The place to begin is with the pain points.

Introducing database publishing

In one organization, we found a tiny group putting together product catalogs and price books for their dealers with a slow, expensive, and painstaking process. Basic product descriptions and benefits lists were combined with photographs of each product and tables of data copied manually from the price data in a corporate financial database. After the copy was assembled and approved, a graphic designer took six months using Adobe InDesign to carefully lay out each page. By the time the catalog was completed, the pricing data was already out of date. Each catalog was a chaotic mix of page layouts with stars, bars, explosions, and other “decorative” items strewn through hundreds of unique pages. The design chaos made it difficult to update the content with last minute changes. And, the customers had difficulty finding the precise products and prices they needed.

Figure 1: Existing catalog development process

Dynamic development process

So, how you overcome old school product catalog challenges? First, identify the common elements in the catalog copy and assist the catalog team in developing a standard. Overcoming allegiance to layout chaos means stressing the potential for cost cutting. The promise of faster turnaround and lower development costs can persuade even the most recalcitrant sales team of the benefits of standardized copy.

Next comes the design of a simplified authoring environment. The standard copy consists of a product name, a short description, and a benefits list. Each product is illustrated with one or more photographs. The result is a thoroughly simple design that could easily be developed by a single author.

The base for authoring becomes an XML/DITA editing tool that simplifies entering content. Every product description follows the exact same structure, a feature that increases information access and readability for the customers.

[Editors note: DITA refers to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human- and machine-readable.]

The most complex part of the new process is the design of a process to produce the pricing tables by drawing the data directly from the financial database. Once the required transforms are in place, each table is built automatically and appended to the content in the DITA topic.

For this project, we created transforms to develop custom indexes that make the information easier for dealers to find. Once the XSL-FO stylesheet was in place, a design and publishing process that once took months to complete was completed in minutes and eliminated the graphic-design costs. Once the copy is reviewed and approved, the printing takes about two weeks. However, this company is now moving to on-demand printing triggered by a specific dealer request.

Figure 2: New Catalog Publishing Process

The marketing and sales managers, who had been skeptical at first, saw the potential for additional catalogs. The second project was a non-US catalog with different prices, dealer discounts, and a more limited product set. Metadata allowed for easy selection of products for more limited markets, replacing the one-size-fits-all approach of the previous design process. The automated publishing process also enables the company to produce catalogs much more frequently than they have in the past.

The company plans to link the DITA topics and the publishing process to their e-commerce site and automated online purchasing process.

Taking automated publishing to the next level

But automating the publishing process and integrating XML structured text with data from a relational database is only the first step in catalog publishing. In another organization, we identified the potential for customized catalogs produced on-demand for a sales representative.

Once again, the basic information about a product is authored in DITA topics and stored in a component content management system along with the drawings and photographs required for the catalog.

The analysis of the catalog in this project included not only descriptive information but tables and graphs of data. The original presentation of the information was as chaotic as the first project. Every product section in the print catalog was unique and every page was individually designed. In some cases, product benefits lists and critical engineering data were truncated in order to fit the page layout.

Once again, the first step was standardization. Working with the marketing communications management, we identified a standard set of content for each product and designed a consistent layout to be produced through the DITA Open Toolkit and an XSL-FO stylesheet.

But the key question was how to get the sales representatives to use the source information to produce custom catalogs. We knew that sales representatives wanted to create unique catalogs for individual customers, rather than carrying around the huge catalog of the entire product line. They also wanted nothing to do with DITA topics and XML.

In response, we created a SharePoint interface that allows a sales person to select from a variety of options, including product name, industry type, and other key characteristics of the information. By simply clicking check boxes, each sales person creates a unique catalog that is fully formatted and immediately available for download and printing.

In a similar project some years earlier, we enabled the sales representative to use a simple, clickable interface on a website to select specific functionality for a product set and choose a cover page with the customer’s business name. Because the sales force was widely distributed, we even gave them the ability to select a printing facility nearby. All that was required of them was to drive to the printer and pick up the final catalogs for their next sales call.

