Our client, a fortune 500 educational publishing company, was experiencing a significant increase in customer demands for highly customized, made-to-order educational material for the fulfillment of unique learning and assessment goals per state and per school district. The client’s legacy tools and workflow processes were inefficient and did not provide sufficient flexibility to rapidly accomplish the level of customization and the speed to market required to satisfy these custom demands. The client also had a strategic initiative to increase efficiencies through reusability by creating an asset data bank. This strategy could not be fully realized using the legacy systems in place.

The client was seeking to implement an XML-aware content management system (CMS) that would allow for smart storage and retrieval of reusable content, and provide an interface for the dynamic assembly and construction of new, made-to-order products from existing assets. Legacy content from InDesign templates would need to be imported into the repository to create an initial data bank, and an interface developed to allow a user to dynamically assemble new product configurations. The client also wished to deliver the assembled products to an InDesign Server to automate the process of applying design templates and auto-generation rules to generate the end press-ready products for production. The business objectives were to:

ArborSys collaborated with the client’s key business and IT teams to design, develop, and implement an XML-aware content management system that met the client’s needs. ArborSys worked jointly with the client to develop an XML schema expressing the known content components and their interrelationships. The CMS was integrated with an XML authoring tool to provide the functionality to create or edit XML content.

Existing assets were converted to XML files by mapping to the XML schema, “chunked” into XML components, and imported to the repository, while applying rules for automatically assigning metadata tags. ArborSys built a custom user interface to allow users to search, select, and dynamically assemble content into customized products. Users could request the press-ready transformation of the product from the application. The process automated the delivery of the assembled XML product content from the CMS to the design and layout tool server, where templates and rules were applied to generate and output the press-ready PDF files ready for production. The PDF file was stored back into the repository for final review and approval workflow, and the user notified when the request was satisfied.