Posted by geoffb on April 15, 2009 at 5:37pm
We're looking for options to better integrate our Editorial process into our website and, as part of that project, we have been turned on to Woodwing Enterprise 6 Content Publishing Platform (http://woodwing.com/).
Woodwing is touted as a "three-tiered content management and publishing system" that "connects to Adobe InDesign, InCopy, Web content management systems and a slew of third-party applications".
WoodWing Enterprise 6 claims to offer integration with "any type of content repository" but with out-of-the-box integration with Drupal.
We are going to be looking at a demo of the product but, in the meantime, is anybody using Woodwing and can offer up their thoughts on it?
Geoff
Comments
Woodwing falling behind K4
My experience is that Woodwing has been falling behind K4 as a server-side collaboration and workflow complement to Creative Suite. The two seemed to have equal market share but now I am seeing much more K4. Perhaps Woodwing's Drupal integration will help it catch back up. I have not heard of anyone using this new Drupal integration yet.
Content Here: http://www.contenthere.net
Drupal for Publishers: http://www.contenthere.net/products-page/web-technologies-for-publishers...
Thanks for the advice.
Seth,
Thanks for the advice.
Geoff
WoodWing Enterprise 6
Seth:
I don't think your assessment of WoodWing falling behind is correct. I'm the Managing Director for WoodWing USA, so not 100% unbiased ;-) but let me try to explain why I believe this.
The K4 system has been on the market since approx. 2000, WoodWing came on the market with a competing solution in 2004. K4 was established in the market first and saw some early success. Since then WoodWing has probably sold more systems in the US than K4. It depends a bit per market (magazines, newspapers, books, corporate), but now roughly, I would guess an overall 50/50 market share.
Looking outside the USA the situation is actually quite different. Woodwing has sold many more systems than K4 in most regions of the world. Check out our announced deals.
http://woodwing.com/en/News
http://woodwing.com/en/Customer_List
Even in Germany, the home-country of K4, WoodWing has been winning most larger publishers such as Axel Springer and Gruner & Jahr.
Furthermore -- WoodWing embraces the open source community. With Enterprise our open architecture and tight integration with open source solutions like Drupal is well established. Our recent release of Enterprise 6 w/Content Station and open source server based PHP plugins demonstrate the extensibility of our solution.
Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and Acquia CTO is a keynote speaker at our Athens, Greece publishing conference next month.
Feel free to contact me with any questions about WoodWing and our Enterprise solution.
Hope this clarifies.
Shawn Duffy
Managing Director
WoodWing USA
tel. 313.962.0542 x 151
email. shawnduffy@woodwing.com
http://www.woodwing.com
No documentation
Hi,
we've set up Woodwing 6 several days ago at an university with a system integrator saying on a former demonstration meeting it's not a big problem to connect SC/InCopy to Drupal. OK, there is a Drupal-Plugin in Woodwing. This was the reason why we said OK to Woodwing and not K4. Fine. But after implementation there is no documentation nor a fingertip how to connect InCopy's content to Drupal, how to read out information. So we are not amused about Woodwing at this time and its support.
Ralph
Thanks for the correction
Hi Shawn,
Thanks for the correction. I will have to give WoodWing another look.
--Seth
Content Here: http://www.contenthere.net
Drupal for Publishers: http://www.contenthere.net/products-page/web-technologies-for-publishers...
Content Here: http://www.contenthere.net
Drupal for Publishers: http://www.contenthere.net/products-page/web-technologies-for-publishers...
re: SmartConnection and K4
Hi Geoff,
The great thing about competition is you have options. First off, I don't know that there has been an independent study on who has greater market share, K4 or SmartConnection. Both products are owned by private companies so the data may not be accurate there. Might be a study for Seth to take on (hey Seth;-).
As far as the products, I've got considerable experience with both solutions having integrated SmartConnection (yes, Shawn, its been awhile!) and K4 for the past 5+ years. Woodwing has always done a great job moving their platform very quickly, and this pace of innovation is informed by Erik Schut, their global CEO's, thirst for adding features and functionality. In the past this has caused stability issues with the product. I can in no way comment on whether those issues are long in the past for Woodwing -- it would be great if a few large customers could weigh in on that matter within this thread, but this is a remote content node that few SCE or K4 users will ever find.
K4 has been in the same version (v5.x) for some time now, although vjoon recently released a version that supports Adobe CS4 products. A new version of K4 is coming out very soon (v6), and I'm not sure I'm at liberty to share the details of functionality, so perhaps Andreas Schraeder from vjoon or someone from MEI will weigh in on that. What has impressed me about K4 is its stability and reliability as an editorial production system.
One criticism that has been levvied against K4 in the past is its dependence on Primebase as the RDBMS. That changes in the upcoming release, which is unbound to any database platform and can be implemented on MySQL (or other solutions like ORCL, MSSQL, etc).
As far as the Drupal connection, we've got K4 integrated with Drupal using a custom module we built in Drupal working along with the Importexportapi module, which we customized. We haven't released the modules to the Drupal community yet but we plan to do so in a coordinated effort with the maintainer of Importexportapi.
We also have K4 working with other Web content management systems -- one interesting integration with Trideon SDL, for instance.
My point isn't to say that K4 or SmartConnection should be evaluated for their integration with the different Web content management systems (or digital asset management systems) in the marketplace. My suggestion to you, Geoff, is that you do a careful procurement analysis of both options and also include vendor competency filters in that analysis to see which is the product that will best fit your needs.
You could consider hiring a 3rd party consultant like Seth Gottlieb to help you with the procurement process, since Seth doesn't have a vested interest in either product and we sort of do. We went over to K4 as our editorial workflow platform of choice a few years back when Woodwing was having major stability challenges with SmartConnection and had concurrently terminated their channel partnerships in the U.S. market. As I noted, this was going back 3 or 4 years, and it is quite likely that they have left the problems of those years in the past, but you should definitely check current 'peer' references to verify that.
Now officially supported
http://buytaert.net/woodwing-and-acquia-moving-from-print-to-the-web
http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20090513/bs_prweb/prweb2419284
I liked it very much
I believe Woodwing Enterprise 6 is very nice. I've used the earlier version and was very satisfied. What I want to advise is not to be lazy or sorry for spending more time on learning this programme. As for me I always find the guidelines at the pdf search engine http://pdf.rapid4me.com . Or you can use the function help of this program. Though you spend some time now you'll save much more in the future.