Interview: Let’s Talk InCopy with Chad Siegel

No one can deny that Adobe’s InDesign page lay­out appli­ca­tion has tak­en the design and pub­lish­ing indus­tries by storm. From solo free­lancers to multi-billion dol­lar pub­lish­ing con­glom­er­ates, InDesign is advanc­ing its way across the front lines of pub­lish­ing, leav­ing pur­ple but­ter­flies on screen after screen. But, only on design­ers screens. Most writ­ers and edi­tors are still using Microsoft Word to write copy that design­ers lat­er place into InDesign lay­outs. There’s anoth­er pur­ple but­ter­fly silent­ly flit­ting around the pub­lish­ing world.

What most people–including most InDesign experts–don’t know is that Adobe also makes a word proces­sor that inter­twines copy and lay­out more inti­mate­ly than Word could ever aspire to.

Current with each new release of InDesign since ver­sion 1.0 in 1999 is a new release of a hum­ble lit­tle appli­ca­tion that brings true editorial-production col­lab­o­ra­tion into the mod­ern pub­lish­ing work­flow. Although Adobe kept its lips sealed about this appli­ca­tion for the first four years of its life, a few with­in Adobe are begin­ning to whis­per the gospel of InCopy.

One such whis­per­er is Chad Siegel.

Quark VS InDesign​.com How long have you been a Senior Product Manager for InDesign and InCopy at Adobe?

Chad Siegel Five years.

QvI Before Adobe, what did you do?

CS Before Adobe I worked as a graph­ic design­er at a start-up com­pa­ny found­ed by for­mer Aldus employ­ees who worked on PageMaker–one of whom was the for­mer Product Manager. I designed for print, Web and also inter­ac­tive inter­faces for CD-ROMs. Before that I stud­ied Painting and Printmaking in college.

QvI How have those expe­ri­ences helped you pre­pare for over­see­ing the devel­op­ment and direc­tion of appli­ca­tions that have become inte­gral to the mod­ern pub­lish­ing workflow?

CS Working at a small start-up required a will­ing­ness to per­form a vari­ety of func­tions that extend­ed beyond the tra­di­tion­al role of a graph­ic designer–often times includ­ing writ­ing and edit­ing copy. So I cer­tain­ly have a first-hand under­stand­ing of the prob­lems of col­lab­o­ra­tive edi­to­r­i­al and design work­flows. Combined with cus­tomer feed­back, this real-world expe­ri­ence helps inform ques­tions we ask and deci­sions we make, ensur­ing our direc­tion is root­ed in the nuanced expe­ri­ence of our cus­tomers who pro­duce mate­ri­als for a vari­ety of media types.

QvI Before we get into the hard ques­tions, let’s have a lit­tle fun. I’ll assume you enjoy using InCopy. Stepping out­side your role as prod­uct man­ag­er, speak­ing strict­ly as a user, why do you like InCopy? When using InCopy CS2, what strikes you as the coolest fea­ture? Why?

CS Writers and edi­tors are just as pas­sion­ate about the qual­i­ty of their con­tent as design­ers are about the for­mat and design used to express it. Because pub­lish­ing is col­lab­o­ra­tive, it’s impor­tant that each constituent–whether that be edi­to­r­i­al, design, or production–has an oppor­tu­ni­ty to ful­ly par­tic­i­pate in the over­all process. Most pub­lish­ers work with mixed edi­to­r­i­al and lay­out tools–for exam­ple, Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign–which means that writ­ers work with­out the ben­e­fit of see­ing how their con­tent fits with­in the con­text and for­mat­ting of the final page. This results in inef­fi­cient back-and-forth reviews and in some cas­es puts design­ers in the awk­ward posi­tion of hav­ing to make edi­to­r­i­al deci­sions to meet dead­lines. So the integri­ty of a writer’s intent suf­fers as a result. Because of the shared text engine and graph­ics mod­el with InDesign, InCopy users can accu­rate­ly see how their con­tent will appear with­in the con­text of the final page, there­by empow­er­ing them to make the nec­es­sary edits. This tighter incor­po­ra­tion of writ­ers and edi­tors into pub­lish­ing work­flows is what I like best.

This is why the mul­ti­ple views in InCopy–Story, Galley and Layout–are my favorite. They are win­dows that help edi­to­r­i­al contributors–such as myself–participate more ful­ly in the pub­lish­ing workflow.

QvI Now that we know why you use InCopy, let’s dis­cuss who else should use it, and why. Who needs InCopy today?

