Interview: Let’s Talk InCopy with Chad Siegel

CS Our goal is to enable Adobe part­ners to pro­vide new lev­els of automa­tion and effi­cien­cy in high-end edi­to­r­i­al work­flows while also address­ing the needs of small­er col­lab­o­ra­tive edi­to­r­i­al work­groups who either don’t have the need or bud­get for a full-blown sys­tem. Doing so ensures that cus­tomers receive the widest breadth and depth of options which can be tai­lored to meet their needs. As men­tioned pre­vi­ous­ly, the nature of col­lab­o­ra­tion is dif­fer­ent depend­ing on the size of a work­group, the fre­quen­cy of a pub­li­ca­tion, the under­ly­ing tech­nol­o­gy infra­struc­ture and need for cus­tomiza­tion. Larger work­groups need database-driven work­flow man­age­ment sys­tems which can be cus­tomized to meet their spe­cif­ic work­flow. These are avail­able from SIs and third-party devel­op­ment part­ners. So we add fea­tures to InCopy that offer the broad­est ben­e­fit to edi­to­r­i­al cus­tomers, leav­ing fea­tures that require the enforce­ment of spe­cif­ic work­flow process­es to our devel­op­ment part­ners who are bet­ter suit­ed at cus­tomiz­ing solu­tions to fit spe­cif­ic work­flow needs.

CS As pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned, our goal is to empow­er our part­ners, not com­pete with them. A num­ber of dif­fer­ent edi­to­r­i­al work­flow solu­tions are avail­able for InCopy and InDesign from sys­tems inte­gra­tors and part­ners. These scale from solu­tions for high vol­ume, large pub­lish­ing oper­a­tions all the way down to small edi­to­r­i­al work­groups. For exam­ple, Woodwing pro­vides Smart Connection, Smart Connection Pro, and Smart Connection Enterprise. Each rep­re­sents an incre­men­tal increase in func­tion­al­i­ty, robust­ness, cus­tomiza­tion and price. So there are some low­er end solu­tions avail­able from third-parties that go beyond what Adobe pro­vides with InCopy directly.

CS InDesign and InCopy-based solu­tions range from high-end sys­tems to light-weight options which are well-suited for small­er work­groups. As men­tioned before, these small­er work­groups are more organ­ic in their approach to col­lab­o­ra­tion and there­fore don’t have such fixed notions of work­flow. Frequently they don’t have robust IT sup­port and cer­tain­ly don’t have the bud­get for large sys­tems. So our direct sales strat­e­gy and part­ner­ships are meant to meet the needs of small­er work­groups as well.

CS Obviously it depends on your work­flow needs, the fre­quen­cy of your pub­li­ca­tion, the size of your work­group, your tech­nol­o­gy infra­struc­ture (data­base dri­ven vs. file-system based solution…etc.). Two edi­to­r­i­al work­flow solu­tions that come imme­di­ate­ly to mind are Woodwing’s Smart Connection and Smart Connection Pro as well as MEI’s TrueEdit, but there are cer­tain­ly oth­ers. I would encour­age read­ers to inves­ti­gate part­ner edi­to­r­i­al work­flow solutions.

CS Our under­stand­ing of edi­to­r­i­al work­flows and how dif­fer­ent peo­ple con­tribute to it is evolv­ing, and I would imag­ine that InCopy will evolve with it. For exam­ple, the cur­rent InDesign and InCopy work­flow is pred­i­cat­ed on con­trib­u­tors and cre­ative teams work­ing from a shared file sys­tem with­in the same fire­wall. In talk­ing with cus­tomers, we’ve learned that with many work­flows this is not pos­si­ble and we’re now look­ing at ways of mak­ing it eas­i­er to col­lab­o­rate with geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­perse, remote con­tent con­trib­u­tors to pub­lish­ing workflows.

This is sim­ply one exam­ple of how we’re like­ly to evolve. You can expect InCopy to make it eas­i­er to col­lab­o­rate with an expand­ed set of con­trib­u­tors for a vari­ety of media types and to intro­duce new meth­ods that enable full par­tic­i­pa­tion of con­stituents with­in a broad­er set of pub­lish­ing workflows.

CS As we’ve dis­cussed, InCopy ben­e­fits any cre­ative team in which design­ers and edi­tors need to work in par­al­lel. Right now, cre­atives in mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers under­stand that val­ue propo­si­tion best. However, that per­cep­tion is grow­ing in the cre­ative com­mu­ni­ty and impact­ing how peo­ple are approach­ing edi­to­r­i­al work­flow in book and cat­a­log pub­lish­ing, adver­tis­ing, and oth­er areas. In our expe­ri­ence, this per­cep­tion will con­tin­ue to grow and to reach into areas you might not expect. We recent­ly had some­one who han­dles pro­duc­tion of the bud­get for the President of the United States come to an InDesign User Group meet­ing in Washington, DC because they use InDesign for lay­out and are look­ing for ways to con­tin­u­al­ly improve their process­es. They’re prime can­di­dates for reduc­ing their “time to pub­lish” using InCopy. And they cer­tain­ly work under severe dead­lines. So you’re going to start to see notions of par­al­lel work­flow and edi­to­r­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tion appear­ing in new places like that. In addi­tion, we’re always look­ing at ways to improve cross-media pub­lish­ing process­es. So I would imag­ine we’ll be explor­ing those oppor­tu­ni­ties too. Personal pub­lish­ing is also a rapid­ly grow­ing phe­nom­e­na, so there may be pos­si­bil­i­ties there as well.

