A Q&A with production management specialist and IPG Conference supporter Deanta.
1. How can you help independent publishers become better businesses in 2020?
Deanta made a considerable investment in our production management system last year, to tackle two main gaps in the market and assist publishers and help them become better businesses in 2020.
The first aim was to provide an enhanced user experience. We have received a lot of feedback from publishers that many publishing systems are clunky and difficult to use, so we set up a development team in Dublin to look at framework technology, the hosting environment aligned with the back-end and front-end resources to design and create a seamless user experience both from a UI/UX and performance level. The result is an intuitive, fresh platform with instant access to production tools, reports, files, content and all users of a publishing project.
The second aim was to streamline content workflows. We identified that the most challenging areas in automating production was automating the ingestion process of content and metadata, both of which arrive in many different shapes and forms. By using target AI models we have been able to prepare content for further automation and provide much more streamlined content workflows for publishers.
2. Beyond the coronavirus crisis, what is the biggest issue and the biggest opportunity in your part of the publishing world at the moment?
The biggest issue and opportunity in our part of the publishing world centres around system integration to ensure a smooth movement of content and metadata. Making the right connections with publishers’ systems and third-party providers will completely change how we think about publishing production and managing the lifecycle of books or journal articles. The latest version of our production platform, Lanstad V2, is built on the foundation stone of microservices, ensuring not only scalability but adaptability to add new modules through API connections as we respond to the evolving movement of publishing content.
3. What are you most looking forward to about the IPG’s virtual spring conference in June?
We’re excited to be part of this very innovative approach to holding a conference at this unique time. As always, we are really looking forward to learning about publishers’ key challenges and showing how we can help overcome them and ensure the onward growth of independent publishing.
This month, we were delighted to join Tom Holman from the IPG in this podcast for their Virtual Spring Conference. We have discussed how innovation in production platforms can assist independent publishers overcome present and future challenges in their publishing programs.
