PublishOne’s annual advisory council event is a chance to collaborate with clients at both an executive and functional level. This year, we welcomed more than 40 guests onboard ‘The Grande Dame’ herself – the luxurious and historic hotel ship SS Rotterdam. Here’s a summary of the two-day event – held on September 27th and 28th – plus key learnings that will help shape future iterations of the world’s friendly publishing platform. 

Executive Advisory Captains

“We started as a publisher, but at the moment we are more of an education company. We do a lot of e-learning, and the content from PublishOne is used as content for training materials.”

-Ruben Berghauser Pont

Day one of our advisory council event welcomed leaders and experts from the publishing world to discuss the latest industry trends and developments in publishing technology. 

The Executive Advisory Council (EAC) sessions saw PublishOne clients share knowledge and information on a range of relevant topics – including Business Intelligence (BI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrations – alongside a broader focus on the education market.

Client demonstrations took center stage, with a large-scale publisher of government content sharing their use of Microsoft’s PowerBI integrated with PublishOne. On top of that, one of our trusted implementation partners – SNAP Innovation – demonstrated AI integrations that are due to go live with two clients before the end of the year.  

The event also welcomed five newcomers – including a large and notable government organization. Although a few of our regular international attendees were sadly missed, this year’s EAC drew a larger attendance than previous editions.

By the end of the first day, we’d gained a number of key observations and learnings:

• Publishers are at different stages in their transition from print to digital.
• There’s a shift from publishing information to offering workflow solutions.
• Deeper search functionality is needed to find specific answers in specific documents. 
• Some traditional publishers are repositioning themselves as education companies.
• Generative AI always needs to be validated by a human. 
• Video is an increasingly popular format in some publishing niches.

Software Advisory Crew

“What we see is that educational companies are looking for their own play-out platform where they can publish their content.” 

– Jeroen Goemans, Partner, QQ

Day two of the advisory council was more of a working session, building on the observations and learning points from the first day. The format for the day involved functional experts from client companies bringing forward and presenting change requests to improve the PublishOne platform. 

This year, what really stood out – compared with previous editions – was the quality of change requests. This demonstrated a much closer relationship between users of PublishOne, and the software itself. All 38 change requests were functional enhancements that could benefit multiple users. 

In fact, this time around, there was a notable shift towards changes based on a particular scenario or use case rather than providing feedback on the look and feel of the UX/UI. Building on last year’s event, the main focus this time around was search functionality for authors and editors. The top requests for improvements to search included:

• Advanced metadata search for finding specific terms in specific fields.
• Search by user to find all documents assigned to a specific user.
• Search for folders as well as documents.
• Advanced filtering to enable users to select or deselect all filters with an exception.

Charting The Way Forward For PublishOne

Thanks to our advisory council attendees, we’re able to continue building a strong community of PublishOne advocates. Together, they help us shape and innovate our product to fit with the changing needs of the publishing industry. 

The next step for the proposed updates to PublishOne is a two-week voting process to help us prioritize those changes over the coming months. Over the next year, we’ll keep you in the know with the latest updates and improvements, and we look forward to seeing you all again next year!

To discover why content publishers in fields such as law and education choose PublishOne, get in touch with one of our experts. Contact us