Looking for opportunities

In most organizations, development of product catalogs and price books are cost-intensive, time-consuming, and tedious. They represent the ultimate static publishing. But the arguments for dynamic publishing of catalog content are easily persuasive to those watching out for the bottom line:

• Significantly reduce the time-to-market for catalog content from months to days
• Significantly reduce the cost of developing final catalog layout to the initial development of XSL-FO stylesheets
• Enable the development of custom catalogs from the same source content
• Enable on-demand printing of custom catalogs
• Ensure that pricing data is accurate and up-to-date, coming directly from purchasing databases
• Enable on-demand development of custom catalogs by individual sales representatives
• Link catalog content to e-commerce websites

No doubt there are many other opportunities for dynamic publishing in your organization. Your starting point is to develop a single source of all materials (text, images, and pricing data), free of formatting (XML/DITA), and presented to staff and customers through an intuitive and easily available user interface.

Mark Gross, President/CEO Data Conversion Laboratory

Data Conversion Laboratory, the company I founded, has been doing document conversion for thirty years and every once in a while I still get asked from someone I haven’t seen in a while “are you still doing that?” or “isn’t there software that does all that?”

The truth is that if it was easy, it would indeed be all automated, which is already the case for news feeds, financial transactions, and other standardized data flows. But when it comes to documents and books, creativity will not be bound by rules and style sheets, especially at deadline when one wants a certain look, and MS-word chooses not to cooperate. The truth is that a document can contain anything, and computer software doesn’t work well with ‘randomness’.

Even what to the human eye looks like a simple book – a book with simple text, no tables, and no links – still contains complications that will thwart software not meant to deal with it. In a recent test of three free software packages, not one book came out perfectly. Each and every one of them had problems. To complicate matters, each book had different problems (recorded webinar includes examples).

Let’s get flexible

In order to deliver the high quality, customized information that consumers expect – and in some cases, demand – we’re going to have to start thinking seriously about creating automated streams of standardized content – something most organizations don’t have today.

For organizations with large collections of information to distribute and monetize their content, the clearest solution seems to be adopting a flexible, standardized content model and maintaining that content in an appropriate type of content management system. In our mobile-connected, always-on world, this means creating and delivering content able to customers on the device of their choosing. It also means future-proofing that content so it will be ready to be quickly and efficiently prepared and delivered to the many devices that have yet to hit the market.

There are many content standards to choose from: HTML, EPUB, XML, PDF, and DITA. But which is one is right for your purposes? For your audience? For the audience of the future? Will you need to support more than one?

For now, let’s assume that some robust form of XML will be the right thing to store your information – the specific form best for your content will need some more discussion. However, it seems that for most large collections, moving to one of the simpler formats like HTML or EPUB can be a risky investment due to the lack of flexibility they offer.

EPUB, for example, now on version 3.0, is specialized to the needs of electronic books as they currently exist. It’s very possible that all the features of your content are not easily definable within the EPUB standard, and are not displayable on current devices. If you limit yourself to converting to the current version of EPUB you may be limiting your content as new capabilities, not currently envisioned, are introduced. The same is true of HTML, which is designed for display of information.

To preserve your investment in converting to a standardized format the safer approach is to convert and store the content in a more robust version of XML, such as DITA, DocBook, NLM, TEI, S1000D, and various other XML standards created for specific purposes. If properly designed, you would then be able to automatically convert your content to EPUB, HTML, PDF, and other final formats in the future.

OK, why is it so difficult to convert?

If everyone wrote their documents with the intent that they be standardized and converted, life would be easy (and we wouldn’t have that much to do). But the reality is most content is not easily extractable, and lacks the details needed for a full conversion. Much needs to be corrected, and much needs to be inferred based on the content.

As an example, let’s look at the difficulties in extracting content from PDF files. Since PDF is a print format, PDF documents are typically less-structured versions of their word-processor originals. While PDF content is laid out to look good, it includes very little structure—that is, it contains few clues as to the function of text elements (e.g., paragraphs, spaces, line breaks) or how they ought to be displayed in a different context (for instance, an e-book). While converting thoroughly structured content to XML is straightforward, PDF doesn’t contain explicit structuring. But an even more basic problem has to do with properly extracting the content from the PDF to begin with.

Examples of problems you are likely to encounter with commercial packages include the following:

Incorrect Word Spaces

While spacing is usually extracted correctly, since PDF documents create spaces visually (i.e., they are not really labeled as “one standard space” or “two standard spaces”), spacing between words is sometimes misinterpreted by conversion software, causing spaces to be added or deleted incorrectly during PDF-to-Word extraction. That’s why ebooks that have not been fully reviewed will have words coming together, or otherwise incorrectly spaced.

