Introducing APEX@IGP

Overview

APEX@IGP is a collection of documents, examples and samples about digital content production, fulfilment and distribution. It's primarily technical.

The key staff of Infogrid Pacific have been creating, transforming and delivering commercial digital content since 1993. It has been hands on, detailed work all the way. We have seen hundreds of products, solutions and XML strategies come and go in those years.

Infogrid Pacific has a lot of depth and experience with a lot of publisher digital content. Probably more than most. We are also document intensive and have captured what we have learned into various documents: specifications, processes, procedures, essays, articles and other formats.

All forms of content are effectively infinitely complex. That includes text, images, audio, video, animation and interactivity - absorbed by our senses and their ability to communicate with out brains. The tools and methods we use to process, present and consume content are finite.

What this means is content cannot be made to fit into a single, rigid container. Any container must have the flexibility to adapt to the demands of any particular piece of content.

The presentation format of content always limits and constrains content. Print has strong X-Y, cost and distribution constraints; digital formats have packaging and reading system capability constraints; interactive content has cost, context and outcome constraints on top of delivery mechanism issues.

Experience is gained by trial and error. It's about making mistakes; then analysing, correcting and learning from those mistakes. The procedural knowledge is then distilled and the focus is on what works, and what matters.

There are no real secrets in digital content production, irrespective of the target delivery platforms. There are production frameworks, consistency of XHTML/XML tagging patterns, quality management, ongoing change management and the agility to match and exploit market changes. Real Intellectual Property in the digital content domain is "know-how". There are few patentable algorithms or processes.

The Infogrid Pacific production application frameworks encapsulates the required know-how and knowledge for processing the infinity of content to finite delivery formats and packages.

The pages on all @IGP sites refer exclusively to Infogrid Pacific applications, processes, services and solutions. That is because our solutions are the ones we and our licensees use, and they are the best.

Infogrid Pacific is a "digital content practioner" organization. Practioner is our way of saying we just get it done. Very little (probably too little self-promotion), no big conference talks, very few trade-show attendances, and selective about our customers. We work at the APEX of digital content.

Not a blog...

For the past couple of years Infogrid Pacific (IGP) has been blogging occassionally on a number of subjects related to digital publishing. The problem with a blog is the information ages and it is difficult to maintain. It is also difficult to resist injecting a bit of opinion here and there.

Our own blogs still get hits on pages that are years old and in many cases now irrelevant.

A blog does not generally have the ability to support the required presentation examples that digital content demands except as screen grabs. A new strategy was required to deliver the significant value, information and knowledge available from our deepest archives. The more valuable blog pages will be moved to APEX@IGP over time.

There is no place on these topic pages to put a comment. Where appropriate pages have social bookmarking and an "Email Us" option.

...an information resource

APEX@IGP is a maintained and growing collection of technical and business strategy information topics and articles for publishers who need to develop, improve, change or grow their digital content strategy.

APEX@IGP is focused on the nuts and bolts of putting into place a real digital content strategy without too much "Contact us" for the secrets. You only need to contact us if you want to do digital content better, smarter and at lower cost.

If a publisher is using a consultant for their digital content strategy, APEX@IGP will probably have the background information to assess whether or not you are getting what you need from your consultant or service provider.

Background

We had urgent business pressure to get our own application documentation online. With the amazing world of Digital Content production and delivery changing so fast, internal business processes have to match the volume and velocity of the market. 

Maintaining large volumes of changing documents is hard. The existing CMS type frameworks in the market, are rigid and can be irrationally expensive for anyone except the big guys. Finding the information you need, more or less instantly, exactly when and where you need it has to be easy. Now our tens of thousands of pages that are accessed through distributed PDFs are going online.

Coincidentally our education, training and library customers urgently needed to be able to make content available online, and as web applications, for large controlled access groups with any combination of digital platform. This had to be affordable.

This combination of requirements resulted in the realization that static digital content delivery sites are Just Another Format (JAF). So we developed the Static Site options for IPG:Digital Publisher. Here is the current IGP:Formats on Demand interface poking jauntily off the edge of the page.

How this site is created and maintained

This site, like the main Infogrid Pacific Website and other @IGP sites, is authored, edited, reviewed and produced using IGP:Digital Publisher.

When a new site or update is ready, it takes one click for the website format package to be generated by the IGP:Long Running Process Engine  from the IGP:FoundationXHTML. It immediate syncronizes the Website location. This can be a test location to allow reviewers and authorizers to do their work, or direct to a live location.

This site is an Amazon AWS S3 simple storage bucket configured as a Static Web site. But it could be on a server or any other system.

The live @IGP static sites are supported by a number of other AWS S3 buckets for delivery of WOFF fonts, Javascript, downloadable files, rich media and more. It's low-cost, sophisticated, easy to maintain and radical. The end to end solution, from IGP:Digital Publisher to live web site makes massive online strategies accessible to the smallest publisher at the lowest possible cost.

It is considerably easier to use IGP:Digital Publisher to produce and maintain a high-value, unstructured content web site than any CMS (Content Management System) we have experienced. Like all disruptive technologies or methods, it takes a change in mindset.

Importantly the same FX content is instantly ready to  be output as an ePub, PDF, WebApp or just about any other digital format as well. So a static website is a format from the master digital content source. In our case IGP:FoundationXHTML.

The same production tools that that create ePubs, print books, WebApps and other packages, seamlessly produces websites that can be under maintenance, or have fixed content.

We hope you enjoy and gain value from APEX@IGP.