Frankfurt Book Fair 2018 Day 2: Experts Define the Future

The experts at our stand brought sage advice to our customers, partners and attendees at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Along the way, we learned a few things!

Today at our Frankfurt Book Fair stand, we hosted the first of our Office Hours. Having experts around who have been there and done that, means that we, the customers, partners, attendees and the MarkLogic team learned a few things:

• “The questions being asked in the industry about better discovery with concepts, handling video and rich media and creating better metadata for new distribution channels all point back to having a single place for content and adding data of all kinds to the content.” – David Worlock
• “After being away for a while, it’s shocking that publishers use only a small percentage of their data. They could do so much more for their customers to improve engagement, tracking and keeping new customers—and engaging with the next, millennial generation of users.” – James Wonder

Office hours continue Thursday with Jen Shorten 10:00-12:00 and Ernst Kallus 14:00-16:00!

Go Beyond Your Content with MarkLogic® Data Hub Service

The MarkLogic theme for the 2018 Book Fair is “Go Beyond Your Content”—a call to action to invest in data as an additional asset for the future of publishing. In our many years of supporting the industry, we at MarkLogic have become experts in integrating data and content and have created the Operational Data Hub pattern and framework. Our publishing customers use these tools to bring together customer data, product data and content, deliver better products and understand the value of their content.

The newly announced MarkLogic Data Hub Service makes the power of the Operational Data Hub immediately available in a new service run by MarkLogic. In a Silicon Angle article on the new product, MarkLogic SVP of Products, Joe Pasqua, said, “Now we run it for you. You click a button, a whole Data Hub cluster is set up for you, and you don’t have to configure anything.” With the new Data Hub Service, it now only takes a few clicks to go beyond your content!

Intelligent, Accessible Content

Carl Robinson and Renee Frank of Copyright Clearance Center shared their expertise on Hall 4.2 in a discussion on how to create the intelligent content that will be vital for the future of the industry. Key takeaways: Don’t lock down your content with fixed structures in advance—it is impossible to plan for every possibility. Instead, plan for change and create content that is ready for today and tomorrow.

Bruce Rosenblum, CEO of Inera, picked up the content creation theme and talked about the value of structured content and how to introduce structured authoring to create it. Authors and editors may be familiar with easy-to-use tools like Word, and there are sometimes situations where you can’t control the user’s software. But you need to create structured content to power your many publishing needs. The trick is to use the right tools at the right time and put structure in at the right part of the process for each workflow solution. Bruce outlined several approaches, with a preferred “middle” approach of converting to XML after authoring but before enrichment and tagging. Bruce’s company Inera makes the eXtyles products that can help you make the jump from Word to XML at the right time.

And finally, Chandi Perera, CEO of Typefi, discussed the importance and impact of content accessibility. The Book Fair is celebrating the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and access to information is one of those rights. There are also rules and regulations across the globe that call for content to be accessible, and the Marrakesh Treaty provides routes for organizations to use publishers’ content if it is not made accessible.

Yet the reality is, that for people with permanent or temporary disabilities, modern information access can be fraught with difficulties simply because simple processes and standards (like WCAG) are not followed. To help with this situation, Chandi announced the Typefi Enabling Accessible Publishing Program for non-profit organizations that publish free content. This program will, free of charge, provide software and services to create accessible content to make sure these organizations’ content gets to and helps ALL of the readers who need it. Contact Chandi and the Typefi team for more details.

RSuite Speeds Content Creation

We are pleased to have the team from RSuite back on the MarkLogic stand for 2018. RSuite is the MarkLogic-based enterprise content management solution that helps speed the creation of content and enables reuse and multi-channel delivery. The experts at RSuite uniquely combine the power of MarkLogic to manage intelligent content and data with world-class workflow and integrated authoring and editing tools.

RSuite customers are from all across publishing and beyond. At the recent RSuite user conference, I was lucky enough to be on a panel with Sara Sharman of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (the IET). Sara spoke about the improvements that their RSuite workflow system has brought to creating their content. Publications such as the Wiring Regulations are critical to the work of hands-on electricians across the UK and have to be right. At the conference, Sara talked about the balance of speeding up the publication process while still ensuring quality. “The publication process of all the associated material used to take two years from the regulation’s approval! This gap caused a lot of issues in the industry.” With RSuite, The IET were able to streamline the workflow, moving some tasks to automation, use workflow status to prevent extra work and remove duplication and enable online first publishing. According to Sara, “This enabled us to reduce the lag time first to nine months and now to just three months from when the regulations are finalized.”

Improvements in publishing processes are at the heart of the RSuite product. Version 5.4.1 adds features that provide a new way for users to customize and tailor the experience. RSuite also now makes it easier to deliver your content with the RSuite Publish (formerly TopLeaf) now built into the product, enabling you to flow content into a layout for production of final products. And, it is easier to create your content with the new integration of Oxygen web author.

“As delivery methods continue to evolve, content remains key to the future of publishing and a critical asset in many other industries. RSuite continues to deliver new ways to create, distribute and make the most of your content,” says Siobhan O’Hare, VP of Content Management at Orbis Technologies. Come by and meet the team and get a demo!

Serial Innovation for the Future

Ernst Kallus is our featured expert for Thursday, October 11. Ernst is a serial innovator in the industry, most recently leading transformation projects at Oxford University Press, Pearson and Emerald Publishing. Ernst is now the founder of Stratigem where he helps create innovation with strategic engagements at organizations of all kinds.

I asked Ernst what was on his mind for the industry at Frankfurt and this was his reply: “It’s vital that publishers understand that the integration of content and data will be truly transformative for their business.”

Come on by the MarkLogic stand 4.2 L94, visit with our partners and customers and tell us what you think about the future of publishing!

Blogging from Frankfurt, Matt Turner, CTO Media & Manufacturing

P.S. In case you missed it, you can check out my Day 1 post here. And if you are online following along, stay tuned for Day 3!