Paragraph Delineation

In most cases, PDF documents contain no explicit information to indicate where a paragraph begins or ends, so this too must be guessed at by conversion software, based on “visual” interpretation of the appearance of chunks of text. While conversion software frequently does guess correctly, paragraph delineation can be a source of extraction errors, particularly when paragraphs are very short or span pages, or images and table get in the way.

Hyphens

Hyphens pose a problem because they serve various purposes among which an automated system cannot distinguish. While the hyphen joining a term such as “half-life” should appear no matter where the words are placed within a document, a hyphen that appears halfway through a word because of a line break (e.g., hyphen-ated) becomes an ugly error once the word is moved to the middle of a line. This is also something you’ll see often in ebooks you download.

Emphasis

Depending on how a document is rendered in PDF, extracting the correct emphasis from a PDF document can sometimes pose problems for conversion software. Again, this is because PDF structure is nothing more than a visual representation; while text may appear emphasized, the PDF does not tag it as “emphasized”—conversion software must make its best guess based on what it can glean from the text’s appearance.

Superscripting and Subscripting

Since PDF documents’ treatment of super and subscripts is limited to the way they appear when laid out in the PDF (rather than by some kind of “superscript” or “subscript” tag), extraction software tends to run into problems with determining the vertical alignment of text. As a result, super and subscripts are frequently misinterpreted by extraction software.

Special Characters

In PDF documents, special characters like foreign or mathematical symbols are frequently represented by unusual or proprietary fonts. In order to extract them to a word processor, these characters first need to be converted to a more standard character representation (e.g., ISO or Unicode). While many conversion software suites build conversion tables to handle such characters, it is impossible to keep up with the vast variety of atypical and proprietary fonts in use, and so many special characters fail to extract properly.

Sub-fonting

PDF’s approach to font embedding is another obstacle to proper extraction. Sometimes when PDFs are created, the PDF document does not store the information for the entire font, but rather stores only the parts of the font, which are used in a given document. The characters within this “sub-font” are accessed via an indirect table within the PDF document itself, making correct interpretation and extraction of sub-fonted characters difficult. Many conversion tools cannot extract these characters at all, and produce “garbage” text instead of accurately extracted content.

Tables

Tables are among the trickiest document elements to extract. This is because the appearance of even a simple table is determined by numerous attributes, including but not limited to column and row delineation, header and body delineation, vertical and horizontal cell spanning, cell separators, and vertical and horizontal cell alignment. With none of this information included in the source PDF, it is nearly impossible for an automated tool to reproduce a table exactly as it appeared in the original document.

While some short or simple documents may be able to undergo a PDF-to-Word (and subsequent PDF-to-EPUB) conversion with minimal difficulty, any long or complex document set will encounter several of these obstacles. The obstacles inherent in any PDF text extraction should underscore, first, the utility of retaining original versions of source documents in word processor format, if possible; and second, the critical importance of a good quality assurance strategy in any conversion process.

So what do I do now?

Obviously many millions of pages get converted; we convert millions of pages ourselves. There are solutions to all of the above and approaches to dealing with all the above, and more, which will be discussed in future columns.

Questions about conversion?

If you have specific questions about conversion that you’d like me to answer, use the comment feature of this website to submit them. I’ll do my best to find an answer for you.

Scott Abel, Editor, TheDynamicPublisher.com

As it turns out, there are subtle variations in the definitions industry leaders and veteran consultants use to explain what they mean when they talk about dynamic publishing. In fact, some of the most widely cited experts don’t offer up a clear-cut definition for the term, opting instead to define related terms like “dynamic content” or “dynamic delivery”.

According to Ann Rockley, author of “Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy” (Second Edition) [New Riders, 2012], what differentiates dynamic content from its static cousin is that “dynamic content does not exist in or as a document; it is information that is assembled only when it is requested. It exists as a series of information objects that are assembled in response to the user’s requests or [other] requirements.”

Rockley’s explanation of dynamic content is straightforward, but isn’t sufficient to answer the question, what is dynamic publishing?

JoAnn Hackos, in her 2002 work, “Content Management Strategies for Dynamic Web Delivery” (Wiley) discusses some of the benefits of “presenting content dynamically”, including the “great potential to make web-based content-rich resources more valuable to users.”

“Users appear eager to work with resources that are ‘customized’ to their needs and respond to their queries effectively,” Hackos writes. They also appear, “to prefer personalizing information resources that they use frequently.”

