Censhare Publishing: Creating Tools for an Nmedia World

PUBLISHING SYSTEMS CenShare Publishing: Creating Tools for an nMedia World

By Ron Roszkiewicz

Historically, the phrase “publishing system” has been applied to many things — from pre-digital flowcharts and pneumatic tubes to comprehensive authoring and management systems for print, Web and other media channels. As publishing businesses wither under harsh economic conditions and new, bewildering media consumption trends, the need for efficient, flexible systems has never been greater. In the first of a series, we take a look at one such contender: cenShare.

nce upon a time, publishing systems were Quark in functionality. As a result, Quark went on to monolithic, inflexible, host-and-slave, buy Vision and immediately close it down. Ex-Vision server-and-workstation environments. employees started a new company, CoWare, in 2000. Then things got really interesting and The name was changed to cenShare in 2007. Overall, democratic as everyone acquired, for the the company has 15 years experience implementing the Oprice of a PC and some software, the means to publish very first editorial systems in Europe. This experience a professional looking bit of content. Unfortunately, serves them well when confronted with deploying large this turn of events did not result in the next step in enterprise sized publishing systems at companies such the evolution of the publishing system, just publishing as Dyson, a publisher that will soon support 150 us- in general. Older systems lived on past their expiration ers. The Dyson integration includes Adobe InDesign date and publishers were characterized as conservative Server (five of which are in operation at this facility). because they would not let go of systems that worked. At the National Magazine company (a subsidiary of In retrospect, the missing pieces to replicating Hearst in the US) half of the magazines are now on proprietary, closed loop systems were technologi- the cenShare publishing system and when the system cal. Technology had to advance to transcend modem is fully operational it will serve 750 users. The National speeds, operating system incompatibilities, lack of file Magazine project will when finished, comprise the larg- format standardization and many other issues. Without est and most complex integration for a magazine pub- CenShare’s Gallery such advances and standards there was no way to glue a lisher. While the company no longer relies on QPS, it mode provides a system together from available parts. does when conditions require it to, use Quark Server as lightbox view with an This article begins a series focusing on publish- part of the workflow. assortment of ways to ing systems available today. Each featured system at- As an enterprise supplier, cenShare claims that their search, display and filter tempts to solve the same basic set of requirements systems are the most scalable, reliable and redundant displayed results. with a slightly different approach. The menu of fea- systems available. CenShare also positions itself as the tures each offers in the main replicates a similar set attributed to systems of 20-30 years ago. For day-today operation, little has changed in what is needed in a secure collaborative environment. What is different is that the basic architectures of many of these systems are designed to support delivery channels today and tomorrow. The content is no longer anchored to any output channel, but is stored ready to be molded to whatever form is required. Desktop stalwarts like Quark and Adobe have made this transition with their design and production applications. In fact, the subject of this first review is cenShare, a German company that grew out of Vision, one of the largest Quark system integrators in Europe. Most of their employees came from Quark and they worked with Quark to develop Quark DMS. The company soon developed their own system that leapfrogged

4 The Seybold Report • Copyright ©2009 RISI Inc., all rights reserved • March 5, 2009 PUBLISHING SYSTEMS solution to all of the popular acronyms bandied about today. Media Asset Management, Product Information Management, Brand Management all seem to share the same core intent focused around the controlled syndication of assets. Characterizing themselves as Publishing System, Localization Management and Product Information Management seems to pull directly from their Vision roots. Breaking it down CenShare claims to be an integrated solution offering content management (à la Documentum), editorial workflow à( la K4 or Woodwing) and flat planning à( la Journal Designer or Proteus). It is predominantly a Java developer that relies heavily on XML. Earlier versions of the software included native Macintosh clients but now are completely Java-based. Their DAM system is also Java-based, and can run on any platform. However Of the components of itemized below, Page Content can be their preferred platform is Solaris or another flavor Planning is the most unique among all of those of- interactively previewed, of UNIX. Their least preferred platform is Windows fered by other publishing systems. In cenShare, it is videos played and XML because, the company maintains, it is too unreliable to implemented as a user-friendly drag-and-drop, instantly code written to screen support the demands of a publishing environment. updated page and publication view. Because multiple for live markup with the About 80-percent of cenShare functionality is Web users have access to it, it becomes a powerful collab- note function. enabled. This means that pages can be opened in the oration tool. CenShare’s long experience with both Web interface, pictures can be edited and content can QuarkXPress and InDesign also distinguish them from be manipulated on the page, using Web Tools. The their competition. company claims the extent of page element manipula- tion possible is unequaled in the industry. This can be Production Tool Overview attributed to the fact that Adobe provides the oppor- The following are the key components of the cenShare tunity for external control over all of the functions and publishing system: features of InDesign to integrators. CenShare, with its CenShare Page Planning — Publications, editorial years of backend publishing experience, is able to make content and ads can be planned by sheet or page. the most of it. Dynamic template management — For all output The company is planning to make a sales and mar- media, any number of templates can be stored and keting foray into the North America in 2009. (An at- made available for specific roles and workflows. In lay- tempt was made to enter the U.S. two years ago, with out templates for Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress, limited success. See The Seybold Report; Vol. 7, No. 7; April both traditional design elements and placeholders for 5, 2007; p. 6.) This is in addition to similar rollouts into text or borders are possible. Europe, Asia and the Middle East. They do not plan on CenShare Image Editor — All image files can be relying on traditional integrators for promoting, install- opened directly in the cenShare client and then scaled ing and supporting the products and only see companies and cropped, as well as rotated and reversed. such as management consulting as high level support. CenShare Translation Management —- Translation Typical of most European developers, cenShare workflows can be managed in any language supported supports all of the languages that InDesign Engine by Adobe InDesign. supports. As far as localization is concerned they sup- CenShare Workflow Management — Any number port the typical five (English, German, French, Spanish of work processes can be defined as workflows in the and Italian) European languages. Even for languages cenShare system. These can be split into separate sub- that are not supported, cenShare will modify the appli- tasks and are monitored using status information. cations to support them thanks to the fact that they can CenShare Schedule Management — Production modify the interface using XML tables. This is simi- schedules for all content and workflow steps can be lar to supplying text strings to a translator except that controlled and managed on the basis of reusable tem- the resulting translated strings do no have to be hand plates. End times are defined for all production- ele placed back into the text. ments, giving each asset a time window for completion. The cenShare workflow modules are fully inte- The chronology of the complete production is laid grated. It is possible to take one and use it in another down in the schedule. workflow but that seems unlikely since cenShare list as CenShare Admin Client — File formats, asset types, components many elements that are critical to serving thesauri und glossaries can be configured, as can user their customers. and CI parameters, versioning rules or permissions,

