From planning to publishing in one flow

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for this webinar, “From Planning to Publishing in One Flow,” where we will have a special guest speaker from a joint customer between Kordiam and WoodWing, and that is Erdee Media Groep. A representative from Erdee Media Groep will showcase their use case and case study, and you'll be able to preview inside Erdee Media Groep's connected workflow.

My name is Magdalena. I am the Product Marketing Manager at WoodWing, and I will be moderating the webinar today. It's great to have you all with us.

Before we get started, I would like to mention a couple of quick housekeeping rules. This session is being recorded, and we'll share it with you afterwards. Also, because we have three interesting speakers today, feel free to drop your questions in the chat at any time, and we'll address them during our live Q&A at the end.

Today's session is all about one common challenge, and that is how to connect planning with production. To briefly announce the agenda, you will be able to preview the reality of today's publishing workflows, which will be presented by our guest speaker from Kordiam, the customer story that I mentioned in the beginning, inside Erdee Media Groep's connected workflows, and then a senior consultant from WoodWing will showcase and summarize how that whole workflow comes together.

At the end, we wrap up with some key takeaways for you and, of course, a dedicated section for the Q&A. We hope that you will ask as many questions as possible if you're interested to find out more about the ins and outs of the use case.

So let's move forward with introducing the speakers today. I have the great pleasure to welcome Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink. She is the Editorial Business Analyst from Erdee Media Groep and a joint customer of WoodWing and Kordiam. Then we have Gert Blekkenhorst. He is the Senior Business Process Consultant from WoodWing, and he was also the main consultant for the whole integration and implementation of the system by WoodWing. And then Robert Dönges from Kordiam. He is the Partner and Integrations Manager.

Before we kick things off with the first speaker, Robert, I would like to ask Robert to come on stage so he can speak more about the reality of today's publishing workflows. Welcome, Robert.

Thank you, Magdalena. I hope everybody can hear me, and thank you very much for allowing Kordiam to be part of this webinar and for giving me the opportunity to present.

Who am I? I'm Robert, a trained editor with over 30 years of professional experience in journalism, from local editor to manager, duty manager, project manager, everything, at various publishing houses in southern Germany. Since 2022, I've been Partner and Integration Manager at Kordiam, formerly known as DeskNet, a great company that I've known from the very beginning because I rolled out DeskNet at that time, in the winter of 2013, as one of its first customers across the 21 editorial teams of my then employer.

At Kordiam, I'm responsible, on one hand, for collaboration with software partners like WoodWing, and on the other hand, I act essentially as a coordinator in individual integration projects, overseeing the interactions between our software, our customers, and their additional software.

Okay. There we go. Sorry.

So what is Kordiam? Kordiam is an editorial planning tool that enables editorial teams to plan their content across various platforms and assign tasks to their staff. With it, we make it possible to plan content for print, digital, TV, radio, and any other channels in one central location.

Kordiam was founded in 2007 as DeskNet by Matthias Gretchma, our CEO. In 2024, two years ago, we rebranded as Kordiam. We are based in Hamburg, or rather, we work remotely from all across Germany and from Spain as well. We have around 40 employees, 14 of whom are actually based in Germany, and the majority of our development center is in Kraków, Poland. Our software is web-based SaaS, we host on AWS, and we are used by more than 20,000 active users from 260 customers worldwide every month.

So let's talk about the frustrations of editorial work when it comes to tools and software. What are editorial teams dealing with today? There's a wide variety of different software tools for specific tasks. You all know that. Then we have specialized apps and software that are sometimes not even available to everyone. We have deadlines. We deal with sudden events, due dates, user needs, breaking news, you name it.

Content production happens in various formats, for different platforms, maybe digital or print, or different publications. There are non-standardized, not individually customized workflows, sometimes even from desk to desk within one department or within the same department. This is all practice. You know that. We have manual handoffs on demand, leading to unclear or missing information and misunderstandings, and we duplicate work to maintain information across all systems.

So, what are the consequences? There we go. Well, the consequences of these annoyances are no overview of the current stories, a lack of coordination among individual tasks, requirements, and platforms, editorial chaos, and confusion over responsibilities. The planning, unfortunately, is disconnected from production. It takes time and patience to bring everyone up to speed, and the result is unnecessary stress for the newsroom and its editorial staff.

Now, how does our integration help, the integration between Kordiam and WoodWing? When a story is planned in Kordiam, it automatically creates an article in WoodWing. The key data is already contained in the WoodWing Studio draft article, like description, title, platform, section, author, whatever. We'll tell you more about that later.