The founding sponsors of TheDynamicPublisher.com, Quark Software, say they believe dynamic publishing is “based on two fundamental principles: Using structured, reusable XML content and automating the delivery of this content to any media type.”

Quark emphasizes automation of all processes involved in an end-to-end dynamic publishing solution, including, the automation of:

• Content reuse
• Layout
• Workflow
• Formatting and multi-channel publishing
• Custom and personalized content

And while all of this information is interesting and thought-provoking, I am still left without a clear and unambiguous definition for dynamic publishing. Shouldn’t there be a Wikipedia page dedicated to this topic by now? As it turns out, there is. But, unfortunately, while the popular online user-generated encyclopedia is often useful at solving semantic challenges, in this instance it isn’t much help.

So What’s An Editor To Do?

After struggling with this challenge for several days, I realized that perhaps the best way to come up with a solid definition was to ask the community for help. That’s where you come in.

What is your definition of dynamic publishing? Please use the commenting feature of this blog to share your views on the subject. Next week I’ll summarize our findings and attempt to craft a definition that encompasses much of our thinking.

Scott Abel, Editor, TheDynamicPublisher.com

It’s hard to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time in the right format and language, increasingly, on a menagerie of mobile devices that seem to pop up faster than daisies after a good rain — especially if you rely on traditional publishing techniques. If your organization is like most others, no matter how hard you try, or how much money you throw at the problem, your reliance on print-centric processes and outdated, labor-intensive workflows fail you. But, you’re not alone. There are people who understand your problem and are willing to share what they’ve learned with you in order to help you begin to think outside the traditional publishing box.

Enter TheDynamicPublisher.com. Originally a website dedicated to information about dynamic publishing as envisioned by Quark Software, today TheDynamicPublisher.com has been both rebooted as a vendor-neutral, one-stop shop for information about dynamic publishing and related topics. I’m your host, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler. My job is to “wrangle” relevant, informative, and useful content about dynamic publishing from the world’s best and brightest experts and present it to you.

Dynamic publishing makes possible the efficient delivery of content to mobile devices, on demand

That’s not all. I’m also responsible for developing this site into a vibrant community of content professionals interested in promoting the methods, standards, and software tools required to create, assemble, and deliver relevant content to those who need it, dynamically, on demand.

In order to reach my goal, I’ll be seeking assistance from the crowd to help me build a body of knowledge and a community that will be a resource to those who want to move away from inefficient, old school ways of creating, managing and delivering content. Won’t you join me?

How can you get involved?

If you’ve got questions about dynamic content and related topics, send them to me via email and I’ll find an expert or two to answer them for you.

If you’re a subject matter expert and would like to contribute an article, let me know what you’d like to write about and how it relates to dynamic publishing.

If you work for a company that produces software products or related services designed to help organizations produce dynamic content and you’d like to become a sponsor, send me am email and I’ll let you know how you can get involved.

And, if you’re interested in the topics presented on these digital pages, then read, comment and question. Become part of the community!

TheDynamicPublisher.com is a work in progress. We’ll be updating and improving the site as we go. If you have ideas about how we can make the site better, please let me know.

“The popularization of smartphones and the introduction of tablets and other Web-enabled devices — collectively termed ‘connected devices’ — have contributed to an explosion in digital media consumption. As these devices gain adoption, we have also seen the rise of the ‘digital omnivores’ — consumers who access content through several touchpoints during the course of their daily digital lives. In order to meet the needs of these consumers, advertisers and publishers must learn to navigate this new landscape so they develop cross-platform strategies to effectively engage their audiences.¹”

Cross-media and dynamic publishing are Quark’s focus. But Quark also sees a significant need for our customers to create an engaging customer experience — whether it’s in print, via the Web, or on a digital device such as the iPad, an Android tablet, or other tablets.

In my last blog, I spoke about cross-media design; now I’d like to focus on workflow collaboration. As rate of content consumption changes, so do the requirements for publishing systems to support new types of content — namely digital — and for bringing new content specialists into content creation workflows.

Digital Assets and Workflows

Once you go digital, you’ll need to embrace the need for rich media content, whether it’s for your Web site or your iPad app; therefore, the first step in preparing to adopt a cross-media publishing strategy is to include support for creating and managing your digital assets and publications. This includes videos, slideshows, podcasts, any other interactive or multimedia assets, and iPad apps and issues.