Volume 9, Number 5 • The Seybold Report • Copyright ©2009 RISI Inc., all rights reserved. 5 PUBLISHING SYSTEMS workflows and customers. Their multi-latency server concept manages user roles and access to certain assets within the system. CenShare Shared Distributed Server Management — Thanks to the cenShare system’s distributed server architecture, assets can be stored in different locations. The system can be scaled to an unlimited extent, with optional cenShare servers, Web servers and file systems. CenShare Server2Server — Automated processes en- able services and content to be mirrored among multiple cenShare servers. OPI Server — cenShare manages generation of low resolution for placement images and replacement with high resolution images stored on the cenShare or Helios sever. CenShare Content Editor — DTD templates control compare these systems.) As far as systems for smaller Censhare’s page the way the text is tagged using XML, eg directly with publishing environments, cenShare concedes that K4 planning view the sales formats in the layouts, links or the matching and Woodwind do sometimes compete. At the low end provides an interactive CSS tags on Web sites. of the DAM market they compete with Cumulus and digital page and Metadata services are available and cenShare does Portfolio and Documentum at the enterprise level. For galley approach to offer support for such well-accepted standards as IPTC. page planning they see Proteus as a competitor. Quark fitting articles and Publishing System competes as a publishing workflow advertisements. Pricing and Services competitor. Because such claims may seem outrageous While it is difficult to price a system but in general a ba- to some, we will certainly follow this overview with sic image library could cost 25,000 British pounds, with some in-depth use cases. prices for a fully configured enterprise system based The word publishing seems to have outgrown its on the number of clients and magazines extending to original link to print. We are now on the other side seven figures. Professional services for such a system of PDF and Java, XML and CSS acceptance for mak- can cost as much as the system. This is not due to the ing publishing applications. What continues to sepa- need for a high level of customization, but due to the rate the heavyweights from the dabblers is the way level of change and the need to control it. Changing they deal with thorny communications issues that one editorial system to another is traumatic and the will simply not go away —regardless of how well good vendors provide important change management architected and coded their solution may be. These procedures as part of the professional services sup- include ease in localization, interoperability (particu- The Web Client gallery port. In some cases, such as Dyson, maintenance of larly with reporting programs,) greater reliance on mode is a metadata the day-to-day activities and monitoring the system is metadata for search, Web site access, streamlining driven browser based outsourced. Hosting a large installation is not practical workflow and archiving. If feedback from publishing asset search tool for because of all of the large files being moved around. customers bears out the company’s claims, then cen- online syndication of Monitoring performance and supporting failover is Share seems to have positioned itself for whatever content. important and can be done remotely, even without the may come in the future. TSR user’s intervention. Conclusions The comprehensive suite of products was developed by only 50 engineers who, given the opportunity to re- architect the code base after the Quark buyout, took all that they had learned and created a more streamlined suite of products that are more easily maintained. It ap- pears that they do not need to apply repeated “hacks” to add features. It’s a rare company that gets such an opportunity. With an easily modified code base and 15 years of know-how, cenShare seems well positioned to evolve with their customer’s needs and adapt to supporting new channels. CenShare claims it does not have competitors for a system as complete as theirs seems to be. That remains to be seen. (At the end of this series of reviews, we will publish a chart of key functions and features to use to