: As another example of intelligent content in action, and this one being accessible online, I would point to HP printer products division and the support resources they supply to customers. My good friend, Rahel Bailie, president of Intentional Design, gave a great talk last year where she explicitly used HP support environment as an interactive illustration of several things being done well. As usual, I acted up in the presentation – this time blushing, fanning myself and getting all misty because she was showcasing one of my customers.

A couple of years ago my team had done a substantial amount of work for HP renovating the intelligent content infrastructure that underlies these online support services. Now our work was made infinitely easier by two factors – one was that HP really did have their proverbial act together and the other was that the previous integrator who had designed the initial system (many years before) had done a spectacularly good job. How often does that happen? And, how often does one integrator say that of another’s work?

The Content Wrangler: Do you know of any useful online resources you think our readers might find useful in understanding intelligent content?

Joe Gollner: In terms of where to look for more information, I would first point readers to the Intelligent Content 2010 conference. Somewhat unabashedly I would point people to my blog posts on this topic and specifically those falling under the xContent category. I also contend that my whitepaper on this topic remains a pretty good place to start.

The Content Wrangler: Thanks for taking time out of your hectic schedule to chat with us about intelligent content. We really appreciate it.

Joe Gollner: I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Palm Springs at Intelligent Content 2010. I am especially looking forward to any debates that might break out –- as they did last year.

Interview with Joe Gollner by Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

The Content Wrangler: Joe, thanks for agreeing to chat with us today. Tell us a little about yourself and your experience in the content industry.

Joe Gollner, Content Philosopher

Joe Gollner: I began tinkering with content, using open markup technologies, in 1987 while still a grad student at University of Oxford. The tinkering has never stopped. Tapping on another side of my background, the military side, I was deeply embroiled in the CALS initiative – where we applied open markup technologies to the most complex documentation scenarios imaginable – within the NATO defense community and I was even given the delightful, as well as official, title of “CALS Philosopher”.


Over the years, I have been entangled in a bizarrely large number of projects and in sectors as far afield as aerospace and education, health care and telecommunications, academic publishing and oil engineering. I formed an XML solution integration company in 1998; sold that company to Stilo International in 2004; and chaired, for many years, the XML World series of conferences. So you could say I have been immersed in the content business for a long time – so long that perhaps it is time to change my title again, this time to the “Content Philosopher”.


The Content Wrangler: Tell us a little about your firm, the markets you serve, and the products and services you offer.


Joe Gollner: Currently, I am assuming new responsibilities for Stilo International as the Chief Solutions Architect (Intelligent Content Technologies) and my specific role is to initiate and lead solutions projects for customers who need to elevate the IQ of their content and the associated content processes and information products. These efforts dovetail naturally with the technology products side of Stilo, with the venerable OmniMark Content Processing Platform being the foundational offering.

OmniMark is used to build highly sophisticated content management and publishing environments.

Go to almost any large scale content environment that you would be tempted to identify as an example of intelligent content at work and there is a better than even chance you will find OmniMark at work as well. Specifically, OmniMark is used to build conversion, enrichment, validation and publishing processes that bring intelligence to the vast stores of content that these organizations have and then OmniMark is used to put in place publishing processes that make something of that new found intelligence. Now at Stilo, we use this technology to build highly sophisticated content management and publishing environments. It turns out that we can also build new services that organizations will be increasingly able to access “in the cloud” (or in their environments if they so choose) – with these being cases where these customers can leverage the power of OmniMark without necessarily jumping in with both feet and mastering what is admittedly a highly specialized field.

Stilo Migrate: On-demand, Online Content Conversion

For the last couple of years, we have been working on an on-demand conversion portal, known as Migrate, and after collaborating with a number of organizations a new release is fast approaching.


New for 2010, I am also dedicating a larger portion of my time to research and publishing, with a book in the works that focuses, resolutely, on the subject of “intelligent content”. Under my research and publishing agenda, I am approaching the question of “intelligent content” from a number of angles and identifying design patterns that have, over the many projects in my history, seemed to produce the best results. These efforts will lead to a book, as mentioned, but I also expect it will produce some new methodological tools, learning resources, and even, looking further downstream, technology components. These activities are being organized under Gnostyx Research. Most recently on the publishing front, I contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book on Information Management Best Practices which I see is getting some good press at KMWorld.


The Content Wrangler: Intelligent Content is a hot topic today, but many people don’t understand what it is or why it matters. From your perspective, what is intelligent content? What makes it so smart? And, why do organizations need it?


Joe Gollner: I might be the last person you want to ask that question. Not because I don’t have an answer – but because I have too many answers. In fact I have been circling the question of “what is intelligent content” on my blog including a recent post that resurrected some of the memories from Intelligent Content 2009 (very positive memories) and that looks forward to this year’s event.


In essence, the definition I put forward last year in my whitepaper, The Emergence of Intelligent Content, still holds water, I believe:

“Intelligence refers to the ability to acquire and apply knowledge (normally a quality attributed to people but not exclusively), or to a collection of information of value in a particular context (OED). Content can be considered intelligent when it expresses, in an open way, the full meaning underlying a communication such that the data, information and knowledge being expressed can be easily accessed and effectively leveraged by both people and the software applications that support them.”

There is quite a bit packed into this definition. In practical terms, intelligent content is about upping our game in the content business – identifying the content that is the most important to a given business, ensuring that this content is created, managed and leveraged in the smartest way possible, and putting in place the mechanisms whereby these high-value assets and services can evolve in a rapidly changing marketplace.

Chef Gordon Ramsay

OK, I should be able to make this explanation more tangible than that. Picture intelligent content is an array of ingredients that can be used to satisfy every customer request as they make their way to your counter. One says, “I want a beautiful reproducible PDF that I can send to my print media supplier.” The next one says, “I want an ePub, and I want an ePub output that is tuned to each of the main viewing platforms.” Then one shows up and says, “I need dynamic online help, that is filtered on-the-fly for an almost unlimited number of configuration scenarios.” Finally one says, “I need to glean the best morsels of this content for marketing material which will be arrayed across a number of media channels and delivered individually to each of our customers and prospects.” The purveyor of intelligent content is like Chef Ramsay, who — with a few well-timed barks — sees the right a dish brought forth for each customer request.


