Really Strategies Blog

RSuite User Conference: Multi-Channel Publishing at the American Society for Training and Development

ASTD is making remarkable strides at improving its internal publishing workflow and content management with RSuite. In this spotlight session, Anthony Allen, director of digital media at ASTD, presents the workflow expansion framework he has developed to publish content for print outlets, the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and websites. He’ll show how RSuite enables ASTD to produce custom training material for sales staff within 1 hour.

Come join over 100 publishing executives at the RSuite CMS User Conference on October 20, 2010 in Philadelphia to hear more RSuite success stories and network with industry leaders - http://www.rsuitecms.com/2010userconf.htm

RSuite User Conference: How a medical publisher convinced 1,000 authors to work in XML

Medical publishing giant Wolters Kluwer Health required a content management system for its highly profitable 5-Minute Clinical Consult series to streamline delivery of content to multiple output channels, facilitate re-use, automate workflow, etc. But here’s the rub---Wolters Kluwer Health actually has more than 1,000 authors and reviewers working in XML. Yes, that’s right! In this client spotlight, Mike Rosiak, lead content architect at Wolters Kluwer Health, details how subject matter experts stay focused on the content while kicking off an XML-first workflow. 

Come join over 100 publishing executives at the RSuite CMS User Conference on October 20, 2010 in Philadelphia to hear more RSuite success stories and network with industry leaders - http://www.rsuitecms.com/2010userconf.htm

2009 RSuite User Conference: In the books

By all accounts the 2009 RSuite User Conference held last week in Philly was a success. We were fortunate to have over 125 guests attend this year which included three tracks (business, technical, and DocZone).

Opening Keynote (After You Implement a CMS). Howard Ratner, CTO Nature Publishing Group is a great keynote speaker. Not only does he provoke thought around content management, but he definitely challenges the status quo. Many thanks to Howard for starting the day with a stimulating presentation.

Technically Speaking. The RSuite technical track highlighted the open architecture, workflow, transformation utilities, user interface extensions, reports, and custom searches. I’m sure by the end of the day the folks in the technical track were raising their hands saying “can I leave now, my brain if full!” The engineering team mixed up the presentations with live demonstrations which I think helped solidify the concepts being presented.

Honest Client Presentations. Presentations that puff up vendors drive me crazy. I am happy to report that the client presentations in the business track were straight forward and did not beat around the bush. Some of our RSuite projects were hard, very hard, but we successfully completed them and our clients would not be in front of the audience if they did not believe in the product or our company. Many thanks to Cengage Learning, Kaplan Eduneering, MIT Press, CQ Press, and The American Society for Training & Development for sharing their success stories.

So much to see, so little time. I was pleasantly surprised to see a number of people jump between different client case studies, technical sessions and DocZone sessions.

DocZone’s First Meeting. Our DocZone team pulled off a great first user conference meeting. The client case studies from Unica Corporation, Kyocera, and Epson were very well received, and the roundtable discussion on DocZone DITA provided a look under the hood of how DocZone manages content.

Closing Keynote (The New Speed of Publishing). Jason Monberg, VP of Product Management for Mark Logic provided the audience with one large dilemma: The gap between content contributor and content consumer is shrinking very fast – so what are you going to do as a publisher? Talk about feeling the pressure? Jason was spot on with his presentation and I think provided some good topics for the cocktail hour. A big thank you to Jason.

Thanks to all of those who attended and we’ll see everyone in 2010!

2008 RSuite User Conference

Registration is open for the 2008 RSuite User Conference. This year's event takes place at The Hub Cira Centre in Philadelphia. In just a few years, the RSuite user community has blossomed and continues to grow. New customers are using the content management system in many interesting ways. The 2-day event takes a nouveau approach to the user conference format:

Day 1. CMS in a day
Through a combination of real-time working sessions supported by technical presentations, we will demonstrate the rapid configuration and deployment of RSuite. This approach offers something for both technical and business users as we set up editorial functions, build workflows, apply metadata, extend RSuite, and set up a multi-channel publishing scenario. We'll use both XML and non-XML content to illustrate RSuite's powerful feature set to manage any content type.

Day 2. RSuite: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
To start the day, industry analyst Bill Trippe and Adobe's Gary Cosimini discuss how Adobe is embracing XML, what's in store for the next version of Creative Suite, and how RSuite complements an end-to-end publishing solution. Throughout the day, we'll review how several RSuite customers have implemented RSuite over the past year and discuss improved efficiencies, return on investment, and future plans. An extended mid-day break will allow attendees to test drive RSuite, participate in a user focus group, or meet with one of our senior consultants. Finally, Lisa Bos, CTO and co-founder, and Ed Stevenson, RSuite product manager, will present the product roadmap.

