Proposing Efficiency with InCopy CS2

Day 1 & 2: Creative per­son­nel were already experts in InDesign, and the two-day ses­sion was much less a train­ing class than a con­ver­sa­tion. Designers asked ques­tions and pre­sent­ed their pain points with InDesign, while I answered their ques­tions and showed them how to over­come their pain points. Throughout, the new and updat­ed fea­tures of CS2 were dis­cov­ered, and how they may be exploit­ed cre­ative­ly was discussed.

During this time Issue 2 was resolved by teach­ing the design­ers to make effec­tive use of: anchored objects, which teth­er objects out­side the text flow to fol­low and flow with spe­cif­ic loca­tions with­in the text flow; align to spine fea­tures that auto­mat­i­cal­ly repo­si­tion and realign objects and text based on their rela­tion­ship to the spine of a bound doc­u­ment, and; object styles for stor­ing, instant­ly apply­ing, and mak­ing document-wide changes to anchored objects.

After I dis­pelled a num­ber of mis­con­cep­tions the team held about the print­abil­i­ty of native Photoshop .PSD and Illustrator .AI files, we fur­ther trimmed the fat from their work­flow by elim­i­nat­ing the need to resave orig­i­nal art­work in those for­mats into inter­me­di­ary graph­ics for­mats like TIFF and EPS for place­ment into InDesign.

Day 3: On day three, InCopy CS2 was intro­duced. As the Design depart­ment was the most tech­ni­cal­ly savvy of all the depart­ments in the work­flow (except­ing the cor­po­rate IT per­son­nel who were Mac-challenged), they typ­i­cal­ly act­ed as work­flow sup­port. Therefore it was imper­a­tive that they not only know the tools and pro­ce­dures for their side of the new opti­mized work­flow, but they also have a mas­tery of InCopy so they might assist oth­er non-creative users. It took less than a day for the design­ers to reach an expert grasp of using InCopy CS2 as well as cre­at­ing and man­ag­ing InCopy assign­ments from with­in InDesign.

The project man­ag­er, who over­sees the pro­pos­al process from all four depart­ments, attend­ed the day three train­ing. So impressed was he at the end of the day by the effi­cien­cy of the InDesign-InCopy inte­gra­tion and its promise for his team, that he agreed to accel­er­ate the work­flow opti­miza­tion schedule–we were going live the next day.

It’s impor­tant to note that I was ini­tial­ly brought in to begin what Omega expect­ed would be a three month opti­miza­tion and migra­tion process, and that the con­sul­ta­tion began while the team was active­ly work­ing on a pro­pos­al. Although they hoped to answer sev­er­al InDesign ques­tions and frus­tra­tions for the Design depart­ment and apply them to the cur­rent pro­pos­al, they did not expect to make any sig­nif­i­cant changes to the work­flow itself until after the com­ple­tion of that pro­pos­al. At my urg­ing, how­ev­er, the team agreed to move the con­sul­ta­tion out of the the­o­ret­i­cal into the prac­ti­cal after the third day of consultation.

Day 4: Planned as a day to demon­strate the soon-to-be opti­mized work­flow to IT and oth­er depart­ments, day four became actu­al deployment.

InCopy CS2 was installed on all pro­pos­al team Windows and Macintosh desk­tops out­side the Design depart­ment, with copies on two of the four design­ers’ Macs. An ide­al deploy­ment would have includ­ed a cus­tomized InCopy CS2 install pack­age with pre-configured scripts, work­spaces, and default styles and pref­er­ences. However, due to the rapid accel­er­a­tion of the plan, we used an out-of-the-box instal­la­tion, and devel­oped a plan for IT to lat­er to cre­ate and push defaults and cus­tomiza­tions to users’ machines via SMS.

I solved the font incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty prob­lem (issue 3) between Mac- and Windows-based users in the work­flow by con­vert­ing Omega’s font library to OpenType, a for­mat they had pre­vi­ous­ly known lit­tle about. Because the major­i­ty of their Type 1 font library was pub­lished by Adobe, it was a sim­ple mat­ter to upgrade all but a few fonts to OpenType by pur­chas­ing Adobe’s Font Folio OpenType Edition. The remain­ing type­faces used by Omega were not avail­able from their respec­tive foundries in OpenType for­mat, so FontLab was licensed to eas­i­ly con­vert the Mac-only Type 1 fonts to cross-platform OpenType.

