This page contains takeaways and discussion points from the customer roundtable session as well as additional resource links that resulted from those discussions and the meeting at large.

Legal disclaimer: Wiley and eXtyles are providing information about alternative vendors for general informational purposes only. We do not endorse, recommend, or have any affiliation with the third-party vendors mentioned. Any reference to these vendors does not constitute an endorsement or warranty regarding their products or services. Wiley and eXtyles are not agents, representatives, or partners of any third-party vendors and have no control over their offerings. Customers are responsible for independently evaluating and selecting vendors that best meet their needs.

Some workflow takeaways and pain points

  • Customers expressed apprehension about moving away from eXtyles due the complexities involved in finding a suitable replacement
  • Some are hoping to find a single solution rather than a patchwork of solutions; others are open to a multi-solution approach and are reviewing their workflow and breaking it into pieces
  • Some individuals were not present/involved when eXtyles was implemented and have questions about what each process truly does and where to begin when communicating their needs to a potential new provider
    NOTE: Our eXtyles User Documentation space on Confluence contains in-depth information about each eXtyles function. You can also navigate to this documentation directly from the Resources section of the Inera site.
  • One customer locked down their IT environment to maintain eXtyles while transitioning, but this isn’t possible for every customer or organization
  • A number of organizations do not want to outsource anything, and several want to be able to configure and maintain any solution themselves
  • Customers mentioned a number of products and vendors (listed below) and discussed both pros and cons of various offerings. With few exceptions, most customers have not yet settled on a path forward, and solutions that look promising to some customers are less attractive to others (i.e., there is no one-size-fits-all solution)

Alternative products/vendors

Considerations when vetting a new solution

  • How similar is the offering to what you’re currently doing? What are the gaps, and what will the learning curve be for your staff?
  • Does the solution prioritize editorial tools, XML conversion, or both?
  • How much of the workflow is automated and how much is manual?
  • How customizable is the workflow?
  • How much training is provided?
  • Is there flexibility around how much of the workflow can be kept in house versus how much will have to be outsourced?
  • If relevant, how will high volumes of content be managed?
  • How will math be handled?
  • How responsive is customer support?

AI – possibilities and challenges

  • Some discussions touched on the potential of AI in editorial and production workflows, with a number of customers expressing skepticism about its reliability compared to established systems
  • A few customers have experimented with using AI to generate XML and have found the results both encouraging and concerning; the markup looks solid, but errors can be egregious, hard to spot, and impossible to predict, so quality control would need to be rigorous and (at least for now) would likely eat up a lot of the time saved

Additional resources