CS Any writer or edi­tor who col­lab­o­rates close­ly with design­ers to get design and copy to work together–and who per­haps is tired of the end­less rounds of review and correction–can ben­e­fit from InCopy.
The con­cept of real-time edi­to­r­i­al and design col­lab­o­ra­tion is famil­iar to cus­tomers in news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines. While those work­ing in oth­er pub­lish­ing work­flows aren’t as well acquaint­ed with it. As inter­est in InCopy has grown, so has our under­stand­ing of its applic­a­bil­i­ty to work­flows out­side news­pa­per and mag­a­zine operations–sometimes in ways we didn’t orig­i­nal­ly expect. For exam­ple, we’ve recent­ly seen book pub­lish­ers adopt InCopy as a means of improv­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tion between exter­nal sub­ject mat­ter experts (i.e. authors) and inter­nal writ­ers (i.e. edi­tors). Traditionally their process­es are more ser­i­al and lin­ear than news­pa­pers. By incor­po­rat­ing InCopy into their work­flow they’ve been able to reduce their over­all pro­duc­tion time, often considerably.

QvI Why is InCopy an impor­tant tool?

CS InCopy is an impor­tant appli­ca­tion because it helps those cre­at­ing, con­tribut­ing and edit­ing con­tent par­tic­i­pate more ful­ly in pub­lish­ing work­flows, let­ting them retain con­trol of edi­to­r­i­al con­tent up until the last sec­onds before a pub­li­ca­tion goes to production.

QvI How does InCopy com­pare against its com­pe­ti­tion? What are the advan­tages to using InCopy CS2 over Microsoft Word?

CS The biggest dif­fer­ence between InCopy and oth­er edi­to­r­i­al tools is that InCopy let’s you see the page design as you write and edit the copy to fit. With Microsoft Word and oth­er edi­to­r­i­al toolsets, writ­ers essen­tial­ly write blind. They throw their con­tent over the tran­som for design­ers to work with.

In addi­tion to pro­vid­ing an edit­ing envi­ron­ment that accu­rate­ly rep­re­sents the con­text of the over­all InDesign pub­li­ca­tion, InCopy also includes the LiveEdit work­flow plug-ins which pro­vide a light­weight par­al­lel edi­to­r­i­al work­flow solu­tion. These plug-ins let design­ers break up their InDesign doc­u­ments into assign­ments so mul­ti­ple writ­ers and edi­tors can work on them simultaneously–all with­out fear of over­writ­ing one another’s work.

These two benefits–the abil­i­ty to accu­rate­ly visu­al­ize con­tent with­in the page design as well as work­ing in par­al­lel with designers–provide tremen­dous advan­tages to cus­tomers using InDesign as their lay­out appli­ca­tion and is unique to InCopy.

QvI How is InCopy doing in the mar­ket­place? What kind of adop­tion rates have you not­ed in major glob­al mar­kets like the U.S., the U.K., Europe, Australia, and Japan? How much of those are retail ver­sions of InCopy and how much solu­tions from SIs?

CS I can’t share spe­cif­ic sales data, how­ev­er I can share some of the gen­er­al trends we’re seeing.
InCopy is includ­ed as the edi­to­r­i­al com­po­nent of high-end pub­lish­ing work­flow sys­tems pro­vid­ed by numer­ous third-party sys­tem inte­gra­tors (SIs). It is also avail­able direct­ly from Adobe for small­er edi­to­r­i­al work­groups who don’t have such strin­gent needs for work­flow man­age­ment sys­tems. With the CS2 release of InCopy, we’re see­ing a tremen­dous increase in adop­tion and usage along­side InDesign. At the SI lev­el, we’re see­ing wide­spread adop­tion in large mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers world­wide. At the small team lev­el, we’re see­ing healthy adop­tion, not only in small news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, but even with­in pub­lish­ing work­flows that we didn’t orig­i­nal­ly antic­i­pate, such as book pub­lish­ing, adver­tis­ing, and in-house cor­po­rate design. 

QvI Any sur­pris­es in who and where InCopy has been adopted?

CS We ini­tial­ly expect­ed large news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines to adopt it sim­ply because of their tra­di­tion­al famil­iar­i­ty with the ben­e­fits of par­al­lel edi­to­r­i­al work­flow. The demand evolved to encom­pass small­er pub­li­ca­tions who have sim­i­lar needs but pub­lish less fre­quent­ly. It seems cus­tomers intu­itive­ly under­stand InCopy’s val­ue propo­si­tion when they see it and demand has now grown to include a num­ber of dif­fer­ent work­flows and pub­li­ca­tion types, such as book, cor­po­rate infor­ma­tion, and gov­ern­ment pub­lish­ing. These lat­ter work­flows are ones we cer­tain­ly didn’t antic­i­pate orig­i­nal­ly with ver­sion 1.0, but the appli­ca­tion and its inte­gra­tion con­tin­ues to evolve and so we’re cer­tain­ly inter­est­ed in hear­ing from cur­rent and poten­tial cus­tomers and respond­ing to their needs.