At Intelligent Content 2010, I will be speaking about “Intelligent Content Management” and I will be looking at how this content kitchen needs to be organized and how it needs to work. In an effort to make the subject both accessible and entertaining, I am leveraging the motif of a famous spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, to address the three sides to intelligent content and the management demands that arise around each and, more importantly, around their integration. I am now thinking that there maybe a little Chef Ramsay involved as well.


The Content Wrangler: Wow. That’s really interesting, Joe. I’m sure that most of our readers think creating intelligent content seems like a good idea. Can you share with us a few examples of how intelligent content can help an organization to be faster, leaner, make more money, reduce expenses, reduce risk, or serve its clients better?


Joe Gollner: On the subject of examples, I could go on forever. I will touch on a couple only. Before I do, I want to stress that creating intelligent content and integrating it into business processes and offerings of an organization can be very hard work. I am bald for a reason. I mention this not to put anyone off, but only to remind people to start small and evolve their “intelligent content capabilities” incrementally. For reasons that I will go into in Palm Springs, where intelligent content is involved, the “big leap forward” might well be your last.


In the chapter I contributed to the Information Management Best Practices Volume 1, I recount a case study where we dug deeply and greedily into the various benefits that intelligent content can deliver. And this was done on a relatively large scale so what benefits were realized translated to some very big numbers. Perhaps the most important benefit, at least in terms of returning concrete financial savings and fundamentally improving the quality of the information services being provided, was the dramatic reduction of content redundancy.


Content in most organizations exists in a state of unbridled redundancy. If there is one version of a warning statement being managed and translated there will likely be a hundred. In this case, there were often thousands of identical components being managed and translated in parallel. Eliminating this redundancy, making it leaner, saved over a $100 million dollars a year in this one example. And the dollars saved were not the only story because by eliminating the content redundancy the number of documentation errors was dramatically reduced. And probably the most important consideration of all was the fact that by eliminating the content redundancy and raising the intelligence of the managed content components, a fundamental change could be introduced that would see content processes fully integrated with the system engineering processes that were continually modifying the equipment platforms the documentation needed to describe.


My favorite anecdote from this case study pertains to the publication of a large parts manual which historically took 18 months to republish. This manual, in being managed the old no-so-intelligent way, was, as you can imagine, almost completely useless because it was always a couple of years out-of-date. When questions arose, the mechanics would typically phone headquarters to ask the equipment lifecycle management office about what parts they should use or order. Once the content was rendered “intelligent”, the republishing of this manual went from taking 18 months to 18 minutes. And the people responsible for providing up-to-date parts information to the field units joked that the 18 minutes coincided with coffee break because it was a fully automated process that then produced an online reference tool that was “continually up-to-date”. That’s intelligent content in action.


The Content Wrangler: Are there any examples you can point to of intelligent content on the web?


Joe Gollner: An example of intelligent content in action onIine would point to HP printer products division and the support resources they supply to customers. My good friend Rahel Bailie gave a great talk last year where she explicitly used HP support environment as an interactive illustration of several things being done well. As usual, I acted up in the presentation – this time blushing, fanning myself and getting all misty because she was showcasing one of my customers. A couple of years ago my team had done a substantial amount of work for HP renovating the intelligent content infrastructure that underlies these online support services. Now our work was made infinitely easier by two factors – one was that HP really did have their proverbial act together, and the other was that the previous integrator who had designed the initial system (many years before) had done a spectacularly good job (how often does that happen and how often does one integrator say that of another’s work).

HP printer products division uses intelligent content principles and technologies to better serve their customers.

The Content Wrangler: That HP support site is an excellent example. I’ve heard Rahel and others point to it as an example of how to use intelligent content to support your customers on the web. Do you know of any useful online resources you think our readers might find useful in understanding intelligent content?


Joe Gollner: In terms of where to look for more information, I would first point readers to the Intelligent Content 2010 conference. Somewhat unabashedly I would point people to my blog posts on this topic and specifically those falling under the xContent category. I also content that my whitepaper on this topic remains a pretty good place to start.


The Content Wrangler: Is there anything else you’d like to share?


Joe Gollner: I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Palm Springs at Intelligent Content 2010. I am especially looking forward to any debates that might break out – as they did last year.


The Content Wrangler: I’m sure I don’t know anything about any debates. LOL Thanks for your time today, Joe. We appreciate you taking some time to help our readers better understand intelligent content. See you in Palm Springs.


Joe Gollner will present Intelligent Content Management, at Intelligent Content 2010, February 25-26 in Palm Springs, CA.

An imaginative and informative video from SDL designed to help people understand the basics of Global Information Management. The video, done in the style of the popular “In Plain English” series of instructional videos from the folks at Common Craft, uses a small set of characters the company calls SDL Buddies that remind me of the little Fisher Price people we played with as children.

By Alex de Campi

Valentine: An original supernatural thriller set during Napoleon’s retreat from Russia

Imagine a graphic novel series, released every month simultaneously in 14 languages and across all major wireless platforms (Kindle, EPUB, Android, iPhone), hopefully soon via the web and, eventually, in collected print editions. Every month, you pay 99 cents and get 70-75 screens of action, adventure and suspense. In its first fortnight after launch, in the difficult final weeks of December and with no marketing and without all our distributors yet on stream, the first episode had 5,000 downloads — of which English was in the minority. (There were over 100 downloads in Irish, which some call a “dead” language! And Latin is next…seriously.)


So, what is this publication and what innovative publishing house is behind it, you might ask? It’s Valentine­ — an original supernatural thriller set during Napoleon’s retreat from Russia that I am co-writing with artist Christine Larsen — and, at the moment, none. It’s just two American girls who got in over their heads.


Valentine became what it is today as a result of philosophizing about future models of publishing, and our real-life needs to have the book start paying for itself quickly. This was one of the reasons for choosing wireless distribution: it’s easier to sell downloads on phones and eReaders than charge for content on a website.


We are a Creative Commons work, which means that we acknowledge that there will be what some people may refer to as “stealing” but honestly, we’d prefer folks just enjoy the story rather than be demonized for how they obtained it. Hey, their sins may be scarlet, but at least our book is read. We’re also deliberately setting our price point very low (99 cents, versus $3.99 for a US comic book of similar length/content) to entice purchasers.

