All of the following questions are from webinar attendees. The answers are provided by Anthony Allen of ASTD.

• Q: Who stores all your content?
• A: All of the content is actually stored in RSuite. RSuite is built on MarkLogic so all of our content is actually in our MarkLogic database including the binaries, the file, images for the books and journals that we create. We also store our video content in the database although that doesn’t have any production work flow on it, we just use it as a library repository for our video content.
  
  
• Q: Can you speak about how this could be used in a medical society/medical journal context?
• A: I would say just look at the Massachusetts Medical Society does, they are a Mark Logic customer as well. www.mms.org. They are doing some really great things with content. I would just follow them in terms of the medical side of things.
  
  
• Q: Can you contrast XML vs HTML5?
• A: There really are two different things. XML is a way to store and enrich information and when HTML5 is ready it will be a way to engage people on the web. They are two completely different things.
  
  
• Q: Has ASTD's sales from selling on their own website increased?
• A: Absolutely there’s a couple things in terms of ways to quantify this change that has happened at ASTD. You have all of the juicy statistics that you can get from something like a Google analytics. You have time on site, number of clicks people used to get to the piece of content they want, you have returning users. All of that paints the picture of the bridge between the investment we made and the revenue we’re gaining right now. No, there’s no directly attributable way in terms o landing page and through what Google calls them Google Goals: step 1, step 2, step 3 and then step 4 the person purchases something. There’s no way for me to directly track from Rsuite to an actual product in a cart. But if you look at the aggregate statistics they are much improved than they were just six months ago. That has to do with several different things, not that just the fact we have our content in XML. If you look at the ecosystem that we built, every piece plays a part. One of the big parts to driving sales is to make sure the way you segment your content is the same way you segment your audience. Let’s say you do email marketing. Let’s use ASTDX terms: Human Capital, Talent Management, Traditional Training, e-Learning, that’s four segments. If my content is also segmented, each chapter or each book or each article is assigned one of those four keywords. Then you have this direct link between your audience and your content. And that can get very complicated. Within ASTD terms is it elearning or e-Learning? Is it Succession Planning or Talent Management? ASTD content is highly contextual and have multiple meanings, so it’s so important to really regulate your taxonomy at all stages of your production from beginning to very end when somebody purchases something. That is the number one thing to drive sales. Quite frankly you don’t need XML or Rsuite for that, but if you are going to scale and also decrease expenses you need to make that kind of commitment.
  
  
• Q: I am interested in how offsite vendors can be incorporated in an XML workflow. Our trade publishing house is very small and composition must outsourced, but I would like to know we could use them and still create content via XML.
• A: If you do composition, if you do conversion, any step in the production workflow can be incorporated into an XML workflow, it really just depends on what workflow engine you have working for you. You’ll have to decide if these people outside of your company need to be able to log into your system. Are there any security issues with that? As long as you do a very heavy content analysis and everybody knows what flavors of XML you’re using it really shouldn’t be an issue and should be pretty seamless.
  
  
• Q: Do you assign a unique identifier for each content format for recording sales revenue?
• A: We do. The biggest problem is consolidating all of the sales revenue because the sales revenue comes from multiple sources. It comes from Amazon, our own store, from third party distributers, and through large retail chains. So that’s a manual process and certainly ASTD isn’t going to invest the time into building APIs to download automatically the sales figures. We know what formats are doing well for us.
  
  
• Q: Did you learn all this on your own, or did you hire a consultant or bring in a new position?
• A: I learned a lot of stuff on my own, but in really big decisions I prefer to divert to knowledge of consultants so I know who to blame if something messes up. To make sure the ship moves forward, that’s my job. But there are huge decisions that are going to live longer than I am going to be here. This commitment to XML and DITA, and not just DITA but our commitment to XML and not just XML but DITA and not just DITA but our flavor and specialization within DITA that is at least a 5-7 year commitment that we’re making. Our commitment to Rsuite again that’s a multi year commitment and we’re here to stay. So those are decisions that I did not want to make on my own. So we went out to a consultant and did a heavy requirement gathering process. Its not because we didn’t know where we wanted to go – we totally did. And its not because we didn’t want to just out outsource everything to a consultant. Its really because I felt we needed an unbiased third party to help us make this decision because the people within our organization, they’re bias, we are a Microsoft house, we didn’t go with a Microsoft product. And there’s a reason for that. Everybody within your organization comes to the table with their preconceived notions. Having somebody like DCL or Really Strategies come to the table with their consulting practice in terms o “Hey, we are vendor neutral.” You need that advice and Really Strategies started out as a consulting company so they have that background. Are they a product company? Absolutely. Are they trying to sell Rsuite? Absolutely. But you have that consulting and that advice. Same thing with DCL is that you have that experience. So I guess to answer the question it really is about that unbiased third party that really going to give you the best decision and I was really happy with the decision we made, we haven’t looked back.
  