CS I’d like to see it facil­i­tate more types of col­lab­o­ra­tion as well as expand sup­port for more per­son­al types of pub­lish­ing such as con­tri­bu­tion to blogs, wikis, etc. One of Adobe’s strengths is the broad range of tech­nolo­gies we have for near­ly every medium–print, Web, mobile, audio, video, DVD pub­lish­ing. I envi­sion inte­grat­ing with more of these tech­nolo­gies so we can keep up with cus­tomer­s’ evolv­ing notions of edi­to­r­i­al con­tent. We need to make it eas­i­er to cre­ate and edit con­tent for alter­na­tive media types.

CS We’re see­ing a num­ber of mar­ket trends that promise to change the nature of edi­to­r­i­al con­tent as we under­stand it today: the explo­sion in dig­i­tal media cre­ation and con­sump­tion, an empha­sis on per­son­al pub­lish­ing and expres­sion, as well as a shift towards con­tent dri­ven, cross-media workflows.

From dig­i­tal cam­eras, to cel­lu­lar phones, to iPods, there’s been a colos­sal increase in the vari­ety of ways in which con­sumers inter­act and engage with media. Not only is this increas­ing the ways in which con­sumers receive con­tent, but also has made it much eas­i­er for peo­ple to cre­ate, share and dis­trib­ute that con­tent. With bar­ri­ers to a vari­ety of rich­er con­tent types falling and new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels emerg­ing it’s quick­ly becom­ing a require­ment for pub­lish­ers want­i­ng to dif­fer­en­ti­ate their brand to cre­ate more engag­ing and per­son­al­ized expe­ri­ences to con­nect with their cus­tomers. From Postscript to PDF to Flash, Adobe has tools and tech­nolo­gies that will help pub­lish­ers meet that chal­lenge. It’s inef­fi­cient for pub­lish­ers to build dis­parate and poten­tial­ly redun­dant process­es around pub­lish­ing to each media type–print, Web, mobile, etc.–and so I can imag­ine many work­flow process­es will begin to con­sol­i­date. Since most pub­lish­ing work­flows begin with the cre­ation, acqui­si­tion and edit­ing of edi­to­r­i­al con­tent, I can see the con­sol­i­da­tion of edi­to­r­i­al being a key enabler for single-source, cross-media pub­lish­ing. By this I mean that we’re begin­ning to see a broad­er need for con­tent types to shift from being print or web or audio spe­cif­ic with re-purposing hap­pen­ing as an after­thought to becom­ing one source which can then be used for print, Web, mobile or any oth­er future chan­nel. InCopy’s edi­to­r­i­al focus and sup­port for col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow make it well posi­tioned to evolve into an easy to use tool that enables the cre­ation and edit­ing of con­tent for mul­ti­ple media. This is an impor­tant role in such a future vision.

CS InCopy and Word have slight­ly dif­fer­ent objec­tives. InCopy is inti­mate­ly tied to InDesign and cre­ative pub­lish­ing work­flows, while Word is a great tool for cre­at­ing busi­ness doc­u­ments. They co-exist and com­ple­ment each oth­er. Where there is over­lap we ensure a high-degree of com­pat­i­bil­i­ty between the two. We cer­tain­ly have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to broad­en our sup­port for emerg­ing work­flows and media types but where the objec­tives of the prod­ucts over­lap, our goal is not to dis­place Word but to make it eas­i­er for cus­tomers to get con­tent into their cre­ative pub­lish­ing work­flow. In fact, both InCopy and InDesign have pow­er­ful Word import fil­ters that help edi­tors and design­ers process text by map­ping for­mat­ting to the con­tent even before it hits the InCopy or InDesign page. InCopy can also export RTF which can then be opened in Word.

CS To be clear, our goal is not to dis­place Microsoft’s word pro­cess­ing tool. Our focus is on writ­ers and edi­tors whose job it is to con­tribute and par­tic­i­pate in pro­fes­sion­al cre­ative pub­lish­ing work­flows. First and fore­most we are about improv­ing their expe­ri­ence and find­ing ways to help stream­line col­lab­o­ra­tive edi­to­r­i­al work­flow. Technically, InCopy can be used as a stand-alone word pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tion but the real val­ue is in con­junc­tion with InDesign. So InCopy stands to ben­e­fit any enter­prise that’s cho­sen InDesign as a key com­po­nent of their operation.