The creators of Valentine deliberately set the price point at 99 cents -- versus $3.99 for a US comic book of similar length/content -- to entice purchasers.

To my mind, the three most interesting aspects of how we are publishing Valentine are: the translations, the multiplicity of distributors per format, and the flexibility/scalability of the model, which allows us to dovetail nicely with the traditional publishing model.


The translations came about because in my other life as a filmmaker, I am always complaining about how not releasing films simultaneously in all geographies and all formats is basically what causes “piracy,” — a corporate term for “people wanting to see a film but having no other affordable way of doing so other than torrenting it.”


So if you’re going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk, right? I also have a lot of friends around the world with whom I like to talk comics, and having written for French comics publishers and being a devotee of Japanese comics (to name but two markets) I am very aware of how comparatively tiny the English-language comics market is. Hell, there are individual French bandes dessinée and individual tankubon that regularly outsell per volume the entire annual output of the US comic book industry.


To find our translators, I put messages up on Twitter and Facebook. It really was that simple. Our first six or so translators were friends of mine; the next seven ranged from friends of friends to complete strangers. Most have professional translating experience. The translators receive 50% of the net sales of the book in their language, which gives them an incentive to blog, tweet and otherwise market the hell out of Valentine. Everyone has been warned though that 50% of our net sales for the first nine months or thereabouts is unlikely to earn them more than enough to buy a cup of coffee.

Translators of Valentine receive 50% of the net sales of the book (in the languages into which they translate) which gives translators an incentive to market the book.

I can’t say enough good things about the translation team; they are amazing individuals (they range from an Anglo-Italian pop starlet and a Serbian artist to one of Rolling Stone’s Brazilian correspondents) and, for something organized via Twitter, there has been absolutely zero drama or flake factor. (Actually, that’s a lie. My first Spanish translator went AWOL, but a good friend, the artist Felipe Sobreiro in Colombia, stepped in at short notice.) The translations come in on time, perfectly done; clarification is often asked for and given — a loose network of individuals acting to an extremely high, professional standard.


Another exciting thing about Valentine is the relative frictionlessness of wireless distribution. We have two “publishers” for iPhone: Comixology and Robot Comics. We could add more if desired; there is no exclusivity. I always say this is like having your comic book published by DC and Marvel at the same time — or Glenat and Casterman, or Kodansha and Shogakukan. As we really start hitting the eReader stores we will have the same distribution reach (though not the same marketing muscle) as any major publisher. In today’s publishing world, you have to be everywhere people look.

Valentine is available from the iTunes Store

And that also means, eventually, landing our product on store bookshelves. I love printed books. Part of the thinking behind Valentine was how to achieve three things: an immersive, high-quality reader experience specific to small-screen devices such as the iPhone; a true right-to-left reading experience for our Japanese, Hebrew, and (eventually) Arabic readers as well as our native left-to-right; and an equally good reader experience in our eventual printed collections. The idea of publishing Valentine as a paper book was embedded in our plans from the very start.


Each “screen” is a stand-alone comics panel. There are no “pages” of multiple panels, just infinitely flexible single panels which act as building blocks, shown singly on iPhone screens or rearranged to a traditional comics page for a book. Episode 01 opens with a five-panel panorama of a battlefield that not only creates a wonderful feeling of movement and space when reading on the iPhone, it raises the quality of the print version, where that five-panel spread will become nearly ten digest-sized splash pages.


Though there is no animation or “motion comics” in Valentine, because we are basically dealing with panels of all the same size and orientation — panels shaped like a cinema screen — we have created a very cinematic experience for the reader, in our expression of space and time.


I am beyond excited for when we reach the first major “break” in the Valentine story, at the end of Episode 08, when we will have the first volume of the story complete and ready to look for a publisher — or indeed publishers, as I doubt one will be able to handle all our language editions. (We already have interest in the US edition, but are actively looking for overseas publishers…write me.) The story is set to run to 24 episodes, which in book terms will equate to three volumes of 250-300 page full-color digest size graphic novels.


Don’t get me wrong. It’s difficult. I work four days a week at a bottom-level job to pay my rent, and I could really use those days to improve the Valentine website, work on our marketing, and write my next series. We make mistakes. We are very much learning as we go along. But sometimes I pause and look back over what we’ve accomplished so far, and it strikes me just what a giant thing a small, informal group of people has achieved. And we have so many exciting places still to go! Episode 04 of Valentine is out on February 17th for iPhone, Kindle, Android, and eReader.


[Note] This article reprinted with permission of the author. It originally appeared in Publishing Perspectives magazine.

This video was used to open the Mark Logic 2009 User Conference. It’s an amazing presentation that tells the story of humans and the paradigm-shifting information explosion we find ourselves in today. When the video ended, the crowd went wild with applause. I’ll have to admit, I’ve never seen such response from an audience, not even to a great presentation delivered by a human opening keynote presenter.

Watch the video and let us know what you think.

And, consider attending the Mark Logic 2010 User Conference, May 4-6, 2010 in San Francisco.

Interview with Gabor Fari, Microsoft Life Sciences by Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

The Content Wrangler: Hello, Gabor. Tell us a little about yourself and your experience in the content industry.

Gabor: I am a Chemical Engineer by training. I became fascinated with software a little over 10 years into my career, before I made the switch to the software industry. To me, building software solutions is still pretty much engineering, and my approach is to build solutions block by block.

Gabor Fari, Microsoft Life Sciences

I have been working in the enterprise content management industry for over 10 years. I am constantly thinking about how to remove the road blocks to effective content management. Part of the challenges are technology issues, and many of the rest have to do with managing people and change. I am a contributing member of the Document and Records Management SIAC at DIA (Drug Information Association) and the OASIS DITA Pharmaceutical Content Sub-Committee.

The Content Wrangler: Where do you work? Tell us a little about your firm, the markets you serve, and the products and services you offer.


Gabor: I work for Microsoft on our Life Sciences team. I am the driver behind the Intelligent Content Framework (ICF) initiative. The idea is to implement a people-ready approach to structured content authoring and dynamic publishing, using the Microsoft tools that many people use everyday, i.e. Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office.


