Modernising Legacy Publishing Platforms

The global publishing market has reached 18.81 billion$ this year, showcasing the current market demand of digital publishing. Digital publishing is on the cusp of tech evolution and once the legacy publishing systems get digitally transformed, achieving scalability would be a cake walk. Hence, like any other industry, the publishers have attained a strong online market demand and continuous evolution would determine their relevance. Hence, there is a dire need to achieve digital transformation for publishing platforms and modernising legacy platforms is a first step.  

In this blog, let’s dig deeper to understand the importance of modernising legacy systems.  

Types of Publishing Platforms  

The publishing lifecycle basically consists of Create –> Manage –> Produce –> Distribute –> Monetise. Hence, the basic category of publishing platforms consists of the following:

1. Content Management System: CMS are leveraged for storing, organising, and publishing digital content across channels.  

2. Editorial and Workflow management system: These systems are used for managing newsroom and editorial workflows. These systems allow multiple authors to access and edit documents. Here multi-factor authentication is leveraged as regulatory and compliance measure.  

3. Authoring and Collaboration Tools: These platforms allow users to create, edit and publish digital content on the same platform, along with collaborating tools which allow multiple people to work on the same content simultaneously, track changes, provide feedback, and manage workflows from a central location.  

Above mentioned are the key publishing platforms popularly used by publishers. The other category of publishing platforms is used for storing media, script conversion into advance formats, subscription platforms, distribution and ecommerce platforms.  

From the above-mentioned publishing platforms, you will find that a lot of publishing platforms are outdated, lack flexibility and scalability, less supporting integration capabilities and much more, hence, to meet the current marketing dynamics and satisfying user needs we need to modernise the legacy publishing platforms. 

Reasons why modernising legacy publishing platforms is Necessary 

Legacy publishing platforms lack active maintenance causing inconsistent functionalities, outdated features, integration and security issues. These issues cause the tool to keep up with the modern publishing trends, causing delays and inefficiencies in publishing workflows and leading to widespread user-dissatisfaction.  

Issues caused by legacy publishing platforms can be resolved by digitally transforming these platforms. Let’s first elaborate on the need of modernising the legacy publishing platforms:  

High Scalability leads to high performance: Mordern publishing demands like scaling data, data stores can be achieve by using cloud-based SAAS platforms where scaling resources can be achieved automatically, you can add servers in cloud platforms to handle data load, implement load balancers to distribute incoming traffic or implementing microservice architectures. Ensures consistent performance under heavy workload conditions and dynamically allocating resources.  

High security: Upgraded or modernised systems consist of high security frameworks and regulatory compliance systems to protect their systems from malicious activities. Security measures like transitioning to cloud native infrastructure, implementing real-time monitoring, utilising secure API integrations can be implemented. 

Support Integration: Legacy publishing platforms could not support integration, blocking the way for enhanced features and improved performance. CRMs like salesforce allow integration with Rest API, using data aggregation layers which can pull structured or unstructured data into a unified interface. 

Workflow Automation improves efficiency: Automating workflows makes the publishing process quick, qualitative and bring better returns. Workflow automation ensures data automatically flows from design, editing, compliance and publishing. This automatically speeds up publishing cycles leading to better efficiency.   

Future Proofing: Once you have achieved scalability by implementing a SAAS platform or integrating features, your publishing platform becomes open for seamless integration of features and enhanced performance.  

Sustained Engineering Services: For publishing platforms to evolve continuously, you need to innovate continuously. Hence partnering with a team of developers who can offer implementation, development, delivery and post deployment maintenance guarantee sustainable growth.  

Conclusion  

Online publishing has evolved better than ever and in order to create, manage, store and publish information, we need to rely on modern systems, advanced technology and scalable growth partners for maintenance of publishing systems. Publishers of today need to constantly meet the dynamic market demands and ensure that they do not disappoint their users. At NEC, we not only provide end-to-end support but also offer services covering all the stages of publishing ranging from API integration, CRM implementation to on-going maintenance support to ensure that your users can have a seamless experience while using your publishing system.