case study
How Tiny helped streamline Tax Notes’ CMS
Jennifer Throm
Senior Training/Business Analyst, Tax Notes
Tiny gives us so much more control over how content gets to the web. It saves our staff a lot of time and the training time is greatly reduced too. TinyMCE is the de facto standard for rich-text editing, and it isn’t difficult to learn.
Customer
Tax Notes is a portfolio of publications offered by Tax Analysts, a nonprofit tax publisher. It provides comprehensive and impartial coverage of tax news updates from over 180 nations.
All names, titles and results were correct when originally published.
Industry
Nonprofit tax publishing
Location
USA (Global)
Key Results
Switching to TinyMCE gave Tax Notes
Massive reduction in editing and production time
What took hours, now takes minutes
In-house training time reduced
Responsive support and knowledgeable partner
Easy to use CMS with WYSIWYG editor
Fast, reliable customer support
The challenges
Outdated systems made publishing content a long and complicated process
KEY CHALLENGES for Tax Notes (before TinyMCE)
Outdated CMS
A 40-yr old word processor application
Existing system required extensive XML coding knowledge
Every type of content had unique formatting rules
Up until 2015, Tax Notes relied on an outdated content management system (CMS) that utilized different workflows and coding methods for its print and digital content. The system worked for a time, but it wasn’t efficient – and added hours of extra work to each publication.
Many of the issues stemmed from custom-made fielded format-to-format text for display on their website, and a heavy reliance on antiquated programs—including a word processor application that was already nearly 40-years-old at that time.
These systems required extensive XML coding knowledge. To make matters worse, every type of content had unique formatting rules, requiring coders to remember and apply different rules based on document type and authorship.
Leaders like Jennifer Throm, Tax Notes’ Senior Training/Business Analyst, began seeking new CMS solutions. Tax Notes hoped to unify every type of content in the system in XHTML and introduce a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) text editor.
Our company’s formatting rules created a lot of problems and made everything very complicated. For example, if one of our staff wanted to change jobs and work on treaty documents instead of court cases, they had to learn entirely new processes and custom XML tags, even though both documents were being posted to the same website.
The solution
A flexible and user-friendly rich-text editor
WHAT WE PROVIDED
WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor with:
- Premium support
- Flexible plugins
- Beautiful UX
- Commercial licensing
- Flexible deployment options
- Scalable editor that handles future growth
When choosing a WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE stood out due to its integrations, user-friendliness, and customizability. It checked all of the boxes Jennifer and her colleagues were looking for:
- XHTML support, where most other rich-text editors on the market were strictly XML editors.
- Integration with enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Tiny MCE is the default WYSIWYG editor of Alfresco ECM.
- Versatile plugins, including support for Resource Description Framework in Attributes (RDFa) content authoring.
For the production team, these benefits were game-changers. No more complicated processes like putting government documents into outdated programs and converting them into different formats. Shortcut keys and source code views make it possible to dive into documents, translate the info for web publication, and make the final product look great.
Tiny is a pretty forgiving WYSIWYG editor. It’s been much easier, not only for our editors and reporters but especially for our production staff who appreciate shortcut keys and easy ways to open the source code and move stuff around.
The result
Greater flexibility and streamlined CMS
Intuitive interface makes document creation and management simple
Fast and easy in-house training to suit different needs
A responsive and knowledgeable partner
TinyMCE has helped reduce Tax Notes’ production time. Before, even minor changes used to require a team of coders to revisit the content and make corrections. Now, editors can fix problems themselves in seconds.
Training time has also been reduced. Instead of training coders how to format specific types of document, everyone “speaks the same language.” Jennifer says that editors now feel more comfortable making necessary changes to content after it’s been published.
But the biggest – and most appreciated – benefit has just been having Tiny as a partner. Tax Notes has a relatively small development team. When they need help, they love having a responsive and knowledgeable partner who always gets back quickly with applicable solutions.
Working until past midnight used to be a regular occurrence. That’s rare now. Thanks to Tiny, we usually have our files set up early in the day and our people get to go home at a reasonable hour.
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