The Content Wrangler: Intelligent Content is a hot topic today, but many people don’t understand what it is or why it matters. From your perspective, what is intelligent content? What makes it so smart? And, why do organizations need it?


Gabor: That is a great question. I have read a lot of definitions about Intelligent Content. I think Ann Rockley and Joe Gollner have the best definition of Intelligent Content, and it would be redundant to quote them here. Another way to look at it: Intelligent Content is where we need to move to, in the Era of Dumb Content.


[Editor's note: See "What is Intelligent Content?" by Ann Rockley and "The Emergence of Intelligent Content" by Joe Gollner.]


The Content Wrangler: Creating intelligent content certainly seems like a good idea. Can you share with us a few examples of how intelligent content can help an organization to be faster, leaner, make more money, reduce expenses, reduce risk, or serve it’s clients better?

Intelligent Content Practices and Technologies can help new drugs get to market faster and save lives, Fari says.

Gabor: The best example I can think of is in my domain: what if a pharmaceutical company could complete all the documentation necessary to finish a submission to regulatory authorities (a New Drug Application, for example) 6 months faster than they do today using ‘Dumb Content’ approaches. Most importantly, medication could reach the population so much faster. And secondly, consider the competitive advantage a pharmaceutical company would gain by getting to market faster.


The Content Wrangler: Are there any examples you can point to of intelligent content on the web?


Gabor: I am mostly focused on Intranet applications at the moment, but I have seen a number of ‘Citizen Self-service Portals’ that are applying Intelligent Content approaches to Content-Centric applications such as dynamically generating permits, tax statements etc.


The Content Wrangler: Do you know of any useful online resources you think our readers might find useful in understanding intelligent content?


Gabor: I would recommend “The Emergence of Intelligent Content” by Joe Gollner and Document Engineering by Robert Glushko and Tim McGrath.


The Content Wrangler: Many of our readers might not be that familiar with your products and services, do you have any knowledge resources you’d like them to know about?


Gabor: You can keep track of my efforts working with the Microsoft Intelligent Content Framework here. You can also find me on Twitter.


Gabor Fari will be presenting a keynote address, Intelligent Content: An Emerging Trend in Enterprise Content Management, at Intelligent Content 2010, February 25-26 in Palm Springs, CA.

Related Posts:

• BumpTop: A New Desktop Computing Paradigm
• Microsoft Surface: Parody Video
• ABC News Explores Localization and Translation: Welocalize Featured
• Bill Gates Last Gig
• Understanding Twitter

Successful Global Content Management (Webinar) February 18, 2010: 7-8:30pm CET; 6-7:30pm GMT; 1-2:30pm EST; 10-11:30am PST

As products move beyond borders the need for global content increases and with that comes the critical requirement for global content management. Global content management allows you to ensure brand consistency, implement a global content strategy, and manage content on a global basis.


Management of a single site is a sometimes complex task, but management of multiple global sites is even more complex and requires a well thought out plan, appropriate technology and clear processes.


Join The Content Wrangler February 18, 2010 for “Successful Global Content Management”, our free, 90-minute webinar in which content management guru Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group, will share with you the ten steps necessary to launch a successful global content management initiative. You’ll also hear from the CEO of e-Spirit, Joern Bodemann, why content management system usability is a “must have”, not an option.


Register tody!

By Alan J. Porter

Alan J Porter

[This post is the first in a planned series of articles that examine how the traditional book industry could benefit from adopting XML.]

Yesterday I posted on Twitter a couple of figures from the Association of American Publishers report of November 2009 book sales. The good news was that sales overall had in fact increased by 10.9%, but what really stood out was that in November of last year the sales of eBooks exploded showing a 199.9% increase and that they now account for about 2.5% of the revenue generated by book publishing. When you consider that most eBooks are cheaper than their paper equivalents, then the market share based on actual sales numbers is going to be even higher.

Sales of the electronic version have out paced hard copy sales 4:1

I’m not sure why I was surprised as the industry figures in some way reflect my own recent experience. Back in September of last year I took the step of offering my biography of the Beatles’ teenage years, “Before They Were Beatles”, as an electronic book on the Kindle. As I no longer had to worry about covering print costs, carrying inventory, processing orders or shipping, I posted the book at a greatly reduced price. Sales of the electronic version have been growing each month, and on average in the last five months sales of the electronic version have out paced hard copy sales by a factor of 4:1.

All this sounds great doesn’t it? – On the surface it is, BUT it could be so much more.

When I look at my book on the Kindle, or on my iPhone, I am frankly disappointed in it. The reason? eBooks and eBook readers today are little more than simple electronic page turners.

eBooks and eBook readers today are little more than simple electronic page turners.

But it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think what they could be like. My book references lots of early recordings of various incarnations of the group that would become The Beatles – wouldn’t it be great to click on a link and actually hear those recordings, or even compare early versions with later versions recorded at the height of their fame. How about when I mention their encounters with other musicians? It would be cool to be able to click on a name and get a snapshot biography, links to books about them and access their music catalog. How about accessing photographs of 1950s Liverpool street scenes, or being able to tour the Fab Four’s childhood homes?

And it’s not only non-fiction where I see these sort of enhancements, imagine reading your favorite novelist, and when a character mentions a location being able to click through to the Google street view, or when they eat at a nice restaurant being able to access the recipe. Ever wanted to know exactly how to make the type of vodka martini that is best served shaken, not stirred? It could be just a click away.

There is no technical reason why this sort of interactive book couldn’t be done today.

As well as being an author of books on various aspects of pop-culture that are published in the traditional model, I’ve also been active in the technical publishing industry for more years than I care to count.

Where eBooks and platforms like the Kindle, the Nook, etc. are now is where the technical documentation industry was 15 years ago – simple electronic page turners.

But take a look at what large engineering companies, the military, and others are doing with their technical documentation today – they are delivering IETMS (Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals), books with links in the text that can jump you to the related part on an illustration, call up part numbers (even do the automatic ordering of that part for you), or call up animations, video and a whole plethora of supporting information.

Technical publications, training, and service departments have been using XML technologies for years to streamline content production processes and to create multiple information products from a single source of content.

How is that achieved? Through the use of mark-up languages, and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) in particular. Using XML allows us to tag the content in such a way that the display devices can create links, or so information can be extracted and passed from one system to another.