In addition, in both systems, mutual links to the WoodWing article and to the Kordiam story are automatically created, which allows editors to directly access WoodWing Studio from Kordiam, as well as from WoodWing to Kordiam.

Since this is all theory, let's move on to practice, because what happens when you really connect these two worlds in practice in the editorial board? So please meet somebody who knows the answer, Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink. Let's continue with you.

Thank you, Robert. My name is Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink. I'm an Editorial Business Analyst at Erdee Media Groep. I'm working with the editorial teams of our company. I'm analyzing their workflows, their digital workflows, how they can be improved, and I'm solving their daily problems that they might encounter.

Before I go into the integration that we set up between Kordiam and WoodWing, let me tell you something about our company. Erdee Media Groep is a Christian cross-media publishing company. We are based in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands, and we have approximately 200 employees. They are working for diverse brands. The best-known brand, the biggest one we have, is Reformatorisch Dagblad, which is a daily newspaper, a six-day-a-week newspaper.

We also have some other brands, like RD Magazine, which is a supplemental newspaper one day a week, on a Saturday, but we also have a family magazine biweekly, and of course our websites, our apps, and a digital database of our content.

Our readership is primarily a Christian group of people. They are interested in the general news, but we are also mainly reporting and interpreting the news of the day from a biblical perspective, so a Christian viewpoint. That makes us different from other media companies in the Netherlands.

The story of the integration between WoodWing and Kordiam that we are talking about today starts even before 2017, because before that time, we didn't have a comprehensive editorial overview in the planning. Especially for print products, because that was still the main focus by that time, there was a planning system on a team level. Teams like politics and economics did have their own planning, but it was mainly in Excel sheets or in Word documents, and a comprehensive overview was lacking.

As you can imagine, if there's no overarching planning, it's difficult to make policy and for the heads of the teams to work together with regard to the content they are making. So then in 2017, we started using Kordiam as our planning tool. It was called DeskNet still at the time. From that time on, the main publication, so the daily magazine, started using the planning system. The family magazine and the weekly magazine joined later because they are way smaller, and we started with the main brand at first.

When we started, Kordiam gave an improvement in the cooperation because teams now could see what other teams were planning on doing, and also the editorial board, the overarching board, had better insight into the planning. They knew what was coming, and they could manage that better.

But still, we were using only Kordiam and then a separate editorial system, and that still brought its challenges because it was manual work to copy information from the planning system to the editorial system. Then three years ago, we started using WoodWing as our editorial system. From the start, we also integrated it with Kordiam. We did that at the same time in 2023, and that opened up a whole lot of possibilities because now it was a continuous flow from planning to content creation to publishing on the website and in the print newspaper.

Also, a few years ago, we made a separation on our editorial floor between an input team and an output team. That means that an editor who is writing input for our channels, in theory, is not concerned with how it's going to be distributed. They don't know when, where, and how their story is going to be published. Of course, it's a form of collaboration, but we have a dedicated output team that manages the output, so the publishing.

As you can imagine, that also makes the need for planning and for a smooth process of continuing the content creation after planning even more necessary. Around these times, the family magazine and the weekly magazine also started using the planning tool. They also had that integrated workflow, and also the commercial brands used the workflow.

So then we made the integration between Kordiam and WoodWing. Nowadays, for us, it's nearly impossible to work without Kordiam as the start of our publishing cycle. All publications start in the Kordiam planning, and they end up in WoodWing. Over there, the editors can finish up their content creation, and then it will be distributed to the channels, whether it's digital or paper or both, or other channels.

We really teach by the model: if it's not in Kordiam, it doesn't exist. So we also require the editors and the teams to start a story in Kordiam, and they never start it in WoodWing. It's also always in the planning, and even though content creation is mainly focused in WoodWing itself, the planning is always done in Kordiam.

As I said, we have a way better overview, and it's much smoother collaboration now between teams and the editorial board. I also want to mention that the publishing cycle is faster because whenever a story is created and it's decided that we are actually going to produce it, the story card in Kordiam receives a link to the WoodWing article.

In a few minutes, I will show you as well with a few screenshots. But this makes it very easy for the editor to continue from planning to content creation because they just click the link, and they can start the writing process.

Furthermore, it's also very nice that a lot of predefined metadata, which is already in the Kordiam card, is entered because when planning, you already might know some of the metadata. This is copied to the WoodWing article. So you don't have to manually copy the information and be sure to make it the same because the integration automatically updates this. Even after the link has started the integration, it will be updated continuously.

