True Software Integration

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on November 14, 2008 at 10:16am

What kind of vendor apps do you have in mind? print world or digital world? or the ones that merge both?

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Permalink Reply by Bert N. Langford on November 14, 2008 at 11:46am

Both print world and digital world.

Bert Langford

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on November 14, 2008 at 11:53am

I don't know what is the purpose of your question - to see the current state or find a solution - as a solution provider I will drop couple notes about how this should be done in ideal world:

Digital Asset Management systems - so called DAMs are built for the sole purpose of solving integration problems between different proprietary systems.
The main idea of a DAM is that all the content is normalized (converted into format-neutral XML) and then resides inside the DAM.
At the same time DAM is connected to all of your proprietary systems (editorial, video, photo, web, repositories, ad serving, accounting, archival, etc.) and serves as a bridge to move content from one system to another. So to move content from archive into CMS your dam converts it into XML (and hopefully enriches with tags) at the moment of ingestion from archive system. Then it delivers a ready-to-go XML content into CMS.
This is how it should be working between all systems.

The structural benefit of this is the fact that for EVERY one of your proprietary systems you have to build only 1 connector - to the DAM (instead of 10-20 you would have to build if you did not have the DAM).

Thus when replacing one of the systems, let's say video server you don't have to build 20 connectors anew - you just build one to the DAM, everything else it taken care of.

Let me know if this is helpful!

Oleg

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Permalink Reply by Bert N. Langford on November 15, 2008 at 12:01pm

I can see where DAM has to integrate and does integrate for many providers and users. I am really curious as to the extent of other software applications like ad and circ and production systems dynamically exchanging actionable data in real time. Is this happening for publishing software apps?

I mean something more than imports and exports per-se, rather the impression by the user with the appropriate rights that he is seeing ads in realtime in his map that just came in and therefore he can act upon them.

How well have software developers integrated their products with other software developers?

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Permalink Reply by Michael Tucker on January 28, 2009 at 1:21pm

I speak for a software development company. We make software for publishers, and our applications, Contract for Media (CRM and Ad management), Naxos Archive (enterprise CMS and archiving), and WebExpress Publisher (web content management and ad server platform) are all well-integrated with one another. OK, you'd expect that.

On the other side of the coin, its been our experience that none of the software we routinely encounter at publishing clients is integrated. We typically see a range of individual applications and protocols (like email, calendaring, etc) across the organization. At best, the most that's shared are network drives. Finance is separate from sales, which is separate from production, and so on.

As a consequence we've built our apps to integrate with most of the systems we do encounter, ranging from Office and productivity applications to financial management and DTP applications. The tightness of the integration depends on the customer and the target software.

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Permalink Reply by Bert N. Langford on January 28, 2009 at 1:52pm

I have concluded that, because of the minimal responses to the original posting, publishers in general have not come close to the true integration potential Enterprise Publishing offers.

I don't consider this any lacking of the developers itself but rather a lacking of a publishing-wide alliance to accomplish it, pushed by publishers. Or some lacking by some key developers to upgrade their systems to a platform more conducive to affordable seamless integration. Or probably both.

It is nice to hear from one developer who is working at it, though.

Bert Langfod.

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on January 28, 2009 at 3:42pm

Hi Bert,

I am on the solution provider side.
I think integration should come on the solution side, not publisher side.

As an example I will use our solution here at Nstein - it consists of 3 major components that are tightly integrated - CMS for all the web/online/mobile publishing, text mining system for all the automated content tagging and classification, and an XML-repository based DAM for all of your content archival, repurposing, syndication, aggregation, rich media handling, workflows etc.

These 3 pieces are tightly integrated, but that is not enough.

What majority of publishers are having right now is numbers of disparate, usually obsolete systems (editorial, picture management, archival, ad management, etc.).

Majority of software vendors do built bridges to all these systems during the deployment/integration process. What publishers end up with is another system with 5-10 custom connectors built in - so called spider web that does not have any central, routing unit.

What happens when suddenly you need to change your editorial system? You have to built 5-10 connectors to each one of your remaining systems (since your new editorial is newer than your cms, etc.) again, which is a lot of work, pain and headache.

Instead what we developed is a so called "flower" architecture that removes the need to integrate all the pieces. Every system in your current infrastructure gets connected to our DAM, which serves as a universal router for content from any to any system in your infrastructure.

At the moment of ingestion into DAM from let's say your aggregation partner feed or Woodwing, content is converted into universal XML and enriched with auto-tagging, categorization, and all the extra meta-data (so your editors don't have to do tagging anymore).

Then when this piece of content needs to be pushed to, for example, your CMS or syndication, DAM transforms that content into needed format and ships it off together with embedded, automatically derived metadata.

Infrastructure-wise this allows for very easy systems upgrades - you just need to update 1 connector to your DAM, and the rest of connectors are always up-to-date (see attached picture).

Besides infrastructural benefit such an architecture provides you with one place to look for your content and with better understanding of what content you have, since everything is being text-mined with entities, places, company names, related articles, related ads, tone and sentiment detected and stored together with the asset itself inside the DAM.

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Permalink Reply by Bert N. Langford on January 29, 2009 at 12:00pm

Good posting on editorial systems. But peripheral to ad, circulation and production systems. And I'd say waiting on all software vendors to convert to the right architecture for seamless integration is what we have been doing and by-and-large it hasn't worked.

Rather an alliance of publishers working toward true and complete Enterprise Publishing to help direct the appropriate vendor communities is the only way it can happen. As everyone is aware, there has been a tremendous mandate by publishing senior management to reduce costs. This is one area that help is needed.

Bert Langford

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on January 29, 2009 at 1:12pm

The beauty of centralized integration, like I outlined it in my previous post, is the fact that all the needed integration on the vendor side is already done. It's called XML.

If your software can export and import XML (and anything that is more or less recent can), then you can integrate with Nstein DAM in the matter of hours, not days just by configuring XML ingestion/delivery mechanism to work with each system's specific XML map.

Permalink Reply by Tom Overton on January 29, 2009 at 1:37pm

We have a corporate-wide DAM system similar to what Oleg describes that works with our CMS. It's definitely worth the six figures we spent on it. However, our editorial system is still such that there isn't anything to tie into the DAM--we're still pulling images out of it manually and placing them ourselves.

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Permalink Reply by Bert N. Langford on February 11, 2009 at 4:21pm

Still hearing only of Enterprise Publishing from the Editorial side. Anything exciting happening with publishers on the Enterprise side: including circ, advertising and production?

Bert Langford