QvI Through ver­sion 2 (the cur­rent release, CS2, is ver­sion 4) InCopy was only avail­able from Adobe’s sys­tem inte­gra­tor (SI) part­ners, and then usu­al­ly only as part of full-blown pub­lish­ing work­flow sys­tems. Only the last two ver­sions, CS and CS2, have been avail­able for pur­chase as stand­alone prod­ucts from Adobe. What was the rea­son­ing behind keep­ing the first two ver­sions locked behind SIs?

CS The fre­quen­cy of dai­ly and week­ly pub­li­ca­tions puts an enor­mous pres­sure on the col­lab­o­ra­tive rela­tion­ship between edi­to­r­i­al and design. For exam­ple, dai­ly news­pa­pers could not pro­duce their prod­uct if they had to work in a lin­ear process con­sist­ing of sequen­tial steps. In order to meet their tight dead­lines, both edi­to­r­i­al and design have to work in par­al­lel. So we orig­i­nal­ly designed InCopy to be the edi­to­r­i­al front end of SI pub­lish­ing sys­tems that enabled par­al­lel col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow. So our ini­tial focus was on devel­op­ing a prod­uct to meet their needs.

Around ver­sion 2.0 cus­tomers in small­er work­groups began ask­ing for some­thing sim­i­lar. They have sim­i­lar time con­straints and a need to stream­line their edi­to­r­i­al work­flow by increas­ing the effi­cien­cy of their col­lab­o­ra­tion, yet they don’t have sim­i­lar bud­gets or IT sup­port or fixed notions of work­flow. We have a well estab­lished his­to­ry of respond­ing to our cus­tomer­s’ needs and so with CS, we began sell­ing InCopy direct­ly from Adobe with a light­weight, file-system based col­lab­o­ra­tion sys­tem called the Bridge plug-ins. In CS2 we changed the name to the LiveEdit Workflow plug-ins as it is more descrip­tive of InCopy’s val­ue propo­si­tion. We now syn­the­size feed­back from edi­to­r­i­al cus­tomers work­ing in a vari­ety of work­flows and are enhanc­ing InCopy’s fea­ture set to appeal to a broad range of cus­tomers and uses.

QvI Adobe has shout­ed from the rooftops about InDesign since ver­sion 1–indeed, even long before its release, Adobe co-founder and for­mer chair­man, John Warnock, pas­sion­ate­ly tout­ed InDesign as the evo­lu­tion of page lay­out. If that’s true (you’ll get no argu­ment from me), if, over the last sev­en years, InDesign has become so impor­tant to pub­lish­ing lay­out, wouldn’t InDesign’s edi­to­r­i­al com­pan­ion be con­sid­ered just as impor­tant, just as evo­lu­tion­ary? InDesign is on the lips (if not desk­tops) of every pub­lish­ing indus­try pro­fes­sion­al, from pro­duc­tion to edi­to­r­i­al, but only a scant few have heard of InCopy–and most of them from Quark VS InDesign​.com and the half-handful of self-appointed InCopy evan­ge­lists like me. Why doesn’t the mar­ket hear about InCopy from its cre­ator? Why the silence? Isn’t Adobe pas­sion­ate about InCopy?

CS The notion of InCopy has evolved from being about spe­cial­ized high-end workflows–where they have an inher­ent under­stand­ing of the val­ue propo­si­tion –to hav­ing broad­er mar­ket appeal. We do mar­ket InCopy in many of the same ways as InDesign, but cer­tain­ly not with the same empha­sis. One of the things we learned ear­ly on about InDesign is that, in order to be suc­cess­ful, appli­ca­tions must fit with­in a broad­er ecosys­tem of pub­lish­ing, so we con­tin­ue invest­ing in the pub­lish­ing indus­try as a whole. For exam­ple, we work to ensure there is a broad com­mu­ni­ty of devel­op­ers who can build cus­tom solu­tions around InDesign and InCopy, we help cre­ate net­works of cer­ti­fied train­ers, and con­tin­ue help­ing edu­cate and train print ser­vice providers to ensure they can accept and trou­bleshoot our files. InCopy is no dif­fer­ent in this regard. In many ways, best prac­tices in edi­to­r­i­al work­flow is still a nascent con­cept. So instead of press­ing cus­tomers with mar­ket­ing mes­sages we’ve been pri­mar­i­ly focused on build­ing oth­er infra­struc­ture around InCopy, such as train­ing. For exam­ple, we’re pleased to report that both Lynda​.com and Total Training now have video train­ing for InCopy. Adam Pratt and Mike Richman recent­ly pub­lished a book about InCopy and the LiveEdit work­flow called the Adobe InCopyCS2 Book. In addi­tion to these train­ing mate­ri­als we’re also in the process of devel­op­ing an ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) exam to help build a sta­ble of qual­i­fied train­ers upon which cus­tomers may rely. Once this train­ing is in place then the foun­da­tion is there to pro­vide more mes­sag­ing and mar­ket­ing around InCopy.