The last big improvement is the article templates. In WoodWing, we have defined a lot of article templates. The templates include a few metadata fields, but they also include which elements an article needs to have. It's based on a repeating rubric, for example, and in Kordiam, when planning, you can already select an article template. So the person who is planning can already decide how the article should look, and that's a great benefit because it saves a lot of repeating work, especially when an article is in the same format over and over again.

So I will show you in a few screenshots what our workflow actually looks like to illustrate the story I'm telling you. The publication planning, as I said, starts in Kordiam, and over here you can see a few of the story cards that we have made in the last days.

Everyone who has access to the planning can add a new story idea. As you can see on the top left corner, it has a status of idea. So it's a new idea, but it's not really decided that we are going to publish the story for real. This is an example of a report on King's Day this year, which is a national holiday in the Netherlands. A few of the metadata is already added, like which platform we are going to distribute this on, on which day, and if it's a text or if it's a video or a podcast or something.

Then whenever, on the editorial floor, it's decided that we are going to really produce this story, the status will be changed. On the top left corner, you can see it's now called production. So the story is really going to be published. It gets a green color, and when this status is changed, that triggers the integration. From this status on, a link with the WoodWing Studio article is made. After a few minutes, you will get a link to the WoodWing article back.

As you can see, which I've indicated with the arrow, there is a link created, and that's the link the editor will use to open up the article and start their content writing process.

In the meantime, I'm also changing a few things on this story card. For example, the scheduled date is now changed to April 27. I've added an article type. I've added an SN for the text writing. All of this information is also added in WoodWing. If I'm changing the story card, it will also change the WoodWing article.

As you can see on the right side, there is a field called text length, and in that one, I can choose from a multiple selection list. The multiple selection list is integrated with WoodWing, which is the article templates that we have in WoodWing. So if I click on the link to the WoodWing Studio article, I will end up in the WoodWing system, and I can see here that an article is created for me. It's a blank article, of course, but the article consists of the components that match with the article template that I chose.

Also, as you can see in my next screenshot, the metadata that I filled in in the story card is also filled in here in the WoodWing properties. From here on, the content creation process is really starting. The workflow, of course, continues with diverse statuses in WoodWing because it's also checked by other readers, and at the end, the article will be published from WoodWing to our web CMS.

These metadata are also very important for the right publishing to the CMS and to the print newspaper. This is what our workflow looks like in a nutshell. I hope it gives you some insight into how we are working nowadays and that we really could not work this efficiently without the integration from planning until content creation.

Then I will now give the floor to Gert Blekkenhorst to showcase how this integration is set up.

Thank you, Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink. Good afternoon, everybody. I'd like to walk you through the project I worked on at Reformatorisch Dagblad, where I was the lead consultant from WoodWing and also responsible for integrating Kordiam with WoodWing Studio.

To give you some context, the newsroom produces around 100 stories per day. Some are digital only, others go to both the websites like rd.nl and the daily newspaper. So you're dealing with a fairly high-volume, multi-channel publishing environment.

As Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink explained, when we started the WoodWing project, Kordiam was already firmly in place as the editorial planning system. Editors relied on it to plan and manage all their stories, and at that time, WoodWing workflows were being introduced for content creation and publishing. That immediately raised the key question: where does editorial planning live?

WoodWing Studio is strong in production, but unlike Kordiam, it is less strong in offering planning and pre-planning capabilities. So there was a real risk of ending up with two systems overlapping, or maybe even worse, conflicting.

Early in the project, a clear decision was made: Kordiam would remain the leading system for planning, and the mantra here was “planning is production.” What that meant in practice is that everything in production had to be driven by planning. No parallel processes, no manual duplications.

There was also an important nuance to that principle. Not every story in Kordiam is immediately ready for production. Some are just ideas, things being explored, not yet confirmed. So we decided that as long as a story is still in that early stage, we don't create anything in Studio. If you really zoom into this slide, that will be explained in a bit more detail there.

Only when there's an editorial decision that the story will actually be published, that's when we create the production framework, so like the WoodWing dossiers and WoodWing articles. That helped keep the production environment clean and focused and ensured that only committed work entered the publishing workflow.

Before building the integration itself, we had to take a step back and look at the existing Kordiam setup. It had evolved over time and wasn't directly aligned with how WoodWing structures content, meaning that a significant part of my role was to analyze and align those two models.

For example, Kordiam uses platforms, where WoodWing works with brands and publication structures like issues. So we had to map those concepts and map metadata like deadlines so that planned stories would end up in the correct context for both digital and print.

We also had to align workflows. In Kordiam, stories move through story and task states. In WoodWing, you're dealing with objects like dossiers, articles, and tasks, each with their own workflow statuses and with their own routing and assignments. So we defined a clear mapping between those so that changes in planning, like a story moving to another date, would translate correctly into production. The goal here was to remove ambiguity and make the flow predictable.