With XML you can not only format the text to look how you want, without having to rewrite or reformat the source each time, but you can use it to automatically generate navigation aids like table of contents, lists of items in the content, indexes, plus all the hyperlinking that adds real value.

Over the last few years I’ve offered to write a few books using XML markup, but the publishers have always politely declined, preferring to stick to a system they know. A process that has changed little since the days of the typewriter – yes the tools have changed, but the process is still fundamentally the same; largely because traditional publishers still see the physical book as the product, and not the content.

But today content is king, and we need to make that content available across all platforms, and to be able to add value to it, and that means mark-up.

[In the next post I’ll compare the differences in the workflow between traditional publishing and technical publishing and look at how the cost of moving to XML is a lot less than most publishers believe.]

About the Author

Alan J. Porter a 20 year veteran of the corporate communications industry is founder of 4Js Group LLC a consulting and services company that specializes in combining creative talent with business expertise to help companies tell their story. He is also the regular writer of the monthly Disney*Pixar “World of CARS” comic book series.

His latest book, “WIKI: Grow Your Own for Fun and Profit” will be published by XML Press in May 2010.

Blog: THE CONTENT POOL http://4jsgroup.blogspot.com
Email: ajp@4jsgroup.com
Phone: 512-968-7362
Twitter: @4jsgroup

By Dev Ganesan, President and CEO of Aptara

Dev Ganesan, President and CEO, Aptara

Today’s content consumers are voracious digital omnivores, desiring to feed on all types of electronic content — from Twitter tweets to YouTube videos, from iPhone apps to Facebook updates, from mp3s to eBooks. Yet traditional publishers, particularly trade book publishers, are not prepared to serve digitally savvy audiences the variety of electronic products they demand. That’s because their production processes are traditionally rooted in outdated print publishing practices that are severely inadequate for tackling today’s publishing challenges.


In order to profit – literally – from the new digital markets, publishers must rethink the way they create, manage, publish, and deliver content. They must re-engineer their processes to create more flexibility and guarantee a sustainable and certain future. They must re-imagine a production process that frees their content to be transformed — on-demand — into whatever new formats, devices, and uses consumers require, now and for the future.


Continuing to retrofit existing print-based content workflows is not only impractical, overly expensive, error-prone, and unnecessarily complicated, it’s also not an efficient, flexible, or sustainable business practice. Fred Ciporen, former publisher of Publishers Weekly, recently echoed similar sentiments to an industry group preparing for the American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference.


To become lean and robust, publishers have to recognize the shortcomings of undertaking each new publishing challenge from scratch. For example, considering eBook creation as a project at the end of the print publishing lifecycle artificially and exponentially increases production costs. Continuing such practices misses the essential benefits of digitization. It condemns the company to the past, forgoing the future while ignoring consumer demand.


Freeing content from formatting and making it possible to easily deliver content to any device on any platform in any format—print, web, or mobile—is not a new idea. Organizations have been doing it for years through leveraging the power of XML.

“It’s both surprising and ironic that trade publishers, in particular, have yet to adopt XML-first or XML-centric workflows,” said Fred Ciporen.

It’s time for traditional publishers to follow suit − with a content-centered XML-first publishing approach. Getting there is not the difficult or disruptive process that many publishing executives have assumed. For instance, innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word. (XML is an open content standard that drastically reduces the effort required of publishing houses to create eBooks — and every other type of content. XML is designed to help publishers break the dependency of content on proprietary formats and specific devices. XML content can be easily repurposed, reused, shared, sorted, aggregated with other content, and automatically processed, published, and delivered, often on-demand.)


“Fortune 1000 companies have been adopting XML publishing not because it’s cool and trendy, but because doing so saves them millions of dollars and provides measurable benefits,” says content management guru Ann Rockley. “It’s seen as a competitive advantage; an approach designed to help publishers respond quickly to both new business opportunities and threats from competitors.”


Note: See Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur and Steve Manning (New Riders Publishing) for details on how to plan for and implement a content-first strategy.


Technical communications departments in the aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, life sciences, financial, and publishing industries use a content-first XML publishing approach to create, publish, and deliver their own version of books: product-specific user guides, product manuals, support Web sites, and online help systems from a single repository of content, thanks to XML. Corporate training departments and universities use the same methods to create role-specific XML-based training and eLearning content. Some publishers may be surprised to learn that their own organizations are already using this approach to create in-house documentation and training materials.


Though there are few examples of Trade publishers adopting XML-first workflows, below are two examples of Educational publishing houses that are thinking creatively and benefiting:


John Wiley & Sons has re-engineered their approach to publishing with the advent of Wiley Custom Select, an online portal that provides educators with the ability to create their own custom text books. Teachers select content they desire from any of the products in the Wiley library, arrange it in the order they desire, upload their own content (should they desire to do so), and, with a few clicks, automatically format, publish, and deliver the content into a custom eBook. All of this is made possible using XML.





O’Reilly Media and the Pearson Technology Group joined forces to create Safari Books Online. The premise was simple: compile the best technology books from the leading authors and publishers into an on-demand digital library that technology, digital media, and creative professionals could quickly and easily search for reliable, definitive answers to mission-critical questions. Content downloaded from Safari Books Online is optimized for mobile devices, computers, or other reading devices, and many titles are available as eBooks. All of this is also made possible through XML.





“It’s both surprising and ironic that trade publishers, in particular, have yet to adopt XML-first or XML-centric workflows,” said Fred Ciporen. “Surprising, because they have the most to gain from re-engineering their publishing approaches, and ironic because their titles and products are more ideally suited for such workflows than most other types of publications.” The benefits to the publisher — and the reader — are many, including:

• Faster time-to-market
• Indefinite extension of products’ shelf-life
• Greater and more nimble responsiveness to competitive threats and new business opportunities
• Cost savings through more efficient utilization of human and financial resources
• Ability to automatically combine and deliver various types of content on-demand
• Flexibility in preparing content in new formats (Web, mobile, social media, eBook) for inclusion in fast-growing third party eBook distribution networks like Amazon.com, iTunes, app stores
• Ability to quickly develop enhanced and engaging interactive reading experiences that are not possible with print-based products

Regardless of publisher type, there’s no avoiding today’s bottom line: in order to compete in the digital age, publishers must design a process that allows them to sustainably profit from digital content distribution.