  
• Q: How do you develop a taxonomy?
• A: I would say pretty carefully. Definitely get an expert to help you because once you make those decisions, these are a multi-year decisions that if you don’t get it right in the beginning you’re going to have to retag stuff. Taxonomy is definitely a living document, but you want to minimize those changes as much as possible, so engage an expert in the beginning.
  
  
• Q: Regarding workflow of Word to XML to InDesign, do you bypass InCopy totally?
• A: We don’t. The actual workflow is Word to XML and XML to InCopy and the InCopy is imported into InDesign.
  
  
• Q: Do you have digital versions of your newsletters or magazines, and if yes, is this all handled in-house?
• A: We do. Little by little those newsletters and magazines are becoming part of the XML workflow, but as far as the digital versions, they’re really just online versions, web versions of the content. But the custom packages we create of our content do include articles from newsletters and magazines.
  
  
• Q: Starting with granular XML how difficult is it to create complex textbook layouts with tables, charts, etc. inside the CMS system versus post processing inside a layout program which has all the intricate design tools AND how much training or retraining might be needed for the casual editor who is accustomed to working in MS Word and the designers taking from there?
• A: It’s a little bit of everything, so you don’t want to build too much of the rendering in the XML. One of the big points of XML is to separate the rendering or the style from the actual content itself so the bare minimum of what you need to put into your XML is whatever minimum is going to simply render the table or render that chart. Then you can send it to another person to be designed. The training or retraining for the casual editor is not necessarily difficult. What is difficult is getting the transformation from Word into XML using the Microsoft Word templates that the editor is used to using. Let’s say you have five different editors and they all use the same type of table or chart and then it will be really easy to convert all those Word documents to XML because you’re really only dealing with one different type of chart. If you have five different editors using five different types of charts in Microsoft Word then it’s going to be really difficult. You’re going to have to retrain four or three of those editors to use similar types of charts. It really has nothing to do with XML, it has to do with consolidating the way that you do business with your editors and unifying the layout upstream in Microsoft Word in the authoring process.
  
  
• Q: I am not sure my question was sent. I have 2 novels epubed. I want to increase sales. They are on Kindle, smashwords, ebookmall and Barnes and Noble. They are in several formats. How do I increase sales?
• A: At some level content is content, although I hate it when people say that. The really big issue right not I think is when if you have a novel, especially with fiction, is what other elements are you going to create that differentiate this ebook from the print edition. If you Google the future of books and you can see some crazy examples of companies putting role playing games into their ebooks or even linking out to videos but the things of the questions, the tenant of the question of sales in terms of product diffiration and why is this product better, you have everything in terms of the author and the content. Is this content good first of all, but hopefully there will be some alignment between, hey this a book that you are not going to want to put down and you can read it on the bus or this is a business book so helping the busy professional consume this content through a mobile device – all those things to remind the customer that hey this is a format that can be used anywhere and everywhere is really important because sometimes they forget that connection of the book and where I am whenever I want to access the content is pretty important. I would challenge publishers to put extra content into their enhanced versions of their ebooks. But I know that’s really difficult, there’s a cost associated to that, there’s a cost to creating videos or audio or gain components to an ebook. All that stuff has to be planned from the beginning.
  
  
• Q: How is this product relevant in the traditional publishing stream? Do you have an example?
• A: I don’t really know I understand the question, but eBook sales are growing and any traditional publishers should pay attention to that.
  
  
• Q: How do you deal with graphic intensive documents?
• A: I recommend if you have graphic intensive documents and you’re just starting to get into XML then capture these graphic as images that kind of conform to HTML standards. If you have a bunch of images on one page and it’s kind of laid out in a really funky way then just capture them all as one image and then that one image will be referenced in the XML and it’s a lot easier than referencing three or four images on one page and having some appear on the left hand side of the page and some appear on the right hand side of the page – just capture all of them as one image. Then consider that XML version 1.0 for your content then when you go back, you can constantly refine your XML, parse out these images into separate images and enrich your XML, but what you don’t want to do is spend so much time and effort into just getting one book into XML especially when you have to deal with an entire back catalog because reuse is the name of the game and if you only have one book to reuse you’re not going to drive a whole lot of revenue.
  
