It has been over 2 years since I last saw WoodWing Software’s Smart Connection Enterprise running. Back then, it was version 1. It looked promising enough, but it was an editorial workflow system like any other. Today, Smart Connection Enterprise is a versatile publishing system based losely on Adobe InDesign and InCopy. It offers granular control and open source capabilities. WoodWing says it sold 400 copies of Smart Connection Enterprise, serving some 15,000 seats.

WoodWing Software itself has grown with the success of Smart Connection Enterprise. The company now has some 60 employees and has a presence in Europe, the US, South-America and Asia. There are 50 VARs in more than 30 countries.

Smart Connection Enterprise still is a plug-in system that bridges between the layout capabilities of InDesign CS2 (CS3 following soon) and the editorial features of InCopy CS2 (with CS3 soon to follow). But in its current form, Smart Connection Enterprise is more than just a bridge between InDesign and InCopy. It also delivers workflow capabilities to Photoshop and Illustrator, and even to Microsoft Word and Excel. In short, editors can use pretty much what they like to enjoy Smart Connection’s workflow features.

Granular Control Over The Editorial Workflow

In InDesign, Smart Connection is still a palette --although it looks different than a couple of years ago. But contrary to what I remember, the palette (and even InDesign) is no longer the central hub for managing Smart Connection’s functionality. Management of features, access control, and the workflow components themselves, is now done through a very efficient and user-friendly web browser interface.

Here, administrators can create users, user rights, and everything else needed to make, maintain and manage the editorial workflow. The interface that I saw, was one of the best I’ve ever seen, given the complexity and number of levels which you can explore to set your preferences for this system. If ever there was a reason to use the term “granular control”, it’s in the context of Smart Connection Enterprise’s management console.

A large number of settings and meta data elements have been pre-defined by WoodWing, but can be expanded easily by the user. The whole system can be customised. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if a demanding publisher could change the system to make it work without ever using InCopy. Smart Connection Enterprise being based entirely on open source standards such as PHP, SOAP and SQL, and running on almost any platform, a customer can potentially program the system so that it matches his needs as a glove his hand.

WoodWing says a number of its customers have done so. And those customers are not the least of publishers and companies around… Apparently, they like the 3-tier model used by WoodWing for Smart Connection Enterprise. This model has it that meta data is stored in the database, but the content itself is stored in the file system.

The benefit of storing the content outside of the database is that a database crash does not render the content files unusable. In other words, this approach avoids a publisher to be forced to stop working until the database is available again. The second level is the application server. Here, PHP and SOAP rule. Finally, the client application is the third level. It is what the user sees and uses.

In most cases, publishers will use --and therefore buy licenses of-- InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InCopy. Some editors will like to use Microsoft Word instead. And for tabular data, Excel may be needed. Although WoodWing won’t say as much, and indeed will strongly advise against it, my feeling is that a publisher might get along with one license of each client application.

As the application server is open source all the way, and the source code is made available to the customer, it is relatively easy for a publisher to make the whole Smart Connection Enterprise system independent of Adobe’s client applications. Indeed, you wouldn’t need more licenses than you have layout designers working for you.

Of course, most publishers will go with the usual way of implementing this system, which is with as many licenses for InDesign and InCopy as there are corresponding users. But the fact that you are capable of changing the system so that it fits your needs completely is quite unique in this market.