Once that foundation was in place, we moved to the integration approach. We evaluated several options, including direct API integrations and batch processes, but we ultimately chose to use Kordiam's message queue mechanism and build an event-driven integration.

Such an integration allowed us to respond to planning changes in real time while keeping the system decoupled and robust, which is very important in a newsroom, where timing is obviously critical.

In practice, what we implemented was this: when a story in Kordiam reached the stage where it was approved for publication, it triggered an event. That event would then create or update the corresponding objects in WoodWing Studio, like dossiers and articles, assign the correct workflow status, and also route it to the assigned users.

From that point on, any updates in planning would continue to flow through automatically. So instead of journalists manually creating content in a production system, everything started in planning and flowed into production in a controlled way, and only when it was relevant. This ensured that all daily and future stories followed a consistent process without overloading the production system with drafts or ideas.

The technical side worked well, and the other challenge was obviously aligning the editorial teams. We were asking people to fully rely on planning as the starting point of the work, which required a shift, at least for some, in how they were used to working. So we worked closely with the core team to make sure the workflow made sense and supported their daily processes.

In the end, the result was a much more streamlined and controlled workflow. There was a single source of truth in Kordiam, no duplicate data entry, and fewer inconsistencies between planning and publication. It also made the process much more predictable, which is critical in a daily publishing environment.

For me, a key takeaway from this project is that successful integration is not just about connecting these systems. It's also about making clear decisions about ownership and workflow, aligning the underlying models, and then implementing that in a way that people can actually work with it.

To conclude, that's what made the credo “planning is production” actually work in practice. The result was a streamlined, high-volume editorial workflow. We have one source of truth across planning and production. No duplicate entries, no inconsistencies, and that resulted in faster and more predictable publishing for both digital and print.

At the scale at Reformatorisch Dagblad, with hundreds of stories per week where planning drives production, this difference isn't just efficiency. It's being in control. By making planning the driver and backing it with event-driven integration, we turn two systems into one coherent workflow.

With that, I'd like to give the floor back to Robert.

Thank you, Gert. I was asked to sum it up in general, so these are the key takeaways from our side for editors. There we go. Thank you.

Number one is data needs to be entered only once and flows automatically between the systems. So no manual copy-pasting, no outdated duplicates, and all systems share the same truth.

Second, faster decisions in planning. No need to check tasks and the status between Kordiam and WoodWing all the time, which means you have more context in one place without having to verify with the second system all the time.

Processes run much smoother since no manual intermediate steps are required. Mutual access from both systems: users can directly access the WoodWing story from Kordiam, as well as from WoodWing to Kordiam, at any time, and the important data is always synced.

Last but not least, the efficiency factor. Not only workloads, but also human errors in data entry are reduced. Those would be my points, and back to Magdalena.

Thank you, Robert. Thank you, everyone, for sharing your experience with the integration between Kordiam and WoodWing Studio. I'd like to invite everyone from the speakers on stage to join me because we are starting with the Q&A part.

For those of you that are following us today, please feel free to use the chat function to send us any questions that you might have for our speakers. It would be great to hear from you and, of course, get additional insights from Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink or Robert for this integration.

There is a question for Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink. How long did the adoption take of the connection between the systems from the team?

Yeah, well, the use of Kordiam as a planning tool was a totally new thing in planning. But we trained the whole editorial team, and it was the only tool we introduced right away, and there were no other options. So we required them to just start using it from that point on.

Okay.

It was not in phases or things like that. It was just start using from now on. That worked quite quickly. I think around two months before everyone was really familiar with the workflow. Of course, integration with WoodWing was even easier because that's just automatic. The system was new, but the integration was very beneficial.

Okay, thank you. There is a question from our viewer, Carol: how do you manage the ads for the print channel?

Well, there are ads, but also advertorials. I don't know exactly which one you mean, but advertorials, so like written content in ad form, are treated like a normal article. So it also starts in planning, and it ends up in WoodWing, and then is published to either print or web. But for the ads, like the normal advertisements, we have a system. That's also integrated, but it's not in relation to Kordiam.

Thank you. Can you share, maybe this is a bit more about how long the implementation takes, the implementation of the integration specifically?

Well, it depends a bit. As I tried to explain in the session itself, we had to align a couple of workflows. We had to get the concepts right. Usually, during the implementation, we have some talks around, okay, how did you implement Kordiam? Kordiam is very easy to implement as an end user or as an IT department, but it somehow needs to match the WoodWing system as well. So there are a lot of conversational topics like that, and that depends a bit on the complexity. I'd say from a month to two months, roughly.