If your team isn’t big enough or if you don’t have enough resources to create these new type of assets, no need to fret; there are services available (such as iStockphoto®) who saw the need to expand their portfolio beyond photos and now offer video, audio, and Flash content.

On the other hand, if you do have in-house multi-media staff, you want to make sure you include this staff in your workflows. It will be important that your digital issue designer has the ability to collaborate with, let’s say, your video editor to ensure that the video you include in your iPad issue delivers the best possible user experience (i.e. full-screen display, etc.). When working together, these two creative minds will surely deliver an immersive, brand-worthy experience.

On another level, if you’re trying to manage the creation of assets and publish content across documents, media, and platforms, you’ll also want to be able to set up specific workflows to support each type of digital asset and publication required. These workflows are vastly different from what may be required for print, in that the dependencies and timeline or workflow automation triggers may change.

iPad Continues to Dominate

“iPads dominate among tablets in driving digital traffic. In August 2011, iPads delivered 97.2 percent of all tablet traffic in the U.S. iPads have also begun to account for a higher share of Internet traffic than iPhones (46.8 percent vs. 42.6 percent of all iOS device traffic).¹” As the iPad continues to dominate, the need to publish to the iPad is gaining ground. Thus, the ability to create an iPad app and publish an issue to that app is something that should be available in the cross-media publishing system.

With that aim in mind, as you evaluate the best cross-platform strategy for you, it’s imperative that you understand what’s involved and leverage best practices shared by the industry experts. The next step for starting your exploration, if you haven’t already, is to take the time to check out The World of Dynamic Publishing, a five-part webinar series brought to you by Quark Software Inc with leading industry experts.

¹comScore, (2011, October 10) Smartphones and Tablets Drive Nearly 7 Percent of Total U.S. Digital Traffic [Press Release]. Retrieved from http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/10/Smartphones_and_Tablets_Drive_Nearly_7_
Percent_of_Total_U.S._Digital_Traffic.

The information-development world embraced desktop publishing in the mid-1980s with great enthusiasm. Desktop publishing software and laser printers gave us the ability to make documents more readable and easier to navigate. We were able to bypass the costs of typesetting and still achieve some of the presentation quality that typesetting provided.

Although Standard General Markup Language (SGML) was available early and was used extensively by large corporations such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and many government agencies, the combination of Microsoft Word and various desktop publishing systems came to dominate the field.  All of these products were proprietary — owned, developed, and controlled by a profit-making organization. Once you created content in one product, you were virtually tied to that product. It became and continues to be very difficult and costly to move from one product to another.

By the mid-80s, through the 90s, and into the new century, with the introduction of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to support the development of the Internet as a communication tool, many organizations, especially large ones, decided to develop in-house applications by working with SGML, customizing the OASIS DocBook XML standard, or developing a unique, proprietary in-house authoring and publishing environment.

Over the years, the Comtech team worked with a large number of clients — including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Bell Laboratories, and various telecommunications companies such as Lucent, Alcatel, Nortel, and many more — who had built internal, proprietary SGML and XML systems.  I personally worked closely with SAP’s information-development organization to help develop their internal authoring environment.

The success of these in-house SGML and XML systems rested on their extensive customizations to support exactly the types of content delivered to internal and external customers. In some cases, the in-house systems provide strong functionality, supported by user-friendly authoring environments. In other cases, the functionality lags behind what is available through commercial products and the user interfaces have become out-of-date. The problem is resources. The cost of maintaining an in-house system, which must be borne entirely by the organization, is high.

One of the telecommunications giants of the 90s required a workforce of 15 people to maintain their in-house system. That team did an excellent job. They built a state-of-the-art system in the early 90s that continued to be funded so that it could be updated and maintained — that is, until the collapse of the telecommunications industry around 2000. As a result of that collapse, management reevaluated the benefits vs. the costs of the in-house system and eventually moved to commercial products that supported international standards. The cost of commercially developed products can be amortized across a large number of customer implementations. Moreover, the standards on which these products are based are developed and maintained by a community of volunteers who bring industry and technology expertise.

Business Motivation for Change

At the 2010 DITA Europe conference, sponsored by the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM), Thilo Buchholtz and Teresa Pask of SAP eloquently explained why their learning and training organization had decided to move away from an in-house XML-based content management and authoring system and adopt the OASIS DITA standard instead.

They explained, as every information developer would agree, that information must to be developed fast and delivered on-time to customers. And, information coming from multiple sources must be integrated, including information from partners.