QvI Excellent! Let me know when the InCopy ACE exam is ready; I’ll be the first to get cer­ti­fied. I’m already pret­ty busy with InCopy con­sult­ing, train­ing, and edi­to­r­i­al and pro­duc­tion work­flow integration.

Those who do use or know about InCopy have a fea­ture wish-list long enough to fill the front­page. For exam­ple: InDesign and InCopy’s LiveEdit work­flow enables assign­ing con­tent to spe­cif­ic indi­vid­u­als for edit­ing in InCopy. However, such assign­ments are ether­ic and impo­tent. Anyone with InCopy or InDesign can edit con­tent assigned to any­one else with­out restric­tion. The retail appli­ca­tions do not include a means of lim­it­ing con­tent access to its assigned own­er. How are such con­cerns addressed for the would-be InCopy customer?

CS We view cus­tomer sug­ges­tions and feed­back as vital to ensur­ing our suc­cess. That feed­back ensures the enhance­ments we’re mak­ing are rel­e­vant, so we con­tin­u­ous­ly gath­er cus­tomer feed­back through a vari­ety of meth­ods dur­ing all stages of our devel­op­ment cycle. The best way to bring fea­ture requests to our atten­tion is to sub­mit a fea­ture enhance­ment via Adobe​.com. Though it may seem imper­son­al, please be assured that we take the feed­back very seri­ous­ly and go through all of them at least once every month.

The retail ver­sions of InCopy do include a light­weight, file-system based col­lab­o­ra­tion tech­nol­o­gy that pro­vides check-in/check-out func­tion­al­i­ty. Similar to check­ing out a book from the local library, this ensures that only a sin­gle user can have con­tent checked out for their exclu­sive use at a giv­en time. Malicious users or those who are on tight dead­lines and need to take back con­trol of a sto­ry are able to do so but I would hard­ly char­ac­ter­ize that as not lim­it­ing con­tent access to an assigned user. The rea­son we allow users to take back con­trol of a sto­ry is because cus­tomers request­ed this abil­i­ty for extreme cir­cum­stances. We con­sis­tent­ly heard this option was a require­ment in small work­groups. For exam­ple, in the event some­one for­got to check-in their con­tent before leav­ing for the day or if they were out sick, would you want such an event to stop a pub­li­ca­tion group from meet­ing their dead­line? Of course not. So that’s why the abil­i­ty to over­ride the lock files is there. We also took great pains to design the sys­tem so that con­tent is nev­er lost. So even if some­one else steals the story’s lock out from under­neath anoth­er user, we always give you the abil­i­ty to save a copy which can be re-introduced lat­er if necessary.

Looking at your ques­tion more broad­ly, it’s impor­tant to under­stand how the size of a work­group changes the dynam­ics of col­lab­o­ra­tion and work­flow. Generally speak­ing, small­er work­groups are bet­ter able to enforce their work­flow through their cul­ture and process, but as the size of a work­group increas­es so does the com­plex­i­ty involved in coor­di­nat­ing their efforts. Because of this, larg­er work­groups look beyond their cul­ture towards tech­nol­o­gy as a means of admin­is­ter­ing their work­flow. Our SI part­ners pro­vide a vari­ety of edi­to­r­i­al work­flow solu­tions that scale to meet the needs of medi­um and larg­er work­groups. The key dif­fer­en­tia­tor between what we pro­vide to small work­groups with the retail ver­sion and what our SI part­ners pro­vide with their sys­tems are cus­tomiz­able work­flow and process restric­tions. For exam­ple, all part­ner solu­tions require users to have a fixed notion of work­flow which their sys­tems can be cus­tomized to enforce. Features such as the auto­mat­ic rout­ing of sto­ries as well as more com­plex noti­fi­ca­tion schemes are stan­dard approach­es they pro­vide. Collaboration in small­er work­groups is more organ­ic and less com­plex and so the retail ver­sion of InCopy is well suit­ed to meet their needs. If cus­tomers would like tools to help enforce their work­flow process more strin­gent­ly then there are a vari­ety of part­ner solu­tions from which to choose. A great resource for help­ing cus­tomers assess which solu­tion is right for them–either InCopy retail, a devel­op­er work­flow solu­tion, or an inte­grat­ed work­flow system–is avail­able on Adobe​.com. If a part­ner solu­tion is desir­able then a full list­ing of third-party edi­to­r­i­al wor­fk­low solu­tions can be found there as well.

QvI What is the for­mu­la, cri­te­ria, or thought process that deter­mines whether InCopy will include a fea­ture out of the box or leave it up to SIs to address?