Useful links:

• Registration
• Learn more

RSuite team attending Mark Logic User Conference

Many of my RSuite colleagues will be attending the Mark Logic User Conference next week in San Francisco.   Once again Mark Logic has put together an outstanding program and it looks like they are well on their way to surpassing 300 attendees.  In a conversation I had with Dave Kellogg last year when he was the keynote speaker at our first RSuite CMS user conference, Mark Logic had only 30 people attend their first event a few short years ago.  My have times changed. 

If you are attending the user conference, please stop by our exhibit table and take a test drive of RSuite CMS.  In addition, our client, Art Zegarek, Director of Data Architecture, Audible.com will be discussing how his team leveraged RSuite CMS to manage their wealth of audio book metadata.  It's a pretty amazing story on the efficiencies gained by implementing RSuite, but I'll let Art do all of the story telling.

Why do CMS vendors exhibit at tradeshows?

I must confess out of the gate that I do not believe exhibiting at tradeshows is worth the money. I have been skeptical for years even prior to launching RSuite CMS. In the twelve plus years that I have been in the publishing and information industry with three different companies, I have never heard of a hot sales lead coming from a tradeshow.

Here’s what I do hear from my colleagues in the industry who exhibit regularly:

• If we don’t exhibit, people will think we are not doing well or we are out of business
• We have to exhibit to get a speaking slot at the show
• We committed to the event organizer for several years

Not one mention of actually getting a sales lead.

I am not here to tell you that Really Strategies will never exhibit to demonstrate our RSuite product, but we need to pick and choose very carefully. Just as publishers and other information companies want a quick return on investment when they purchase a CMS, a CMS vendor wants a quick return on investment from exhibiting at a tradeshow. Based on my unscientific study of the many vendors we work with in the industry, a return on investment from exhibiting at a tradeshow is becoming less likely.

So what should a CMS product vendor do? Should we risk not appearing like a viable company and spending our marketing dollars on other creative ways to build our brand or should we exhibit at every industry tradeshow at $5,000 per show with very limited success?

Software sales are not about booth traffic and cool giveaways anymore, it’s about networking and partnering. With all due respect to my friends in the industry who run tradeshows, let’s come up with a creative way to help CMS product vendors instead of offering an exhibition comprising of a 10 x 10 booth with one table, two chairs, a trash can, and a $700 internet connection. Oh, did I mention the black curtain you get behind the booth?

2007 RSuite CMS User Conference

Last week we held our first RSuite CMS user conference at The Hub Cira Center in Philadelphia.  If I must say so, I think it turned out to be a great event with over 60 attendees on day two.  The two-day event was segmented by technical presenations/discussions on day one and user/business focus on day two.  We were very fortunate to have Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic, present the opening keynote on day two.  Dave's presentation (Content Management:  Whence It Came, Where It Went) set the tone for the day. 

The event also spotlighted two client installations and their key business drivers:

Sage Publications: Business Rules Validation and Workflow
Keith Lawrenz, Senior Business Analyst, discussed the highly automated processing of Sage's journal content and the anticipated business goals Sage will realize once the system is fully implemented.

Audible.com: Metadata Management
Art Zegarek, Director of Data Architecture, discussed the application of metadata to Audible's audio files and the key production efficiencies already realized. The best quote of the conference came from Art: “Seeing the RSuite Developers Guide was an ‘aha’ moment!”

We greatly appreciate both Keith and Art taking time to travel to Philadelphia to discuss their success stories around RSuite CMS.

We look forward to an even bigger and better 2008 RSuite CMS user conference.

Go native! How to manage and deliver XML content

How do you

• harness the power of XQuery?
• streamline queries for chunked content?
• avoid mapping document fields to relational data?
• increase performance speed when reconstituting data into a document?

You manage your content in an XML repository. 

RSuite, a CMS powered by MarkLogic Server, offers native support for XML content storage services, full text search in combination with XQuery, and content processing. True native XML management offers easy access to every node of XML and avoids unnatural mapping exercises.

Lisa Bos, chief architect at Really Strategies, and Matt Turner, product specialist and XQuery guru, will present a free live web event on May 10, 2007 from 2:00 to 3:00 pm

Register here.