Pearson plc

Adapting to multichannel publishing

For years, Pearson’s publishing workflow was outdated, using tools like Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign for textbook print publishing and ePub for electronic textbook publishing. While InDesign supported the print publishing requirements, Pearson recognized the need to publish this content more efficiently in a variety of formats, including web browsers, mobile devices and its Pearson+ education service.

Pearson realized that, because its creative process prioritized print publication, it lacked many components that created engaging, interactive online learning experiences. It needed a system that better supported video presentation, interactive tasks, accessibility features and smaller, more easily consumed units.

To accomplish this objective, Pearson needed to rethink how it designed and created content and ensure it was putting the right tools in the hands of its authors and designers.

Building a solution

To support its modern education publishing business, Pearson developed its Pearson Authoring and Content Ecosystem (PACE), a suite of applications and services that empower content creation and development teams to create and publish content intended for multiple platforms and products. PACE brings a modern, cloud-based digital content creation and delivery platform to Pearson employees, vendors and suppliers to create engaging, high-quality content to meet Pearson's digital and print needs. From a learning perspective, Pearson wanted to make it easier to try, fail and learn, driving better, more effective educational experiences.

PACE enables authors to identify content within the publication, including headlines, quotes, videos and bulleted lists. These semantic tags enable the publishing platform, including Pearson+, Connections Academy, or even InDesign, to understand the content and present it appropriately. In addition, these indicators can link to learning objectives, curricula, educational standards and other sources, which adds additional context and enables content to be reused in different channels and new or different publications. Finally, these descriptors can inform when more accessible content is required.

Replacing OpenText Documentum with Alfresco

Key to Pearson’s PACE solution was Alfresco, Hyland’s open, scalable, cloud-native content, process and governance management suite. Alfresco enabled Pearson to break through many of the limitations of its legacy content management platform, OpenText Documentum. Documentum was limiting Pearson’s ability to modernize its publishing workflow to adapt to its publications’ changing requirements.

Pearson made the decision to leverage Alfresco to provide a comprehensive system to manage its content, while ensuring that access rights protected both viewing and editing access to appropriate authors and reviewers. Pearson was also attracted to Alfresco’s open APIs, enabling the company to both integrate with important tools and customize the solution to meet its unique requirements. In addition, Alfresco enabled the teams to manage their own access to relevant content, while allowing Pearson to maintain a global view across all business units.

Realizing quick benefits

Once the new solution, based on the Alfresco suite, was deployed, Pearson quickly identified several benefits. In addition to addressing its overall goals of better supporting digital publications, enabling a single document to be published in many different formats and dramatically reducing the time to publish, Pearson employees quickly became dependent upon Alfresco to find all relevant content during the authoring and publication processes. Pearson also leverages Alfresco to store all digital assets, including graphics, audio, and other marketing data and assets.

With Pearson’s legacy system, executives were increasingly frustrated by the delays in publishing eBooks or other electronic publications. Because the previous publishing workflows were sequential, electronic efforts did not begin until after the physical publishing began. With Alfresco, the publishing processes can be executed in parallel and completed within an hour or less. The results are reductions in publishing times, both for initial publications and for minor updates or corrections. In addition, the system streamlines a wide range of conversion, review, editing and approval processes to deliver efficiencies throughout the publishing process.

Since deploying the Alfresco-based PACE system, Pearson has created over 7,000 publications, represented as projects or sites within the system. Its work-in-progress repository contains over 650 terabytes of content and, combined with its archive repository, Pearson manages over one petabyte of content with Alfresco. Pearson has incorporated Alfresco as the preferred repository for all new content and, even within legacy authoring workflows, authors are leveraging Alfresco to manage graphics, photos and other shared assets.

Looking ahead

While Pearson’s investment in PACE has streamlined its publishing process and resulted in better print and electronic publications, the company continues to see opportunities to leverage Hyland’s capabilities to improve its business processes.

Pearson plans to leverage Hyland’s Alfresco Enterprise Search to deliver enterprise-wide search capabilities, integrating legacy repositories and file shares that continue to manage older company information. Pearson also plans to enrich assets with rights information, so authors can readily understand whether photos or videos require licenses or are in the public domain. Similarly, Pearson plans to identify assets with AI labeling, so users can understand what content is generated or translated using AI technologies.

Alfresco has helped to transform Pearson’s authoring process, adding advanced ECM, process management and enterprise search functionality to make it both faster and more flexible for creating and updating multimedia publications.

Learn more about Alfresco