Okay, thank you. There's a question: do we need our own developers, and what about specialized workflows or specific workflows?

No, you don't need your own developers for the integration. You don't need your own developers. It's basically a standard integration. There's a lot of configuration in it, but that's not development.

The other question was: what if we have a specialized workflow? We have to adjust the configuration to the specialized workflow. We actually do so as well for one of their magazines. The workflow is slightly different from the daily newspaper, so the configuration takes that into account. We have a specific configuration for that specific platform from Kordiam to the brand in WoodWing configuration, so we can cope with that.

Okay, thank you. I'm checking. There is a question for Kordiam: what is the licensing model? Is it nominative user licenses, and what if we would like to get an offer or at least know the positioning in terms of budget?

Just go to our website, the marketing site, and check out the prices. That's the easiest way. It's all online. Yes, we do charge for every user on a monthly basis, and the more you are, the less you have to pay per user.

I've also shared on the screen a brochure for our viewers today that gives more details about the Kordiam and WoodWing integration.

There is also one question from Rosella: is the interface available in French?

Yes, from the Kordiam side. Yes, from the Kordiam side. Yes.

WoodWing Studio as well. Yes.

Another question from Duncan: how would the same principle of this integration work with other document types in WoodWing, for example, InDesign layout?

That's an interesting question. We're actually planning stories. It's editorial planning. It's not page planning. But we basically run a query to select the template that could theoretically be a layout as well. That's not the case at Reformatorisch Dagblad. Actually, print page planning is done in a different planning system. So the story, the editorial part, the stories for all the channels, come from Kordiam. The page planning comes from another system, but you could configure it to plan layouts as well.

Okay, thank you. Then I am looking in the question section.

Yes, this is maybe a good question for Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink, or maybe for all of the speakers. What are your recommendations for publishers with similar challenges like yours, specifically with disconnected systems between planning and production?

Yeah, I would really advise taking a look at whether an integration is possible between the systems, because it saves a lot of time, and the workflow really gets faster and more ideal for the daily work. Repeating work is just less, and so that saves a lot of time.

Thank you, Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink. Any other comments from you, Robert, because you work with publishers on a daily basis, so you know part of the issues that they're facing. Do you have any recommendations in terms of how to easily get something like this in their own workflows?

Well, for sure, I'd recommend the integration. Any integration helps. Maybe just to refer to that former point about the specialized workflows. About two years ago, we introduced customized fields on all areas of the story card in Kordiam, which means you can have any kind of custom field in the description, or in the task, or in the publication area. That allows customers to reflect their workflows quite precisely within Kordiam.

Then, when you have the integration with WoodWing, for example, WoodWing just needs to adopt and adjust to these custom fields, and I think they already did it.

We do. We do, yes.

So it's not that much work. With those options, you can cover almost everything.

Thank you. Is there anything you'd like to add to this?

Yeah. Mainly one important topic here is that integration will also reduce errors. If you have duplicate silos and you have to start copy-pasting, or even worse, typing your story names over from your planning system to your production system, that's prone to introducing all kinds of errors. Same with articles maybe ending up in the wrong issue or in the wrong folder. When you have to do it manually, and with the integration, it's all transparent. There's one source of truth, that's the planning system, and the WoodWing system will follow. If you move your story around, the story moves around in WoodWing Studio as well. So yeah, it highly reduces any errors in your move from planning to production.

Thank you. I'm looking in the chat side panel here, and I don't see any other questions. So I'd like to maybe wrap up this session, if you're okay with that.

Thank you again for showcasing the use case. Special thanks to Annerie Mauritz-Wilbrink, of course, for giving us a glimpse of how their workflow looks like and what their challenges were before the integration and before the implementation of the two systems.

It's been a great pleasure having you all today here to listen to this story, and I'm hopeful that you've learned a little bit more about Kordiam and WoodWing and the integration between the two systems.

Again, feel free to reach out to us, download the brochure if you'd like to see more focused, tangible insights about how the integration works. And yes, of course, always feel free to reach out to us if you have any outstanding questions that we didn't get to cover during this live session.

Again, a reminder to everyone, you will receive the recording. Even if you missed the beginning or the middle part, or at the end you couldn't stay until the very end, you will receive the recording of this nice webinar, and I'm hopeful to see you again anytime soon.

Thank you, Robert, and I wish you all a lovely day. It's a great pleasure to have you today to be part of this webinar. Thank you.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

And until next time.

See you next time.

Bye.

Note: this transcript has been auto-corrected using AI, it may contain mistakes.