  
• Q: Would you advise illustrated book publishers to leap into apps rather than focus on eBooks?
• A: This is completely my opinion, apps for me is a wormhole, it’s a foxhole, it’s a Alice in wonderland place, I’m getting a headache thinking about it. Unless you have very specific touch needs, meaning I need to be able to interact with my contact with four fingers and swipe to reap the benefits of this device there is no reason to make an app. And that being said stuff like Adobe digital publishing suite and woodwing (?) there are companies that are catching up to provide frameworks to plug into XML and current formats and render that stuff in apps. It’s kind of like what WordPress and BlogSpot did for websites probably six to seven years ago and now to make a website and to have it be really functional with all these gadgets and widgets its super eas. Its because framework companies like wordpress are offering their services and now there are companying doing it for apps. So it’s going to be interesting for me, I’ll be looking forward in a year who is going to take a leadership postion in the industry to provide small publisher with a framework to produce and make their apps that really are more than just show page 15 on an app with nothing else. For all the hype around the Wire Magazine app, it didn’t exactly blow me away. It was really cool, they had a couple of different assets on the page that actually were specifically for the iPad, but it wasn’t magic so it’ll be interesting to see what frameworks come out in a year. I’m really looking forward to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.
  
  
• Q: Can audio and video streams be included in this content management and distribution?
• A: Absolutely you have to be careful of the end device. You can’t necessarily play a 30 frame HD video on a kindle, it doesn’t even have color. You have to be cognizant of those things. The different variants kind of spiders out very quickly. There are embedded videos on the web and when I talk to people about how theyr’re going to make money in thie new world, there is that whole app verses ebook question. Should I make an enhanced ePub or ebook or distinct app that someone buys for $9.99 from the app store. So, in terms of the production, go all the way back to the very beginning of th eproduction process and consider you have this library of all of your assets you have the book of which chapters and topics make up the book, you have the magazine where several articles make upp the magazine and then you have other assets and videos or audios. ASTD produces hundreds of hours of video and audio a year, especially from conferences. You can put together these pakcages on the fly. Now it’s really powerful for me to go to work with our sales director who has someone like Kaiser Permanente who has an internal training program who wants to get the content to help them do their jobs better. Video and audio in’st XML necessary, but the video and audio we have in Rsuite still uses the same taxnonmy hierarchy as everything else. In rsuite if I search for TIME? Management, what shows up? Charters XML, articles XML, video and audio. It’s all right there and then you can start thinking of now that I have this stuff let’s get it out and what device we need to get it to and can we play audio or video on these devices? That’s really half the battle right there. Just organizing all of your stuff which is what a CMS and XML will help you do. Even for binary assets like video and audio.
  
• DON: And those are stored in your CMS?
• A2: Yup, stored in CMS. If I go into CMS and type into search all of those things pop up. We have a customization to search for just audio or video or whatever.
  
  
• Q: How long did it take to transform your existing content?
• A: That was actually a short time. Each PDF we sent, cause we’re a PRINT? Organization, so we actually sent print PDF to be converted into XML. We always had stuff out there and processed. Maybe a week until it comes back to us and then its QA’ed and then thrown into repository. It’s not necessarily the time it takes to convert the amount and the constants you have in your conversion specification. I was lucky enough to do this conversion specification that would apply to all ASTD content from scratch. Other companies are not so lucky. They have to deal with legacy systems and legacy types of XML, so you are to update and adapt to future content. I feel very sorry for those people that have to deal with legacy system. You don’t want some of your library in this one flavor of XML and this other part of you library in another flavor. It just creates havoc for reuse. If you want to extract all of my chapters in e-Learning, I’m not going to get consistent results if not using same type of language. So in that amount of time, it was probably a five to six month process from very beginning to very end from when we went into modeling of our content to when we actually had the finished conversion specification. I was very nervous, it was a very difficult process and very difficult decisions to make, but now we’re at the other end and we can reap the benefits especially in terms of the apps and they’re just turn key applications that just work.