Overcoming the dif­fi­cul­ty expe­ri­enced by some users in installing and man­ag­ing pro­pos­al fonts, with the added ben­e­fit of lift­ing font dis­tri­b­u­tion from the shoul­ders of design­ers, was just as simple–I employed Extensis Suitcase Server X1, a server-based font man­ag­er with remote admin­is­tra­tion, licens­ing com­pli­ance con­trol, and unmanned or direct­ed client sys­tem font acti­va­tion. Suitcase Server and the entire Omega font library was installed on the pro­pos­al doc­u­ment serv­er. Copies of Suitcase Desktop Edition, which can act as stand­alone, local font man­agers, as well as clients to the serv­er, were installed to the users’ Windows and Mac work­sta­tions. Once installed and test­ed, Suitcase Server was pop­u­lat­ed with the team’s OpenType font library.

Controlled by a remote administrator–in this case the pro­duc­tion man­ag­er via her desk­top Mac–Suitcase Server man­ages and deliv­ers all the fonts need­ed by the work­group. The pro­duc­tion man­ag­er sim­ply acti­vates the pro­pos­al’s fonts or font groups via Suitcase Server’s remote admin­is­tra­tion pan­el, and the serv­er push­es the fonts to client systems.

Because Suitcase includes font auto-activation plug-ins for InDesign and InCopy, even if the pro­duc­tion man­ag­er for­gets to push the fonts, the client ver­sions of Suitcase run­ning on the desk­tops will auto­mat­i­cal­ly request and acti­vate the need­ed fonts from the serv­er. When writ­ers, accoun­tants, and the rest of the pro­pos­al team open their assign­ments in InCopy CS2, they will nev­er see a font miss­ing warn­ing; all in-use fonts will acti­vate auto­mat­i­cal­ly on their systems.

Although Omega’s doc­u­ment serv­er employed full hard dri­ve mir­ror­ing at four points dur­ing the day, and a dai­ly tape back­up, the new work­flow’s con­cur­rent doc­u­ment access from with­in all depart­ments and over­sight by the project man­ag­er gave me con­cern for at least the ini­tial pos­si­bil­i­ty of user error lead­ing to data loss. Specifically, I was con­cerned with some users revert­ing to old habits of copy­ing asset files to their local com­put­ers, edit­ing local­ly, then mov­ing the files back to the serv­er, thus pos­si­bly over­writ­ing the work of oth­er users. To elim­i­nate this pos­si­bil­i­ty, and to pro­vide an extra lay­er of back­up via file ver­sion­ing, Creative Suite 2’s Version Cue tech­nol­o­gy was acti­vat­ed and con­fig­ured on all work­flow com­put­ers. Because all depart­ments were involved in the cre­ative process somehow–Copywriting, for exam­ple, used Photoshop to cor­rect and touch-up pho­tographs and proofed Web con­tent live in GoLive while Engineering and even Accounting used Illustrator for some of their less tech­ni­cal con­cep­tu­al draw­ings and illus­tra­tions, and every depart­ment required Acrobat Professional–Omega had already licensed the full Creative Suite 2 for all desk­tops in the work­flow. Thus there was no licens­ing imped­i­ment to the inclu­sion of Version Cue in the workflow.

Concluding the day was an IT brief­ing and Q&A ses­sion that cov­ered InDesign’s and InCopy’s inter­nal saved­da­ta back­up fea­tures; nuances of work­ing with Version Cue-managed con­tent; dis­cus­sion about extend­ing and automat­ing func­tion­al­i­ty with script­ing in InDesign, InCopy, and Adobe Bridge, which all users would employ for basic dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment, and; how to resolve some of the com­mon tech­ni­cal issues users may encounter with the con­stituent appli­ca­tions in the new opti­mized workflow.

Day 5: Originally planned as my last day on-site where­in I would pro­vide the first half of InCopy and opti­mized work­flow train­ing to the Copywriting, Accounting, and Engineering depart­ments, the new live deploy­ment extend­ed my vis­it to sev­en con­sec­u­tive days, and day five became on-the-job train­ing to Copywriting.

All three writ­ers were extreme­ly pro­fi­cient writ­ing mar­ket­ing copy in Microsoft Word. Their instal­la­tions of Word were mod­er­ate­ly cus­tomized with workflow-specific auto­cor­rect set­tings, doc­u­ment tem­plates, style sheets, key­board short­cuts, and sim­ple text-insertion or replace­ment macros. Although they were eager to improve their work­flow and gain bet­ter per­spec­tive on how their work inte­grates with oth­er depart­ments’ in the pro­pos­al lay­outs, the writ­ers were skep­ti­cal that InCopy could replace Microsoft Word and appre­hen­sive about los­ing their productivity.

