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HarperCollins Embraces Open Text Web Content ManagementInternational publisher delivers targeted digital catalogs with rich media on demand

HarperCollins Publishers is one of the world’s leading and most technically innovative publishers with strengths in literary and commercial fiction, business and children’s books, cookbooks, and mystery, romance, reference, religious, and spiritual books. With readers all over the world and annual revenue of more than $1B, HarperCollins needed to offer their booksellers and clients accurate,

customized online catalogs that could be easily updated for a more personalized and dynamic user experience.

Headquartered in New York and a subsidiary of News Corporation, HarperCollins is the first publisher to create a global online warehouse that consists of over 15,000 titles and digital assets to protect the accuracy of its catalogs, offer a more effective user experience, and generate additional business opportunities.

Out-of-date catalogs and out-of-date user experienceFor almost 200 years, HarperCollins has been printing catalogs for all the various titles that are released during each publishing season, and there have always been issues concerning out-of-date information. The catalog deadlines were always dictated by the “to the printer” date, so there was a lot of pressure to get the information in order—sometimes before it was available. Often, there would be a price change or a release date moved back after the print date, but once the catalogs were published, there could be no updates until preparations for the next catalog began.

With some of these catalogs being quite thick, there was also a concern about the amount of paper being used. What was the cost to the organization? What was the impact on the environment?

The other major business challenge was the limitation of the paper catalogs. HarperCollins’ booksellers and clients deserved a more dynamic user experience: one that went beyond making notes in the margins of several huge catalogs

and attaching sticky notes to highlight an important reference. They wanted to be able to access all the available rich media related to each book and author, such as a promotional video or an interview with the author. The addition of rich media to normally static book details is an enormous benefit and creates an enhanced profile of the book by integrating data from multiple sources. This enables booksellers to easily differentiate one book from another, and the content mash-up creates much more value.

Innovative business-to-business solutionHarperCollins wanted to offer their booksellers and clients an online catalog in an extranet environment that is focused on their specific needs and offers an exciting user experience. For this business-to-business (B2B) solution, they chose to work with Enthink, an Open Text partner. Enthink is a Web development firm that works only with Content Management Systems (CMS)—specifically, Open Text Web Solutions. Enthink is the only Open Text partner in North America that has that level of focus, and they have successfully completed over one hundred implementations.

“One of the things that was really exciting for us about working with HarperCollins was that it’s a very forward-thinking company that really pushes innovation,” says Michael Martyn, president of Enthink.

“We understood how easy it was to use the tool, and the users loved it, so it was perfect.”

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Another key was regarding resources: since it was a manual process, if somebody was out of the office or one person was on vacation, a paper change may be on someone’s desk, and it might sit there for two weeks while they’re away—it really impacted the schedule.” All of these issues are addressed with Open Text Web Solutions: there is an electronic audit trail that tracks the date, author, and any notes regarding each change, and there is an effective workflow in place that keeps the process moving and alerts the appropriate managers of any delays.

“I think one of the other key elements was that HarperCollins really wasn’t leveraging existing systems,” explains Martyn.

“This is one of the biggest issues we see in most content management deployments across all industries: there are all of these systems with information from various sources, within various silos inside an organization. So often no one is able to leverage this information. They get stuck working under the paradigm of ‘I must pull out A, B, and C from my current systems and put it into this new system that I’ve bought to be able to display it on the Web.’ That was something we wanted to avoid. The new system is a good example of how using dynamic content and leveraging existing corporate information is such a powerful way to build out a content management system.

In addition, Open Text Web Solutions enables HarperCollins’ sales representatives to create a more personalized experience for their customers and also allows the customers to create a unique experience on their own through the site itself and through the cataloging process.

“HarperCollins is a unique company, with a history of wanting to revolutionize the way that they provide information and do business with booksellers, and they wanted to come up with a more innovative way to be able to do that. Enthink’s focus is on packaging an organization’s information in a more consumable way, so it was a great partnership.”

Improve efficiencies“Sometimes, information can be out of date as soon as it’s published. The day after a catalog is printed, something can change—the pricing, book details, additional titles, whatever the case may be, and that new catalog is instantly out of date,” says Annmarie Joyce, Senior Director of Information Technology at HarperCollins. “With our new online catalog, information can be immediately updated at any time, ensuring all of HarperCollins’ catalogs are always accurate…and we update the information once. We’re not updating it somewhere else as well—there’s one repository for that, and all of those updates happen automatically, even if those changes are independent to the individual catalogs themselves.”

“There were some other key things we were trying to move away from,” says Joyce. “One of them was that much of the editorial input was done through notes on paper, so you would lose the audit trail of why items were changed. There was also the risk of losing or misplacing information as it’s going back and forth throughout the entire process.

