Helping Wolters Kluwer launch CasebookConnect
The Legal Education group within Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. is the leading provider of educational content and digital learning solutions to law schools in the U.S. and around the world.
Wolters Kluwer was well into a development effort to build a new law school curriculum platform. CasebookConnect is an all-in-one learning solution featuring full e-book versions of casebooks; a Study Center complete with practice questions from leading study aids like the Examples & Explanations and Glannon Guides; outlining and case briefing tools to enhance student learning and save time; and a topical news feed to connect what students are learning to their everyday lives.
Wolters Kluwer engaged Wrycan with a clear goal; to make sure that all the content scheduled for the initial CasebookConnect release would be ready.
Challenges
Timelines were short; content had to be completed and loaded well before the CasebookConnect launch in five months.
Content drove much of the functionality in CasebookConnect. The software development team needed final content design decisions quickly so that they could complete their work.
The software development team defined the content model required to load content into CasebookConnect. The proposed model was different from the source content models and formats. Manual and automated conversion processes were needed to get the source content into the model necessary for CasebookConnect.
Strategy
Wrycan's "source model vs. utilization model" content strategy was determined to be the best way to get out ahead of the timelines while providing flexibility and scalability for future versions of the CasebookConnect platform or other future uses for the content.
Wrycan built a new content model, one suited to the source content. The new model focused on the semantics of the source content, considering current CasebookConnect requirements, as well as potential future needs.
Platform
Wrycan deployed ContentBase as the solution to manage the content and the related processes. ContentBase facilitates content proofing, review, mapping metadata/taxonomies, and exporting content to CasebookConnect.
Exports configured in ContentBase handle converting the sematic source content to the format/model required by CasebookConnect. CasebookConnect content changes needed by the development team would be handled by changing the export configuration, not by changing the source content.
Process
The processes focused on exposing errors as far upstream as possible. With short timelines, automated content checks were added to flag issues early in the process, avoiding the risk of errors making their way downstream where they require more time to address.
Wrycan delivered a toolset to the editorial team so they could start the conversion process immediately. The same toolset handled loading content to the ContentBase platform, allowing the team to have control of the entire proofing and QA process.
Wrycan integrated CasebookConnect's HTML-structure and CSS styling into the QA process in ContentBase. Resources reviewing content in ContentBase would see the same styles and structures they would see when viewing the same content in CasebookConnect. This integration saved time because issues with the content and CSS could be corrected early in the QA process.
Once the content was loaded to ContentBase, metadata could be added, and taxonomy mappings could be made without blocking the editorial team from making content edits.
Exporting content from ContentBase was an on-demand process; the Wolters Kluwer team could send new content to CasebookConnect as soon as it was ready.
Results
All the initial content was completed for the first release in 2014. All content has been ready for all product releases since.
With a platform and process in place, Wolters Kluwer manages the process to get new content into CasebookConnect ahead of semester releases. Thanks to the strategic decision to create a source model, ensuring flexibility and agility to adapt the content to future needs, Wolters Kluwer can continually enhance CasebookConnect functionality without reconverting or manually updating any content. Wolters Kluwer's collaboration with Wrycan has ensured their ability to provide the most value to CasebookConnect users and quickly meet their evolving content needs.
We pride ourselves on being long-term partners. Our goal is to build solutions for customers that not only solve short term problems but are also well-positioned to serve as a foundation for future digital content products.
No matter what your next content-driven product is, Wrycan can help to ensure that your content is ready.
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