The NWB Verlag is a German specialized publishing house with the emphasis on tax law, commercial law and accounting. The publishing program includes databases, software, magazines, books and seminars.
Already in the past the NWB publishing house set on Single-Source-Publishing with a process partial automation on basis of structured contents in the XML format. Thus, many processes such as the further processing of content and the publishing into different digital products could be automated.
However, the transfer of content created by external authors and delivered in MS Word format into the necessary, publisher-specific, XML-structures caused considerable effort. In this step, manually structured data based on MS Word document templates was already used, which were further processed by means of conversion routines and transferred to the target structures. Nevertheless, in more than 90% of the cases the contents had to be manually post-processed. These manual efforts were to be completely eliminated with a new editor.
NWB was looking for an XML editor that is completely intuitive for users experienced with MS Word. To enable authors to edit content at any time and from anywhere in the world, a browser-based solution was a must. In addition, content should also be able to be edited offline and the Internet connection should only be needed to transfer the data to the Content Management System (CMS).
During an internal research and test phase, NWB Verlag decided to use Xeditor. The solution was integrated into the self-developed authoring platform, which is accessible via the Internet and is in turn connected to the CMS. Content can be created by authors directly in the individual XML structures and can be processed immediately after approval.
NWB authors now access their content from anywhere using a browser. They are created directly in XML with Xeditor and made available via the author portal. Any manual post-processing effort is eliminated and automated further processing can take place smoothly.
Key Takeaways
Contents from MS Word could only be transferred to XML with a high manual effort.
Automated further processing of content was therefore only possible with difficulty.
