RSuite Content Management System based on XML database

By: Erik Vlietinck - Last Updated: Tue 09 September 2008

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Really Strategies is an 8-year-old company, originally active in consulting for publishing companies. Really Strategies' founders came from Reed Elsevier.

While still maintaining its consultancy business, Really Strategies also evolved into a vendor of a product specifically designed to manage XML for publishers. The company’s product is RSuite, a Content Management System (CMS) running on top of the well-known XML database by Mark Logic. I ran through a demo of RSuite to see how the product performs in different publishing environments.

First of all, RSuite is an enterprise-scale publishing system. It’s definitely not for small publishers but you could successfully implement it if your workgroup passes the mark of let’s say 25 people (although RSuite is used by a 3-people company) and your publishing workflow requires you to re-purpose document elements as small as a paragraph. In those areas, RSuite shines and is probably one of the most robust solutions available.

However, that robustness and the associated scalability all come at a cost, and I don’t mean the price tag. For example, RSuite has no direct integration with QuarkXPress or InDesign. This means you’ll have to export XML from InDesign yourself. If you want to minimise errors that creep into the XML file as a result of design and content not tagged correctly, you’ll have to create a DTD (Document Type Definition) yourself.

This is what’s needed with InDesign. With QuarkXPress, things only become worse, as QuarkXPress has no XML export capabilities by itself. After going through the demo, my conclusion was that if you want RSuite’s considerable power with regards to creating and re-purposing content elements, and you want to run the show with InDesign or QuarkXPess, you really should buy a complimentary XML export product such as one of Easypress’ Atomik products. However, Really Strategies are about to announce their connection with CS3 InCopy, which enables a customer to create a “real time” transformation between their XML content and an InCopy document. They’ve created a plugin for InCopy that allows the user to browse the RSuite repository and open the document within InCopy. InCopy is the first step – this will be extended to InDesign.

Transparent XML export

This problem has been non-existent when publishing from Word documents, as the In.Vision XML export system could easily make the whole process transparent for Windows authors. However, Quark having acquired In.Vision recently, it is unclear what is going to happen with the Word plug-in and the effect Quark’s further development will have on users of RSuite.

That way you be sure of the correctly formed (well-formed or valid) XML elements. This also implies you might be able to use RSuite for publishing a consumer-type magazine or newspaper, but given the variability of the design—which would largely forbid the use of static templates—it would not be very efficient.

RSuite does feel at home in a publishing environment where content elements—you may call them snippets—are frequently being re-used, either because they remain the same across different publishing workflows, or because the elements must be put in different orders across different output channels. Scientific journals and books, and departmental publications come to mind.

But as RSuite isn’t limited to textual content only, the format scope of the elements that can be re-purposed, is virtually endless, and includes video, audio, text, presentations, drawings and images.

RSuite being built on top of Mark Logic’s XML database, the RSuite CMS also supports very powerful content mining, which again is of use in the environments I’ve just listed, with scientific and enterprise publishing being the foremost environments where such functionality will be appreciated.

As for the interface, the demo showed me a web-based (AJAX and HTML) interface that looked slightly dated—but then again, being a Mac user I’m pampered and therefore more demanding than the average RSuite user. The interface did a good job of showing clearly what each button, icon or link represents, and that’s the most important to be able to use the system quickly and effectively.

The demo further showed me how easy it is to add XML content snippets from an InDesign file to the system and then have that snippet appear in a web page, together with completely different content from another file.

While the demo only showed me a textual workflow, RSuite user stories quote companies like Audible.com which use the system to push their audio content to iTunes. The workflow configuration of RSuite is done using a graphical user interface, and should be relatively simple, although I must admit I do believe most publishers will need some help from Really Strategies in the form of consultancy here.

Metadata universal or contextual layered

Metadata in the system can be universal layered or contextual layered, which means you can either create metadata used across all content snippets, or only metadata that’s relevant for the current publication. Searching happens on a level where XML as well as PDF content is being run through, and queries—or rather their results—can be copied into new or existing articles as a sort of live “Smart content” snippets.

RSuite has been a CODiE finalist in 2007 and was KM World’s trend-setting product of that same year. Those awards say enough about the market positioning of this product. It’s certainly not comparable to either Quark Publishing System or Smart Connection Enterprise. It comes closer to Atomik Dynamic Publisher and the Quark Dynamic Publishing System, but even then it has unique selling points (USP) not found in any of those publishing systems.

RSuite having been built around strong content mining is one major USP that will appeal to publishing environments where content re-purposing happens on a level far below the document level. One thing that RSuite lacks in that respect is the ability to also “component-ise” multimedia formats such audio and video. From what I’ve seen in the demo, it would not be possible to grab a video clip in Final Cut Pro (as an example) and inject that into the system complete with metadata.

However, as far as I know, there is currently no dynamic publishing system (unless it’s dedicated to video and/or audio) that can do that.