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Is Print Passé?

by Lisa Bos    Aug 2001

From CMSWatch.com, August 2001

Long ago, in another century, people worried more about how things looked on the printed page than on a computer screen or Palm Pilot. Guess what: People still do. Not only are publishers still making money from hard copy newspapers, books, magazines, car repair manuals – you name it, but dotcom pureplays are realizing that having “analog” catalogs bring in revenue. In short, Print is definitely not passé.

That’s one reason we are starting a “Print” topic on this site.

There’s also another good reason to talk about print content management. You might not know it, but systems that support the printed page contain a wealth of lessons for the implementer of electronic CMS’s. Here’s something to ponder:

Print publishing systems target a variety of needs, from automated, high volume output using templated layouts to highly designed publications like magazines. Anyone from the publishing world knows that Quark Publishing System (QPS) is a great product for the second type of publication, but that for automated publishing you’d probably want to take a look at a product like XyEnterprise’s XPP.

Now, think about the Web CM products. Categorize them according to the functionality, workflow, and content they support. Can’t do it? Web content management hasn’t matured enough to let us talk comfortably about the different feature categories, and the tools certainly haven’t caught up yet either. (In fact, I’d say there’s no QPS equivalent – a system that allows wide design flexibility within reasonable constraints – for the Web. But that’s a topic for the future…)

It is possible to put CM products into broad categories by price and how they address the rather wide Web content lifecycle (this site offers one such taxonomy). However, no clear category-killers have emerged. Perhaps the successes and failures in the print CMS world can help us look ahead to the future of CMS for the Web.

We’ll also explore the differences between print and Web organizational structures and processes, and what that says about CM products. How tightly coupled should print and Web content development processes be? When can you effectively combine them? (And how in the world do you get those print and Web editorial groups to actually work together?!?)

Finally, publishing to both print and the Web is still technically challenging. Print-oriented systems don’t live up to much of what they promise for electronic output, and the systems for managing Web content typically don’t know the first thing about outputting to paper (even when “paper” really means PDF files). There are some interesting products tackling both sides of the issue, and we’ll be taking an especially hard look at those in the near future.