IEEE Documentum and

CYA Case Study

13 October 2011

EMC Momentum NYC User Group

Meeting Ken Rawson

Manager, Publishing Systems

IEEE

IEEE and Its Publishing Program

• IEEE is the world’s largest professional technical association • 39 societies and 7 technical councils

• 400,000 members in more than 160 countries; 50 percent of whom are from outside the USA

• Best known for its standards, such as the 802.11 wireless networking standards

• Sponsors over 1,200 conferences in 73 countries

• Publishes 148 transactions, journals and magazines—approximately 1/3 of the world’s technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science and electronics

• Also publishes books and standards

Move to Electronic Publishing Has

Transformed The Publishing Process

• Volume of articles published has grown steadily • Web-based peer review has greatly increased the

number of article submissions

• E-first publication allows for faster dissemination

• The rise of Web-only journals enables a larger volume of articles than previously

• Primary delivery model and “copy of record” have shifted from print to electronic

• Focus of periodical process has become article-by-article electronic publication

IEEE Publishing Operations

• IEEE Publishing Operations runs as a competitive publishing service to IEEE Societies and Councils • 89 peer reviewed journals

• 19 magazines and 11 newsletters

• Some IEEE Societies and Councils publish with external vendors

• Having to operate as a competitive business has driven continuous improvements and increased efficiency • Compelled the decision to move to a next-

generation editorial and production system

Vendor Selection Process Was Detailed &

Comprehensive

• Did site visits to see existing journal

production CMSs

• Looked at a number of proposals, based on

all leading CMS available at the time

• Documentum

• Other proprietary systems

• Reviewed detailed written proposals

• Invited leading contenders in for

presentations

• Evaluated vendors using an evaluation

matrix

Documentum-Based Workflow Management

System (WMS) Was Selected and Built

• WMS is used by the IEEE Publishing

Operations Department to:

• Streamline and automate the editorial/production

process

• Provide the ability to quickly adapt to changing

business conditions

• Worked with consultants to build IEEE

customizations into third-party software

• Built in phases, beginning with vendor

proposals in 2004 and ending with launch in

late 2007

• Rolled out in 2008

Selected a Documentum-Based System

Building on Existing Solution

• Worked with Flatirons Solutions to customize

PubFusion, a system built for Wolters Kluwer

• Purchased base code and customized extensively to

fit IEEE needs

• Worked in phases, using an iterative design

process

• Phase 1: Functional specs, solution design

• Phase 2: Core functionality

• Phase 3: Automation

• Phase 4: Integrations

Defining Requirements, Developing

Workflows & Designing UIs Took Time

• Core team identified to work with Flatirons

Solutions to review process in detail

• Started in 2004, system went live at end 2007

• Called in larger groups of stakeholders for

review & input as portions of system were being

developed

• First step was to review existing workflows

• Workflow development in process while UI

prototypes were built, reviewed, refined, and

then reviewed and refined again

• Reviewing as the system was being developed

was critical to success

The Final Implementation Was Reasonably

Close to What We Expected

• The workflows, the most complex part of the

system, were reasonably close to our

expectations

• We are did a major update all of the workflows in

2010

• New workflows were more streamlined and more

flexible

• Integration with composition system went well

• The testing process was challenging

• The system was less stable than we expected at

launch

• We ended up launching without a reporting

module

WMS Is Based on an End-to-End

Digital Workflow

• All articles and other materials for publication are imported directly from external systems (i.e., online peer review systems)

• The ability to import manually exists

• Articles move through the production process based on pre-defined workflows, milestones trigger the update of schedule information

• Important not to over-engineer—need flexibility to react to changing business needs

• Contact with authors, EICs, IEEE volunteers, and others is done through system portals

WMS Provides All Involved With Real-Time

Information About Content in Our Queue

• Through Web-based portals, WMS gives authors, editors-in-chief, and Society staff the ability to • Check the status of an article

• What has happened, what will happen and when

• Update personal information (bio, photo, contact information)

• Review article proof and submit alterations

• Contact IEEE editorial staff

• Review the queue of articles available for publication (EIC/society)

• Create issue line-ups (EIC/society)

• View information about page budget and pages published (EIC/society)

IEEE WMS Content Flows

•ScholarOne Manuscripts

Peer Review System

•Other Systems Peer Review

System

Workflow

Management

System (Documentum)

Journal

Articles IDAMS

Digital Asset

Mgmt. System

(Documentum)

