Crossmedia Publishing: Hanley Wood successfully uses SoftCare K4 XML Exporter together with SDL Tridion
March 28, 2008
DPCI, the New York based K4 integrator, successfully integrated Hanley Wood Business Media's editorial publishing platform, SoftCare K4, with the company's content management system, SDL Tridion. This integration utilizing a custom-developed XML utility provided Hanley Wood's editorial department with an end-to-end platform to control how content is published online.
Hanley Wood Business Media is an award winning portfolio of housing and construction magazines and online media. As part of this project, DPCI worked with Hanley Wood to analyze workflow, define requirements, and develop a series of tools that add on to SoftCare's K4 Publishing System. Integrating the two systems, DPCI developed customizations around SoftCare's K4 XML Exporter, an auto-extraction tool utilizing XML. This served as the bridge between the editorial, publishing, and content management systems.
"With the ability to add metadata, tag content, and make associations from the inception of article content, Hanley Wood is in a good position to achieve a media-neutral content workflow wherein some articles will be attached to layouts for print, while other online-only content can be published directly to the Web. In both cases writers and editors will have a single tool for authoring that offers them robust editing, tracking, and dictionary support," said Ivan Mironchuk, Technical Services Manager at DPCI.
As part of the project for Hanley Wood, DPCI strategized a way to use "non-formatting" character style sheets as a way of identifying important keywords, people, and companies within the article. By doing this, writers and editors are empowered to decide what is important and what is not. They no longer rely on a Web producer to identify relevant content before the story is published online.
The association-building was streamlined as well. Now writers do not need to write script or insert tags; they can simply highlight words with a set of pre-defined character styles and the XML transformation will recognize these "call-outs" and take care of the rest. Once the article is imported into Hanley Wood's Tridion Content Management System all keywords, companies, and people become reference links to view-related content.
"With this new integration, our editorial department has complete control and greater flexibility in developing Web content," explained Jennifer Hannon, Business Systems Analyst. "Now users can determine the most important content including names, references, and keywords and integrate them within this content management database using hotlinks. From a visitor perspective, our Web site now offers a better content experience providing links to other relevant articles and subject matter."
"The XML feed allows our entire editorial department to continuously update our site with fresh new content," explained Jeff Rule, Managing Director of Web and Content Management at Hanley Wood. "Enabling our writers to have the freedom to prepare their articles and images for the Web without requiring the assistance of a Webmaster is extremely valuable, and ultimately delivers a better quality editorial experience."
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