Although eBook challenges may be new, thankfully their solution already exists. The Trade industry is well armed with proven multi-channel, content-centered publishing approaches that deliver sizable, real cost savings and increased margins.


It’s time for Trade publishers to take a fresh look at XML-first workflows. It is the best and only content strategy designed for the present and the future – while establishing a solid foundation on which to profitably operate a publishing business in the digital economy.


[This article was originally published by TeleRead, and is reprinted with permission of the author.]


About the Author
Dev Ganesan is the President and CEO of Aptara, a digital e-book conversion and digital publishing company headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia.

Join us at SDL Innovate 2010: Strategies for Delivering Content and Products to Global Markets in Santa Clara, CA – February 9-10. Learn about localization, translation, internationalization, structured content, global multi-channel marketing, and attend half a dozen sessions dedicated to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Join us. It’s free! We like free.

By Scott Smith, Invisible Fist

Each time I’ve sat down to write about Microsoft SharePoint, I’ve experienced a sensation that is the polar opposite of writer’s block. Indeed, there is much to say about SharePoint. The current ‘deluxe’ edition, (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server aka MOSS), is a big, feature-rich solution, developed by a gigantic company that has bankrolled an aggressive marketing campaign. Additionally, there are many Microsoft partners and bloggers helping to spread the SharePoint gospel. There is also a proportionally large population of SharePoint detractors and companies that profess to offer solutions that rival those of MOSS.

Some time ago, after decades of experience with the Macintosh, and several years in supporting Unix systems, I found myself working for a Microsoft development partner. Thus, I can assure you that I have already received my life’s ration of SharePoint hype. I have also seen a fair amount of unwarranted criticism of SharePoint. Neither unbridled praise nor baseless criticism are helpful, if you, the content specialist, or your clients are considering SharePoint as a possible solution.

To add another layer of confusion, Microsoft is scheduled to release a new version, SharePoint 2010. this year. We’re already seeing a fresh wave of SharePoint hype, and SharePoint hate.

In this article

• What is SharePoint? (really, I’m going to try to answer that)
• What are some of the merits and drawbacks of SharePoint?
• How much does SharePoint cost? (I’ll give you the final answer right now: it’s complicated. However, I will try to provide some guidance on the factors that may impact SharePoint’s price tag for you.)
• What types of resources are available for to help ensure successful SharePoint implementations?

I’ll explore SharePoint, attempt to reduce your uncertainty about the product, and help you understand what it means for the content manager. As stated, SharePoint is a gargantuan solution, this article is merely a flyover of SharePoint’s features and functionality.

Though there is new version of SharePoint forthcoming, this article’s focus is on MOSS, with some discussion of other members of the SharePoint family, including commentary on the new SharePoint 2010.

Really Brief Background on SharePoint’s Genealogy

Some of the confusion surrounding SharePoint is natural because there are several different flavors of SharePoint. I won’t go through the entire family tree, but I do want to clarify that there is a version of SharePoint that was bundled with Windows Server operating systems. This is known as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). WSS offers some basic portal and document-management services at no additional charge to owners of the Windows Server license.

MOSS, released in 2007, is an amalgam of several key Microsoft server technologies, including:

• SharePoint
• Content Management Server
• Forms Server

MOSS provides the same collaborative technologies as WSS, with value-adds including web content publishing. The ‘Enterprise” edition of MOSS provides enhanced search capabilities, and the means to extract content from legacy systems.

What Does MOSS Do?

When asked what MOSS can do, without hesitation, I can honestly say that “MOSS can do a whole lot of things.” There are indeed many things that MOSS does pretty well out-of-the-box. Additionally, there are things that it can do reasonably well with minor configurations. Finally, there are attributes of MOSS that are probably not going to be on par with your expectations. While desired functionality might be achieved with custom development, this may not be the most cost-effective tactic for you or your clients.

The glut of literature making claims about MOSS is highly confusing. You may have encountered articles and blogs that profess that MOSS provides:

• Web Content Management (WCM)
• Social Networking
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Records Management (RM)
• Enterprise Portal
• Document Management Suite (DM)
• Web 2.0 Collaboration (including blogs wikis and discussion forums)
• Digital Asset Management (DAM)

While each of the above descriptors are technically true (errr, possible), such labeling is of little value as you consider solutions to your communications challenges. Let me boil it down to this:

MOSS is a content management system.

With every digital photo, every key stroke…you are making content. At issue is whether MOSS can manage your content types and whether it can do so in a manner that meets with your needs.

I realize that content management (CM) is a term that is rather elusive in its own right. So, to provide some structure to our conversation about MOSS, I offer this rather simplistic definition of CM:

Content management is about who gets, what, when and how in an organization.

My fellow political science minors might recognize the inspiration of this definition: the scholar Harold Lasswell.

Essentially any content management solution should address the following organizational challenges:

• Who gets your content? (security)
  • Content consumers: Students, customers, employees…
  • Content contributors: Artists, photographers, videographers, writers…
  • Content approvers: Editors, managers…

• What content can they get? (content creation, repurposing and transformation)
  • Web pages
  • Documents
  • MPEGs

• When can they get the content? (content publishing and workflow)
  • When they browse: Content consumers
  • When they’re working on it: Content contributors
  • When it’s ready to be published: Content approvers
  • When they search: All users

• How do they get the content? (fulfillment)
  • Downloaded to desktop
  • Via email
  • Via FTP
  • Via iPhone

MOSS security: Who gets your content?

The MOSS security model is a bit confusing at first glance (and probably second glance, too), but with proper planning, an organization can make its content as open, or as restricted, as it chooses. By default, content access requires that users be authenticated; however, MOSS allows for anonymous access configuration. This permits content to be made available outside the organization, as in the case of a public website.

A deep-dive of security is beyond the scope of this article; thus let it suffice to say that SharePoint offers a range of user roles from full control to read-only access and that can be applied globally or to individual content items.

MOSS content creation, repurposing and transformation: What content can they get?