Buchholtz and Task told us that “Adherence to an industry standard data model and toolset enables rapid integration of new technologies and modalities, as well as content contributions from other contributors and partner-built content.” For SAP learning and training,

• DITA supports the direction that the business wants to take customer-critical content.
• DITA supplies a modular architecture that supports multiple content deliverables from a single source.
• More technology is available to support the DITA standard.
• The open-source community supports technology changes.

I regularly learn in discussions with senior management that they have already decided to move, like SAP, from their sound but expensive in-house XML environment to the DITA standard. But there is more to the move than just the expense of maintaining an in-house system. The DITA standard promises interoperability, a critical consideration at a time of increasing business consolidation.

Mergers and Acquisitions
What happens when one company with a proprietary in-house system buys another company with its own proprietary in-house system? One group usually has to change to the other’s proprietary system, usually at great expense. What happens when a company using the DITA standard buys or merges with another company using the same DITA standard? They easily merge their content, even if both have DITA specializations in place. If they are using DITA out-of-the-box, the merger simply requires an integration of the two information models. That integration, although requiring agreement about architecture details, is far simpler and less expensive than integrating two proprietary systems.

Integration of Content Contributors and Content Management Systems
If each organization uses different authoring tools or different content management systems, as long as these systems are based on the DITA standard, the integration can be quite simple. In fact, we have been assisting one such move to a new content management system. We export all of the data from one system, including all the translated content, to the other system with automated scripts. Both systems support the DITA standard, with few proprietary features that cannot be “translated” to the other system.

The Role of Standards Bodies in Moving Away from In-house and Propietary Models
Laurent Liscia, the Executive Director of OASIS, has written a series of articles on standards and innovation for CIDM Information Management News, our monthly e-newsletter.

In CIDM Information Management News, February 2010, Liscia provides some history of the development of standards. He explains that government-sanctioned bodies developed many earlier standards. For example, we know that U.S. government agencies provide standards for workplace safety or the safe handling of food. Such de jure or legally required standards are backed by legislation.

More recently, standards have been developed not by government but by standards organizations such as OASIS that are supported by interested industries. He explains that “in 1988… Europe made an enlightened and agile move and created a standards body that involved not just the Post & Telecom administrations, but private companies in Europe and elsewhere.”

Innovations that had been developed in-house by companies — such as IBM’s development of DITA — have come to be a shared and openly accessible collection of technology. Standards have become a good way for all of us to share the responsibilities and cost of product development.

Clearly, the motivation for the move to standards has been financial. By working together, industry representatives could share the work in defining and developing an innovative technology. In developing the DITA standard, we have seen the exactly this result. Although the standard was begun by IBM to support its own internal requirements, by donating the original DITA 1.0 to the OASIS standards community, IBM allowed many more companies to become involved. The development of the standard is now supported by the work of many contributors.

However, spreading development costs across an industry is only one of the benefits of standards. The ability to move information resources from one company to another, because of mergers and acquisitions or through business partnerships, has become essential. Today, DITA standard content can be

• Used across departments and throughout the global enterprise.
• Shared across related industries.
• Maintained through corporate reorganizations.

Liscia points out that as “companies multiplied in the field, interoperability between the many software products available looked more and more like a great idea.”

Contributing to the move to standards have been the move to communicate through the Internet, the move to open source software, and the use of XML has a foundation. All of these influences have helped promote innovation through DITA, introducing new ways of developing and managing information.

Again, Liscia tells us that “more often than not… a software standard IS the innovation, not the result of innovations that must be standardized. For instance, [OASIS has] a set of technical committees that focus on ways to make the power grid smarter — the so-called Smart Grid effort. The participants have a good idea of what they want to do, but what they want to do does not exist yet — and will change as they realize their collective vision, through public comments, open contributions, and ballots.”

Since its introduction in 2006, we have witnessed a large number of organizations adopting the DITA standard. Doing so significantly reduces the cost of implementing XML-based structured authoring. The organizations are supported by

• Product developers that adopt the standard.
• Well-organized and effective training opportunities.
• Articles, white papers, blogs, conference presentations, and books.
• A skilled community of consultants and colleagues.

Organizations encouraging their management to support a move to DITA are able to argue that adopting an international standard developed by a community of industry representatives is a beneficial corporate move. Senior managers, often coming from engineering and software development, understand the importance of standards. Their own work relies on standards, many of them also developed by the OASIS community.