IEEE

Xplore

Digital

Library Production

Portal

Author

Gateway

Portal

Print

Vendor

Conversion

and

Outsourced

Vendors

Other Benefits of WMS Include

Component-Level Content Management &

Enhanced Reporting

• WMS is designed to manage our content at the component level • Figures, photos, multimedia, text

• This will prepare us to act on opportunities for component-based publishing

• Better, more automated tracking through the production process allows for more detailed reporting • Audit trails, milestones, and system events can all

be used to create meaningful, targeted reports

Training End Users Is a Critical Part of

the Process

• Staff training was done using: • Demos

• FAQs

• User guide

• Weekly open user group meetings

• Expert Users on the floor

• Blog site

• Centralized help desk

• Despite our best efforts, training & documentation were challenging

• Documentum interface was radically new to the staff users

What Does WMS Look Like? • Screen shots illustrate some system

highlights

• Inbox view: editorial staff interact with WMS

through the inbox

• Highly customized to provide ability to organize work in

different ways

• Tasks sortable by columns

• Additional filters to screen visible tasks by type,

publication, issue

• Metadata

• Used to automate the production process, for reporting,

and to track performance to schedule

• Detailed tracking of process/system events

• Easily identify bottlenecks

• Analyze where time is lost/gained

• Measure staff productivity

Extensive use

of metadata to

drive

automation and

reporting

Metadata fields

with asterisks

are required

Detailed

tracking of

process is

possible

Overall Benefits of WMS to IEEE

• WMS has enabled IEEE Publishing Operations to increase the amount of content published with flat staff levels every year • Number of pages has increased 7-10% per year

• We add 4-5 new journals every year

• Improved staff morale (work remotely)

• Handles both in-house edited-and-composed journals and outsourced journals

• Supports an all-digital workflow

• Has enabled Pub Ops to respond more easily to new business requirements and opportunities

• Enhanced reporting

System Size and Basic Architecture

• Approximately 50 users

• Using Documentum v6.5, SP2

• 6 TB of content, 100 GB database

• Runs on 8 servers: 2 DB, 2 Documentum

content servers, 2 WebLogic application

servers, 2 tools servers

• Tools servers provide XML-based article

composition and editing services

• Operates 24 x 7

• Maintenance is a challenge

• Must be done in off-hours

Complex Workflows

• System has 5 very complex workflows • 3 article-based workflows and 2 issue-based

(content packaging) workflows

• Workflows were hard to design and are tough to change and to test • Found it required an business analyst and

workflow expert for design and for writing programming requirements

• QA testers found workflows hard to test. They had to use different methods from standard test case development from requirements

• System is so large and complex we can’t fully regression test it with each code deployment

Business Case for CYA Documentum-

Specific Recovery Solution • A user we could not identify through the audit

trail deleted 80 articles in mid-2010 • All of the extensive metadata (9 “Blue I” tabs of data),

along with several subfolders of article content

• Our standard IT backup/restore process could only restore an entire days-worth of data • Would wipe out an entire day’s work from 50 users to

restore only 80 articles

• We ended up restoring these articles by hiring a temp and manually restoring the content from other systems • Metadata restoration was especially painful

Lack of a Reliable Restoration System

= Big Business Problem

• A mission-critical production system that we couldn’t completely rely on was a major problem

• We needed a much more granular restoration solution that would keep both the Documentum content store and the database in sync

• Had to be able to restore down to the object level

• No traditional backup product would work

CYA Turned Out to be a Great

Solution

• Learned about CYA at EMC World

• After extensive investigation, it looked like it would fit all of our needs

• All set to purchase, when the contract was killed by our IT department

• Required some intense justification to get the contract approved

• Finally got CYA SmartRecovery installed in January of 2011

Installation Was Fine, But Had Some

Early Issues

• The installation of CYA went fine, just as promised.

• The training of our Documentum admins went well also

• The initial full backup by CYA ran into performance problems

• Heavily used system with millions of objects and object relationships

• Ended up taking 3-4 weeks running at off hours

Tuning of CYA Took Some Time

• Once we completed the full backup, we went to a one-hour incremental backup

• This did not work due to intensive use

• WMS communicates with a variety of other systems, such as DB apps, Web portals, MassTransit, etc.

• Now running an hourly backup that is working very well

• Have done around 20 restores of articles so far this year

CYA is a Success at the IEEE

• Our admins were able to fairly easily locate articles to restore in the CYA backup repository

• The process takes around 15-20 minutes to find an article and restore it to production quite easily

• We no longer feel we need to lock down the system, just in case

• Also find it useful as a troubleshooting tool

Q&A

• Questions?

• Comments?