MOSS pages are built upon Microsoft’s ASP.Net framework, thus they support bundles of reusable code known as Web Parts. Similar to components (portlets, widgets, gadgets…) that you may have used with other content management systems, Web Parts enable eligible users to create or aggregate content on a MOSS Page.

MOSS also provides the capability to create many types of document libraries, as well as lists — things like calendars and announcements — that you can embed directly in a page, the same way that you would do with a Web Part.

Some of the types of content that you can manage and deliver with MOSS include:

• Browser-ready pages – You can create web content from scratch or you can choose from the numerous sites templates that are available. You can modify the page layouts and master pages (look-and-feel) with SharePoint Designer to suit your own needs.
• Documents - MOSS document libraries provide for storage and metadata classification of document files. Documents can be downloaded, or can be created/edited in the library with Microsoft Office products. When you edit a file in a document library, you can modify metadata attributes directly from the Office tool you’re using.
• PowerPoint Slides - Interesting feature that allows you to upload entire presentations that are stored as individual slides. You then have ability to select, and reorder, individual slides to generate a new presentation (requires Office 2007).
• “Web 2.0” collaboration – This includes wikis, blogs, discussion forums and social networking.
• Surveys – This is probably one of the most underused content features in MOSS. With the survey tool you can easily create survey questions and a variety of response formats (text, single- or multiple-response).
• Rich media – Images and video files can be stored in a library, thus allowing for descriptive metadata, version control and workflow.
• Content from legacy systems – The enterprise edition of MOSS permits aggregation from disparate systems (like an ERP system) by the Business Data Catalogue Web Part (requires customization).

With base-level configurations, you also will have some ability to convert content, on-the-fly, from one format to another. However, you will only be able to convert content from one  Microsoft Office format to another, or to HTML

MOSS content publishing and workflow: When can they get the content?

One of the key challenges to an organization is that content is made available when, and only when, it is approved for public consumption. It’s surprising how often workflow is accomplished manually in some organizations. For example, content might be routed–through e-mails, or printed pages–for approval before the ‘final’ version is sent to a web specialist tasked with “adding it to the site.” MOSS can help to automate this process.

MOSS has features to ensure that content has gone through proper quality control before it is available to end users. This includes content status (‘draft’ vs. ‘published’ states) and approval workflow. Content creators (and site administrators) can see sites and documents when they are in a ‘draft’ state, but end users can only see the content when it has been approved and published.

MOSS provides content-approval workflow capabilities out-of-the-box. These are rather simplistic, but fit the needs of many organizations. A MOSS workflow requires that content be ‘approved’ by an eligible user (an administrator or approver) before it can be viewed by end users. In the event that more complex workflows (integrating with other information systems, for example) are required, MOSS allows for workflow customization.

MOSS fulfillment: How do they get the content?

There are an array of methods by which users can find content in MOSS, but the primary means are browsing and search. Users who are familiar with the site’s taxonomy, or are intrepid clickers, can browse to a specific page, where they might download a document or view calendar items. Others may rely on MOSS search functionality to return results based on users’ input.

MOSS search service will index all of your site content, including documents housed in your libraries. You will also have the ability to index documents on your file servers. This is a handy feature because you will have access to a robust document search — even if documents have not yet been migrated to a MOSS document library.

MOSS’s search service can index external content that can is available via the Internet. Thus, you can configure MOSS search service to index public-facing websites that are relevant to your users.

Strengths

Some key areas in which MOSS excels:

• A wide variety of ways to create, manage, and share content – MOSS provides the means to create web pages, documents, surveys and many types of “Web 2.0” content. You have the potential to solve many business problems with MOSS out of the box.
• Document libraries allow to you better describe your documents than you are afforded with storage on the file server - You can customize metadata for documents, which can make the document more findable for your users. Furthermore, metadata descriptors enable the development of custom document sorting and can be leveraged for document archiving, workflows and security (with customization).
• Simple site brand management - If your organization has expertise in cascading style sheets, applying your own look and feel will be a relatively simple endeavor. You can see many great examples of custom-branded MOSS sites here.
• Version control, publishing state and workflow are available for of all forms of content – Publishing states and workflow help to ensure that content is in front of the right eyes at the right time. There is nothing better than the ability to “roll back” to a previous edition of your content in a pinch.
• Private collaboration areas - MOSS “My Sites” allow authenticated users to create documents, calendars, announcements in their personal workspaces, that they can choose to share with others in the organization. My Sites provide the added utility of providing a safe area where user can become acquainted with SharePoint concepts and procedures for creating content.
• SharePoint Designer makes design changes easy - Designer is a descendent of Microsoft’s Front Page, that is tuned for SharePoint. In addition to facilitating changes to a site’s look-and-feel, Designer offer features such as developing site-usage reports and Section 508-compliance accessibility checking.
• Many integration opportunities with other Microsoft solutions – With relative ease, MOSS can be joined to Project Management Server, Exchange Messaging Server and other Microsoft solutions.

Some Drawbacks

Some areas where SharePoint is lacking:

• SharePoint is Microsoft-centric – Should I get you some smelling salts? Certain features are only available ony with Office products. For example, the ability to edit metadata from a document, will be unavailable with products outside the Microsoft family. If you work in the creative services, you likely have Adobe products in your quiver. While you can still work with SharePoint libraries, you will have to forgo some of the advanced editing features available with the Office suite. 

From an IT standpoint, Microsoft-centricity means that there are strict limits to choices among Web servers (Microsoft IIS Web server) and database servers (Microsoft SQL Server) that will work with SharePoint. If you are already a Microsoft shop, then this is no problem. If you are not yet (nor do you intend to be) a Microsoft shop, then these restrictions might be show-stoppers.
• SharePoint has a really (really, really) confusing licensing structure - Early in my career as a MOSS consultant I attended a seminar in which Microsoft showed a slide that illustrated its SharePoint licensing structure. To borrow from Facebook lingo, “It’s complicated”, to say the least.
• Creating accessible content will take some effort - Many of the conveniences available in SharePoint, such as the ease of adding content with Web Parts and lists, can throw a curveball at accessibility. You will require custom-development expertise to ensure 508-compliance (an added expense).
• Inadequate support for traditional digital asset management services - While you do have some ability to manage high-resolution photography and video, MOSS’s preview capabilities, limited conversion options, and file-size limits will likely frustrate your graphic specialists.
• Social networking functionality is likely to be disappointing for your users - When the term “social networking” is used in consideration of collaborative solutions, stakeholders soon have visions of FaceBook, MySpace, and Linkedin dancing in their heads. MOSS is probably not going to fulfill their wishes.
• Batch features (upload, metadata-editing, fulfillment) are a bit on the clunky side – While there are settings and views that make batch edits possible, they are rather difficult to use.
• Ability to create structured content is unlikely to meet the needs of those who require a component-content management system, which provides granular control of reusable content components, a must-have for many who are attempting to deliver personalized, dynamic XML content on demand.