If you’re getting ready to recommend adopting the OASIS DITA standard, you’ll find yourself in good company, not only with fellow information developers but also with the entire standards community.

The hype around the new possibilities that digital publishing has ushered in and a vibrant emerging market are driving innovation forward. Remember the Internet in the 90s? A lot of parallels can be drawn between the heyday of the Internet bubble and today’s rise of digital publishing. We can probably safely assume that tablets will stick around (like the Internet did). And Apple has definitely been the catalyst with the introduction of the iPad last year.

So what are the main characteristics of emerging trends and new markets? Typically people jump on the first solutions available, and then work on refining them, based on market feedback, consumer preference, and business models. In digital publishing I noticed that publishers of all shapes and forms (corporate publishers, catalog publishers, magazines, newspapers and other “content producers” like photographers, artists, and designers) quickly went “tablet.“

And to land on tablets, content is generally published via an “app” — a discrete application that readers need to download and install.

Most designers and publishers produced first-generation apps that almost felt like interactive PDF, mimicking print media: showing a table of content, using pages, allowing pages to flip, creating linear pages or page stacks, and so on. Although it’s an app with multimedia objects (audio, video, animations, etc.), it still feels almost like a PDF, but on some mild steroids.

This approach worked fine for a while, attracting readers to pay for content, as they were still infatuated with the new medium. Soon, though, you could see that interest died out, as there wasn’t much additional value in the magazine app (except being available digitally on-the-go).

I believe people moved on because the content and design weren’t tailored to the device, so it didn’t feel natural. It felt like printed media. That is not saying that PDF or printed media are wrong, it’s just that on a tablet readers expect something different.

Remember the Flash-based flipbook catalogs or flipbook magazines a while ago? They were really fashionable, a must-have. They showed what state-of-the-art technology could do. However, after readers looked at flipbooks once because they look so cool, they then switched back to the HTML or a printed version. Because flipbooks just didn’t feel natural and didn’t give readers any advantages (if only, disadvantages related to the high hardware requirements of Flash that often felt slow).

At the moment, a lot of content apps are what I would classify as second-generation. They feel and behave more like web pages than PDFs. That’s an improvement, as digital is more akin to web pages than paper.

But why not use a HTML page in a web browser then? It seems that many readers using a mobile device feel that using a browser is a bit outdated. A recent study (http://goo.gl/cgKxb) shows that readers spent more time using apps than a browser. So that probably means your content gets more attention and attracts more readers (customers, consumers) if it’s within an app.

Don’t get me wrong, I see great uses for first and second-generation apps and there are good examples that work well. However, if you are a content creator and want to distribute your content in a richly designed format, you constantly need to ask yourself: what is the best way to attract readers? Content is one, design and experience the other. So, do something different: design the next generation.

Design for digital and be agnostic to the device.

I think moving away from the “flip pages” metaphor is definitely the first step. Secondly, design a page with finger-swipe support in mind and make sure that the layout adapts to the content you are reading. Now, that’s a new way of delivering content: you stay on the same canvas and your content doesn’t feel static. Thirdly, and of course only if it makes sense to strengthen your message, take advantage of 360° product shots, 3D-worlds and panoramic experiences, show rich content in slideshows that can be expanded to show a wider view and so on. Or – in a nutshell – make the most of the possibilities of a tablet.

You may already know that dynamic publishing offers two types of benefits:

1. Internal process improvements that reduce cost and time.
2. Information quality improvements, such as greater accuracy, relevance, and convenience.

Along with conveying these main benefits, you need to figure out how dynamic publishing can support your organization’s key business strategy in order to show your executives why they should invest in dynamic publishing.

Are you focused on raising top-line revenue? Dynamic publishing can help by reducing time-to-market and increasing customer satisfaction through better-quality information.

Are you focused on profitability? Dynamic publishing can help on both the cost and revenue sides.

On the cost side, dynamic publishing can help you streamline your process and reduce hard costs such as translation, printing, warehousing, and distribution. On the productivity side, dynamic publishing may be able to help you deliver higher-accuracy information that improves first-time fix rates or help desk efficiency.

On the revenue side, dynamic publishing helps you deliver more timely, accurate, and useful information, which can draw more prospective customers into your sales process and give current customers a more satisfying experience.

Are you focused on global expansion? Localization costs often determine how extensive your global reach can be. Dynamic publishing goes hand-in-hand with getting control of your localization costs by helping you send out only newly changed information for translation and by eliminating the desktop publishing part of the process through publishing automation.

