How A Major B2B Publisher Streamlines

The Challenge

As a publishing leader, when it comes to constantly changing, tightly-regulated, and highly competitive global markets, it’s essential that all of the publisher’s operations are able to maintain the edge on rivals by upholding impeccable standards of content, whether in print or online.

Traditionally, the print publishing cycle was a relatively slow, time-consuming, and largely manual process. Today, the industry is still adjusting to an innovation curve, which means that content is published faster and more frequently than ever before. But in sectors such as accounting, law and healthcare, there’s no room for inaccuracies of any kind. 95% accuracy is not sufficient for a doctor or lawyer. Only complete accuracy will do.

So for content creators – themselves industry professionals – and publishers working in this field, the pressure is on to not only create, update, and iterate up-to-date content on an ever more frequent basis, but to ensure its reliability. As a business, the publisher depends on this accuracy to maintain its historic and ongoing reputation for trustworthiness, and up-to-the-minute professional information.

In order to streamline and future-proof its operations and processes, the company needed a solution which could create a frictionless portal for its authors – typically highly-skilled professionals with limited time to produce high-quality content. At the same time, it required a publishing platform which could handle the small details, like formatting, so writers could be freed up to focus on the areas where they could add the most value – producing accurate and up-to-date content.

The Solution
PublishOne’s relationship with the publisher began over 8 years ago in Italy. Success there saw the platform rolled out and reused in multiple worldwide locations, unifying approaches to publishing across the organization, and becoming the defining tool for publications and authors rather than just another tool amongst many others. This has led to a more standardised and streamlined approach to their content management throughout the company.

There’s no question that the way in which the world accesses information has changed. Internet-based ‘search’ is fast-replacing books on a shelf. For an everyday topic or a basic introduction to a particular field, a search engine might suffice. But for in-depth, up-to-date, and deep insights, professionals such as lawyers and doctors need a trustworthy and dependable point of reference.

With increasing digitalization of professional knowledge – less than 10% of the company’s worldwide output is in print format – it’s essential that digitised information is accessible and searchable for professionals whenever and wherever they need it the most. With PublishOne, it’s easy to create once and use everywhere, ensuring information stays current no matter where it’s located online.

Nearly gone are the days when industry professionals write for money. For professionals at the top of their game, content creation is more about validating their status and expertise, and sharing their professional insights with others. So to incentivize them to write, PublishOne removes the technical barriers to content creation. In fact, authors can use familiar tools like Microsoft Word, from inside the platform. This mitigates the need to learn new proprietary software simply to update an article or deliver content for publication.

One of the key factors impacting the quality and reliability of searching in a quest to locate relevant information is metadata. Metadata is data on the data which helps to describe and classifies what a document is about. One of the strengths of PublishOne, is how it makes managing metadata simple. And by strategically adding relevant metadata to documents through PublishOne, content is automatically enhanced for search engine optimization and applicability.

PublishOne has a reputation for being a friendly publishing platform. Having a people-first approach means that customer needs are front and centre for future developments and improvements. New functionality is added based on customer need, so that the product evolves and adapts to users, not the other way around. For clients like the publisher, this means that their feedback goes into shaping the future products, and they play an active role in development. By attending the twice-yearly Software Advisory Council, they also get to share experiences and ideas as part of a community looking to take the authoring tool to the next level, and ultimately work toward better serving the needs of writers, publishers, and readers.