Topic Suggestions for TOC Conference 2009

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Permalink Reply by Brett Stone on September 3, 2008 at 8:14pm

What does a real-world transition from non-xml print publishing to xml publishing look like? What training is required, and by whom? What hiring decisions should be made -- IT? Programming? What unspoken challenges face a publisher, editors, authors, and production people -- it can't be as simple as the enterprise companies lead you to beleive, or is it?

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Permalink Reply by Travis Bryant on November 16, 2008 at 11:47pm

I have to second this line of questions. We are struggling with the same things right now. Everyone in our shop is ready to go "all in" and incorporate xml tagging into our workflow, but we're having trouble figuring where and who.

It's becoming more apparent that our editors may need an crash course in some IT vocabulary and we'll all need to become a little more familiar with some little used palettes in InDesign.

We're not even out of the planning stage and it hasn't been as easy as "the enterprise companies lead you to believe". We know where we want to go and what we need at the end, it's just charting the course that's giving us fit right now.

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Permalink Reply by Brett Stone on March 15, 2009 at 8:13pm

Travis,
Has your company made any more headway? I'm finding there are several companies with solutions, and each solution seems to have it's own 'way' of encouraging collaboration, workflow management, etc. It's been a challenge to know just who to trust, and whether we require a 'big' solution that may overwhelm us with the amount of learning needed, or a smaller solution that may leave us in a year wishing we had done more.

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Permalink Reply by Brett Stone on December 19, 2008 at 1:35pm

We've made a decision to go with a particular enterprise based solution, and will begin installs, configuration etc in early January 2009. Our full staff should be trained and getting used to the the system by end of January, and by March/April 2009 we should be in the swing. Since there seems to be little on the web by way of case study, I'll update occasionally, hopefully to share all our successes :') If this interests you, please reply just so I know someone is reading...

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Permalink Reply by Brett Stone on January 27, 2009 at 3:09pm

I owe everyone an update. After choosing to proceed with one of the major players in the dynamic publishing arena, we opted out literally last minute due to a significant mis-alignment of anticipated functionality compared to what the company intended to deliver. Best case scenario it was all just a little rushed. We're holding off now until Spring and will begin again.

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Permalink Reply by Dan Dube on March 24, 2009 at 2:37pm

Hi Brett,

If you think there may be interest in a more affordable, easy to deploy solution, I would welcome the opportunity to talk to you offline about DocZone Publisher. I'll try not to blatantly advertise here. :-)

Best regards,

-Dan

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Permalink Reply by Dave Pawson on September 12, 2008 at 10:11am

How to get publishers away from the 'pixel perfect' print equivalent when reviewing e-books.

What does House Style C21 mean?
Author to online in .... how many days!

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Permalink Reply by Andy Oram on March 23, 2009 at 11:01am

Joining communities, and forming communities around content, suggests that the publisher's role moves from gatekeeper and control center to acting as a consultant to the community. How does this affect the roles and attitudes of publishers and their staff? For instance, the publisher has to accept some loss of control, and resulting compromises to quality and the structural integrity of documents.

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