Anticipating this, dur­ing day three work with the Design depart­ment, I had had the design­ers pre­pare InCopy assign­ments from an already laid-out but still under revi­sion chap­ter of the cur­rent pro­pos­al. At the begin­ning of the writ­ers’ train­ing, I opened the InCopy assign­ment, import­ed and copy­fit the most recent­ly revised Word doc­u­ments, and showed the changes in real-time in the InDesign lay­out snap­shot of InCopy’s Layout view. While this impressed and excit­ed them, my next step of cre­at­ing text macros and set­ting auto­cor­rect options from set­tings they shout­ed out on-the-fly was what tru­ly dis­pelled their fear.

Throughout the remain­der of the day, the writ­ers learned to work in, col­lab­o­rate on, and cus­tomize InCopy CS2 hands-on, employ­ing active, mission-critical doc­u­ments. During the sec­ond half of the day I brought the project man­ag­er and one of the design­ers to sit in so they would be aware of the Copywriting team’s con­cerns and new pro­ce­dures and be able to act as in-house how-to support.

Day 6: Similar to the day before with the writ­ers, the sixth day was train­ing for the Accounting and Engineering depart­ments; the lat­ter con­sist­ed of four engi­neer­ing and archi­tec­ture team man­agers who each over­saw a com­bined staff of twenty-three peo­ple who would not be direct­ly involved in the pro­pos­al cre­ation process. As these depart­ments pro­duced less copy and more art­work, less time was spent dis­cussing InCopy’s copy­fit­ting and text-insertion and replace­ment automa­tion fea­tures in favor of a greater focus on plac­ing imagery and tab­u­lar data into the lay­out. We also spent a good por­tion of the day opti­miz­ing the account­ing and engi­neer­ing staff’s image cre­ation pro­ce­dures, includ­ing build­ing effi­cient lay­ers and lay­er comps in Photoshop to ease ver­sion exper­i­men­ta­tion when plac­ing images into InCopy and how to import and batch con­vert var­i­ous types of tech­ni­cal draw­ings, plans, and schemat­ics into Illustrator or via scripts in the Adobe Bridge.

Again, the project man­ag­er and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Design depart­ment were asked to attend the lat­ter half of the Engineering and Accounting edu­ca­tion session.

Day 7: To reduce any lin­ger­ing trep­i­da­tion about adopt­ing the new opti­mized work­flow while work­ing on actu­al, mission-critical dead­line doc­u­ments, I made the sev­enth day light-hearted and fun. With the assis­tance of the project man­ag­er and the Design depart­ment, we dec­o­rat­ed the com­mon areas and indi­vid­ual offices of the pro­pos­al team with stream­ers, home­made signs pro­claim­ing “It’s Workflow Optimization Day!”, and strate­gi­cal­ly placed dough­nuts, muffins, bagels, and can­dy through­out the team’s areas. Being a Sunday, busi­ness attire was not a con­cern, so I asked every­one on the team to wear her bright­est, most gar­ish attire (the result was a cacoph­o­ny of tie-dyes, car­toon char­ac­ters, and blind­ing neon hues).

We began the day with an all-hands pep ral­ly to pump up excite­ment, then the team broke into their respec­tive depart­ment groups and went to work.

During the first hour, the Design depart­ment pre­pared the mate­ri­als. The pro­duc­tion man­ag­er ran pre­flight reports from the in-progress lay­outs, spec­i­fy­ing the in-use fonts to be pushed to client sys­tems via remote admin­is­tra­tion of the Suitcase Server. While she did that from her desk, each of the three remain­ing design­ers cre­at­ed InCopy assign­ments from the first batch of pro­pos­al chapters.

The Accounting team fin­ished up their lat­est batch of fig­ures while Engineering prepped their draw­ings, plans, and Visio charts in Photoshop and Illustrator. The Copywriting team migrat­ed their Word cus­tomiza­tions to InCopy. Each took a task–user dic­tio­nary entries for one, auto­cor­rect options for anoth­er, and text macros for the third–and dis­trib­uted the results to the oth­ers when fin­ished. In just over an hour, all three depart­ments were set­up and open­ing their first assign­ment files in InCopy.

Because the four depart­ments and project man­ag­er were spread through­out an entire floor of a large office build­ing, I could­n’t be with­in earshot at all times incase of a ques­tion. To com­pen­sate, all team mem­bers put my cell phone num­ber on speed-dial, and I wore a hands-free head­set. And, since I could­n’t see every­one’s screen at all times, and rever­sion to old habits was a risk, I pro­vid­ed an incen­tive for peer support–tattle-telling.