Whatever your business strategy, I hope you now have the tools to connect dynamic publishing to that strategy. If your situation presents unique challenges, let me know — in exchange for helping you, I’ll satisfy my curiosity.

If you play a role in the publishing of financial research reports, you know that the past few months have seen some lively debate about the use of social media. Why? The main reason is because the classic PDF that firms have relied on as their lifeblood for delivering research information just doesn’t meet the mark anymore; firms have to engage their clients in a more timely and personal way. And not just through popular social media tools like Facebook, but also through one of the hottest topics still dominating technology — the iPad.
And it’s not because social media and the iPad (or any of the other tablets gaining a slice of the market) are fads. On the contrary, both signal a larger shift in the financial services community, a shift that’s about developing closer relationships with clients through tools that give those clients specific information about their investments. It’s about letting clients explore details about investments and investment opportunities interactively on their iPad, or their Samsung Galaxy, or their Motorola Xoom, and so on. Research reporting in a broader sense — meaning how a firm engages its clients — is a critical business requirement. We’ve simply moved beyond the PDF-based research report to an era of customer engagement. Firms that don’t figure out how to do this will struggle and lose momentum.
In fact, I believe this larger customer engagement phenomenon stretches across the financial services community. I’ve seen it both in regards to investment research reporting and in the way fund management companies communicate with their customers through their fund fact sheets. Since my company sells publishing software, I’ll go out on a limb here to say that I believe that while almost any organization can ratchet up productivity or squeeze out costs with enterprise publishing software, what’s really driving change is the way investment firms publish information to drive customer engagement.

Like their brethren in investment reporting, fund management companies are reasonably happy with their production process. They don’t need to change what they’re doing to “fix” it. Instead, fund managers are looking at new types of communication vehicles as new opportunities to take what they’ve been doing — in this case, with fund fact sheets — and apply it to the modern, interactive, tablet format.

After all, customers looking at fund fact sheets care enormously about where they’re putting their money. They want to know their objectives are understood. And they expect to find evidence that fund managers understand this through the way those fund managers engage with them.

But fund management companies’ existing publishing process doesn’t necessarily support creating engaging communications and is not necessarily capable of delivering it efficiently to any tablet device, be it the iPad or another brand. Fund management companies must find a new way to get it done — in the context of all of their publishing requirements — and dynamic publishing, with the right content for the right consumption channel, is the answer.

It’s not just about ratcheting up productivity in the way financial services companies produce investment research reports or fund fact sheets. It’s about turning up customer engagement and discovering what interactive communications on tablet devices can do to help you meet your objectives. I think you’ll find dynamic publishing provides many answers.

To answer the first question, documents appropriate for dynamic publishing are usually:

• Produced through a formal process — there are people in the organization with the explicit responsibility to create, review, approve, and distribute the information. Marketing materials and product documentation are good examples.
• Produced often — they require publication on a frequent or regular schedule. For example, employee or partner newsletters, sales or project proposals, and almost any newspaper, magazine, or news content published on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
• Personalized —for example, financial statements, direct mail, or other customer communications where content must meet the recipient’s specific needs.
• Updated often — for example, data sheets, spec sheets, or other information that must be updated to support releases of new products, product features, services, or other evolving capabilities.
• Costly to translate, update, and redistribute — this can be true of any of the document types mentioned above for organizations that operate in multiple geographies.
• Those which must be delivered across multiple channels — including print, the Web, and digital devices.

These types of documents have significant business value — the information is vital to support marketing, selling, installation, operation, maintenance, repairs, legal compliance, regulatory compliance, or other critical business functions.

On the flip side, there is likely no justification to apply dynamic publishing to:

• Documents that are NOT produced through a formal process (such as e-mails)
• Documents that are one-off or rarely produced (such as annual reports)

The following chart shows the sweet spot for document characteristics that are appropriate for dynamic publishing. Your documents’ characteristics do not all have to be at the right end of the spectrum, so just use these as indicators; your decision will rest primarily on cost savings, time savings, and the impact of improving the accuracy, convenience, and relevance of your information.

As you consider whether the documents you publish are a good fit for dynamic publishing, you’ll find that you’ll stop focusing on publications and shift your thinking to creating components of information that your dynamic publishing system can automatically assemble into different types of publications and automatically publish to multiple types of media.