vjoon helps Chemical & Engineering News to implement its digital-first workflow

The American Chemical Society (ACS), established in 1876, is a leading provider of chemical and scientific information to its member base of over 150,000 subscribers.

When the ACS looked to upgrade its content presentation across all media – print, web, and mobile – upgrading vjoon K4 played a significant role in the success of the project. Their member benefits magazine, “Chemical & Engineering News” (C&EN) distributed to a subscriber base, evaluated a number of alternative print and digital options. None of the alternatives were able to offer the benefits of vjoon K4 – ease-of-use, flexible workflows, and the ability to integrate with their existing platforms. The ACS decided that in addition to upgrading the vjoon K4 system, taking advantage of some of the newly introduced tools and modules that vjoon K4 offers would help to add efficiencies of their delivery of content destined for print or web – or both.

Print content is generally delivered to the online platform following the print run, however, using vjoon K4’s XML Exporter tool and refined content transforms, vjoon K4 is now used for posting web-exclusive content, print content the staff wishes to publish prior to the print run, as well as the update of its weekly print content from C&EN.

C&EN uses a vast network of remote writers and editors, so the upgraded solution had to account for the staff in Washington DC as well as home-based users across the United States. Deciding to move from a Microsoft Word-based workflow to Adobe InCopy and vjoon K4 has helped by both standardizing the content, as well as streamlining the workflow as the production editors and graphic designers place content on Adobe InDesign pages. Using Adobe InCopy with standardized templates has furthered the ease of delivery of XML to the web content platform.

Since the design starts in vjoon K4, once text is placed on the page, vjoon K4 allows both designer and editor to collaborate simultaneously. The writers and editors – or any other users with the appropriate permissions – are able to add images and related content to the article for the designer and approvers to review.

“We had already upgraded our web content management platform (WCM) to Adobe’s AEM, so we were focused on how we could prioritize a ‘digital first’ workflow without sacrificing any of the efficiencies we’d been using vjoon K4 for”, said Kim Bryson, C&EN’s Director of Operations. “Along with the upgrade, we decided to use vjoon K4 to tag content and organize metadata, allowing us to export clean XML, producing more accurate content – with fewer staff in less time. We’re able to get breaking stories on the website faster than ever.”

In addition to the production efficiencies, Bryson noted how the collaborative nature of vjoon K4 allows their staff to work together, no matter where they work. “vjoon K4 helps our staff, who are located all over the U.S. and the world, to stay connected and on task with an accurate picture of the status of story production.”

C&EN 25. Juni 2018 Cover Vol.96, Ausgabe 26, Yang H. Ku/C&EN/Shutterstock

vjoon K4 demonstrates its flexibility with XML and Open Architecture

The American Chemical Society uses vjoon K4 to publish its content to several sources – increasing its revenue stream on existing content. While much of the C&EN content is produced primarily for its member-benefits magazine, there are countless articles that are converted to XML to be monetized on its journal platform as well.

“We needed a solution that would allow to repurpose our C&EN content on other platforms, making that content available in a form that our other platforms and media could easily bring into their systems”, noted Amanda Yarnell, Editorial Director. “When we upgraded vjoon K4 and started leveraging vjoon K4’s XML Exporter, we were able to provide our writers easy to use InCopy templates, and that helps us easily transform our content through XSLT with the requirements of all our platforms in mind.”

vjoon K4 database architecture and OS support have helped ACS IT staff comply with company requirements and directives. vjoon K4 supports all the major platforms – Windows, Mac, and Linux – and all major databases – MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle.

John Blanchard, Director of Global Publishing Services at ACS, noted vjoon K4’s open support of SQL databases has been a major factor in the ACS’ adoption and retention of vjoon K4. “The ACS runs a lot of Linux servers where we can, but we often run MS SQL Server to take advantage of our expertise with Microsoft Enterprise products. In addition to that and other priorities, vjoon K4 fits well within our Enterprise Architecture.”

ACS will be at the Association Media & Publishing Event in Washington, D.C. from 25th to 27th June 2018 with exciting guest contributions and speeches.

You can find more user stories like this under "Resources" in our blog or as a full case study.