In addi­tion to hourly give­aways of fun prizes like base­ball hats, Frisbees, can­dy bars, toys, and sim­i­lar tchatch­kis for cor­rect­ly answer­ing InCopy-related ques­tions, I offered slight­ly bet­ter prizes (gift cer­tifi­cates to local restau­rants and Target, DVDs, and mousepa­ds) to any­one who catch­ing a co-worker revert­ing to using Microsoft Word, mark­ing up a PDF, or try­ing to get a design­er to place an image or oth­er asset into the lay­out for her. While I had brought over a dozen “tattle-tale” prizes in all, I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to only give away two dur­ing the course of the day (the remain­der were hand­ed out at the end of the day to every­one who had­n’t yet received one).

By mid-day, every­one was over the hur­dle of “how do I” train­ing reminder ques­tions, and was working–without wait­ing on any­one else. Copywriting had fin­ished import­ing, edit­ing, and copy­fit­ting exist­ing Word doc­u­ments into the InCopy assign­ment, and were begin­ning to write new mate­r­i­al direct­ly in InCopy. Accounting had also com­plet­ed its imports and con­ver­sions, and was back to crunch­ing num­bers in Excel; as the accoun­tants fin­ished a dataset, they import­ed it into InCopy, checked the sto­ry in, and moved on to the next. Most of Engineering’s art­work was placed in InCopy, although they did require some changes to the lay­out in terms of graph­ic frame resiz­ing and the addi­tion of sev­er­al new, fold-out pages, which Design quick­ly imple­ment­ed and re-assigned to Engineering. The project man­ag­er, work­ing in InDesign CS2 him­self, kept an eye on every­one’s progress and, as each assign­ment was checked in, added notes and revi­sions to con­tent for review by the authors. In between, he assist­ed Copywriting and Design by plac­ing pho­tographs and illustrations.

Except for the quickly-accomplished changes required by Engineering, Design left the assigned chap­ters alone. While every­one else filled in, edit­ed, and revised the con­tent of laid-out chap­ters, the design­ers were design­ing new lay­outs and cre­at­ing InCopy assign­ments for sub­se­quent con­tent sec­tions. Without the con­stant inter­rup­tions caused by incom­ing asset changes and marked-up PDFs, the design­ers found them­selves work­ing so quick­ly that one jumped out of InDesign and into GoLive to begin the Web con­tent creation–typically a process that would not begin for anoth­er four weeks.

We wrapped up the day ear­ly with anoth­er all-hands meet­ing at two o’clock because every­one felt that she had a sol­id grasp of the work­flow, and that she was already ahead in her work.

The excite­ment in the room was tremen­dous. Everyone in all four depart­ments expressed a strong feel­ing of being more con­nect­ed to the pro­pos­al, more in com­mand of her indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions, and more in touch with the work of the oth­er team mem­bers. InCopy’s lay­out view allowed each depart­ment to see not only their con­tri­bu­tions and Design’s, but also the work of the oth­er depart­ments as it was done. This lead to tighter col­lab­o­ra­tion between the depart­ments, espe­cial­ly for the Copywriting team whose work had to describe and sup­port the con­tent from both Accounting and Engineering. During the wrap-up meet­ing team mem­bers were com­pli­ment­ing each oth­er’s work and brain­storm­ing ideas for collaborating–discussions they could pre­vi­ous­ly only have after Design had com­plet­ed the lay­out mod­i­fi­ca­tion and sent out PDF proofs. No one missed Acrobat and PDF-based reviewing.

Among the group, only the writ­ers felt that they were not yet as pro­fi­cient writ­ing in InCopy as they were in Word, although they felt it would only be a short time before they were. More impor­tant­ly, every­one, includ­ing the writ­ers, felt strong­ly that her work as a whole had been great­ly sped up by the elim­i­na­tion of the lin­ear review and change process. Design, in par­tic­u­lar, was ecsta­t­ic that changes were no longer fil­tered through them. They still had the con­trol they need­ed, but were no longer respon­si­ble for affect­ing the changes that had always been with­in the purview of oth­er depart­ments. The pro­duc­tion man­ag­er esti­mat­ed that, in less than a sin­gle day, the lay­out of the pro­pos­al was already more than a week ahead of sched­ule. That belief was echoed by each depart­ment, putting esti­mates of their sched­ule advance­ments at between two and four­teen days.