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“So for example, if I wanted to create a series of all the Christmas titles or romance books and create a catalog for that, I can easily do it,” says Joyce. “If I wanted to customize something for a particular client, I can do that as well. It’s very flexible as to how you want to build out the environment. One of the system’s best features is its flexibility.”

Leveraging what already exists and minimizing migrationJoyce recommends leveraging what you already have and using what already exists within your organization. Creating new systems only complicates things and upsets users.

“Since the information already exists somewhere, there really is no migration. All we’re doing is exposing it inside a different infrastructure and allowing an editorial interface to enhance that information through something that’s very, very simple,” says Martyn. “With an historic system that houses all the information, you may have the ability to go in to update and maintain, but it may be difficult or you may not be allowed because of data integrity.”

One of the values of this dynamic solution is eliminating content migration, information porting, and managing a system in multiple places with multiple buckets of content. Once the shell and infrastructure of workflow processes are created, the title selection tool allows the user to customize which titles will show up in which catalogs—and these can be edited and moved in minutes.

Online and offline convergence“In addition to delivering the best up-to-date information with several enhancements, the solution also enables us to make sure that we have a convergence of the online and offline experience,” says Joyce. HarperCollins has increased customer interactivity, which was paramount to the project, but the solution is also able to help customers create customized catalogs. Joyce adds, “We can put together a Christmas catalog or a mystery catalog or very different types of things for different types of customers and stores and create whatever we need. This adds to a better experience.”

With such a dramatic change to the way they handle catalogs, the publishing company wanted to make sure their booksellers and other clients felt comfortable using the new system. The online solution looks almost exactly like the old paper catalogs and allows them to do everything they could do before, but with the added features, the entire process is much better and much faster, facilitating better buying decisions. Among other things, they can manage personalized lists of titles they may want to purchase or recommend as a buyer for their bookstore or chain of bookstores; they can see previous catalogs to compare the notes they may have made regarding certain titles; read reviews; watch an interview in which the author talks about his or her inspiration for the book; and listen to the quality of a book on tape. After they made their lists, they would feed the information to a bookseller system through Excel downloads and order sheets, but with Open Text Web Solutions, they can create their own personalized catalog of purchases or recommendations.

“I think this not only provides a better buying experience for the customer, it also helps to maximize the sales experience so the salespeople can spend their time with a customer talking about great new titles that are coming out rather than worrying about the administrative details of documenting and spending valuable time typing into an Excel spreadsheet the books the client wants to order. So it’s really about trying to automate and make that process as effective as possible,” says Joyce.

Increased interactivity Searches are performed across multiple catalogs through a single interface, with areas to make notes. “I could look at one catalog at a time, or I might hop back and forth, or I might have an author that was in the hardcover catalog for children’s books but also in the paperback catalog for children’s books,” states Joyce. Searches are also performed on audio or video content related to the titles.

Customers can also browse through Advance Reader Editions (ARE), which are pre-published versions of the books. “They can see the layout, look at illustrations, and read excerpts inside the book while they are making title choices,” says Joyce. “That was one of the key interactive features that we wanted to make sure that we had live at the launch.”

Catalog creationTo create a catalog, customers simply select the titles they want (even all of the titles), and click on a red dot to create a catalog. The information is imported into the CMS, and all the catalogs’ titles are there inside the template structure using the preexisting workflows and authoring processes that are already built into the system. If there are enhancements to be made to the catalog, which is normally the case, those enhancements are started right away.

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Users love the easy-to-use tool“Any time you go through any change process in an organization, there’s always a bit of hesitancy,” says Joyce. “Everybody went through training, and we spent a few hours explaining how the tool works and how you would make enhancements to each title. The entire group, who has worked with printed catalogs and maintained them with red pens, said, ‘Wow, I cannot believe how easy this is.’ That’s a testament to what a great step forward the system is.”

Joyce tells of a real-life example of how easy the Open Text system is to use: “Before our first launch, just before our sales conference, HarperCollins went through a little bit of a restructuring, including some of its imprints. Given the nature of how this was built and the architecture, we were able to react right away and change all the titles that were in one of the imprints that was reorganized. Within a week or two before the sales conference, we were able to update the entire catalog and react to that business climate change. After that we understood how easy it was to use the tool, and the users loved it, so it was perfect.”

ConclusionHarperCollins is the first publisher to introduce the online application of their B2B catalog in North America and to completely eliminate print catalogs. With Open Text Web Solutions, their online catalogs look almost identical to the paper catalogs, have much more enhanced information, and nearly eliminate their environmental impact by dramatically reducing their paper count. Open Text Web Solutions helps to provide a more user-friendly environment, delivers a multimedia-enhanced experience, offers personalized catalogs tailored to particular types of stores or resellers, and reduces the time spent making edits, changing the layout, and going back to the design team and inside authors from months to days.

Open Text Web Solutions helps speed up the process to go to market and offer more updated, enhanced information, which helps the customer make better buying decisions and provides a better end-user experience.