Overcoming MOSS Obstacles

A lot of people are using MOSS. This isn’t an attempt to get you to succumb to peer pressure, but it does mean that a lot support (people, products and solutions) is available. To paraphrase The X-Files, the truth is (probably) out there.

Some reasons that MOSS may still be a possibility for you even if it comes up short out-of-the-box:

• There is a large body of literature—books, blogs, discussion forums on MOSS – You have instant access to information about everything MOSS — from the most basic tasks (such as creating a document library) to many that are rather complex (like development of a customized Web Part).
• Other, content companies are adopting the “if you can beat ‘em build a connector to them” philosophy to SharePoint – Many content companies have developed the means to integrate with SharePoint. For example, there are several solutions available that will deliver advanced rich media management (format repurposing, color management) for SharePoint. Those who are interested in component-content management, there are solutions available that can make a SharePoint portal work with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).
• There are Microsoft partners and independent consultants all over the globe available for customization projects of all sizes – Consultants can help you ensure 508-compliance, provide custom workflows, develop custom Web Parts, and much more.
• If you bump into a wall with SharePoint, chances are great that many others have, too. There is also a rather-strong possibility that someone has written a solution. Many of these are freely available at sites such as CodePlex.  A great example is the open-source SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) which adds e-learning capabilities to SharePoint. Numerous other solutions are available for purchase.

Coming Attractions

A major upgrade of SharePoint is due to be released this year – I haven’t actually taken SharePoint 2010 for a spin yet, but in the final version you can expect:

• A more elegant user interface – If you are already using Microsoft Office 2007 (formerly known as Office 12), this should be familiar. If you are not using Office 2007, you should expect a few days of foul language among your colleagues. It’s not a bad interface, just very different from the traditional Office look -and-feel.
• Tighter integration with the Office suite – For example, you can create a theme in PowerPoint, or Word and to apply it to a SharePoint site.
• Improvements to the social networking capabilities - This was an area of high focus in the upgrade. SharePoint 2010 is a great leap forward in the area of corporate social networking.
• Better support for traditional digital asset management (DAM) services - One thing that is a key addition is the integration of Silverlight (more Microsoft-centricity) for video streaming, and for image-zooming capabilities.

Key Questions Regarding SharePoint

1. Is SharePoint the right solution for my organization? To this, I offer a resounding “I don’t know!” It may very well be a good fit as is, or could be with some proper customization. Though I hope that in my descriptions of SharePoint’s strengths and drawbacks that I have helped to reduce your uncertainty.
2. If my organization or clients are convinced that SharePoint is the appropriate solution, should I wait for SharePoint 2010? I can’t answer that definitively for individual contexts, but my predisposition would be to wait. You probably want to avoid a scenario where you are migrating to MOSS and then upgrading to SharePoint 2010 later in the same year. My own preference would to wait until the release of a service pack upgrade from Microsoft, though if your organization is an early adopter, the rest of us owe you a debt of gratitude for blazing the trail.
3. How much does SharePoint cost? OK, I have been putting that one off, because it’s complicated. However, this price calculator from Bamboo Solutions is a really useful tool that will help determine what characteristics (concurrent users, CPUs) will increase or reduce your total costs. While the actual price-tag is going to between you and Microsoft, I will say this: If you are planning to use MOSS to host a public-facing site, consider baking a batch of cookies for your CFO before you submit the purchase order.
4. What can be done to help ensure a successful SharePoint project? I won’t lecture about best practices for a content management initiative. Much has been written on that topic. I feel that Ann Rockley’s book, “Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy” is a great reference for any such endeavor.

I can, however, offer a few guidelines for a SharePoint project:

• Try before you buy - I can’t overstate the value the proof-of-concept to help you make a better-informed decision about a complex information system. This allows your users to get some hands-on experience with SharePoint’s features. If a prospective vendor has the means to provide a MOSS sandbox for you, then you should insist upon that. Alternatively, you can obtain a trial license and set up a SharePoint server on your own infrastructure.
• Don’t skimp on the training - SharePoint is a big product, there is ample opportunity for your users to be confused. The most carefully architected, well-developed system that money can buy is meaningless if your users aren’t properly acquainted with your site’s functionality and comfortable with its usage.
• Listen to your users – The work doesn’t end when the site launches. You should provide mechanisms to allow your users to communicate with you to address usability issues and suggested site enhancements. There are several SharePoint features that you can leverage to help facilitate this dialogue (issues and tracking lists, wikis, discussion forums and surveys).

SharePoint is a growing force in the content management industry. As discussed it offers many ways to create and deliver content within the confines of a single organization or throughout the world. And despite weaknesses in some key areas, its presence is buttressed by a huge development community and numerous commercial software vendors offering solutions to extend SharePoint’s functionality. It’s hard to ignore.

However, it is important that content experts be able to separate SharePoint’s functionality from SharePoint hype in evaluating content management solutions. SharePoint is not for everybody. Forcing SharePoint to fit in an organization is painful, and costly.

Learn more

• The Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog

About the Author

Scott Smith offers 20 years of experience in the creation and delivery of content. His professional service includes production-team leadership, web consulting and management of digital assets of all forms.

In recent years Scott has gained an extensive knowledge of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Scott is especially interested in extending SharePoint’s functionality to include robust digital asset management (DAM) and e-learning.

He has experience in an array of contexts, including publishing and advertising, IT, web consulting, K-16 education and biotechnology.

Scott is currently working on his capstone project in fulfillment of his master’s degree in educational technology at Western Michigan University. The project will involve the design of a learning-management solution to facilitate the creation and delivery of accessible content for educational and commercial contexts.

You can learn more about Scott, here.