The BMJ Group is one of the world's most trusted providers of medical information for doctors, researchers, health care workers and patients. BMJ, (British Medical Journal) the Group's flagship journal, was founded in 1840 and is one of the world's leading general medical journals. Our head office is in London and has around 280 staff, and in the USA our office, BMJ Inc, has 10 staff. We also have sales staff based in Asia and Europe.

Which problem did your company have?

Prior to using Serna XML editor in-house we often relied on RTF to XML conversion. The workflow process required several conversion steps and although automated usually required manual intervention to fix conversion errors. Using an XML editor has removed these bottlenecks and allows us to maintain robust and valid XML throughout the content creation workflow.

How has Serna helped to solve the problem?

Serna doesn't need to amend. People just do the work and then they check in and the document is already valid XML. Our articles have highly structured content. Serna allows us to ensure consistency of our data.

How is Serna used in your company?

Serna is used for authoring medical topics in XML format, such as treatments and drugs information. There are thousands of such topics. Each topic may contain several references to or re-use content from other topics. This information is kept in the X-Hive Docato content management system. Finally, there articles are published to the web site and other media.

What is the most useful feature of Serna?

The main features are that it works with the CMS or the WebDAV and that it has WYSIWYG interface. There are few editors out there that you can set up for kind of presentation. The user doesn't have to necessarily know the markup or work with XML code directly but they can work in WYSIWYG editor mode.

Then, there's FO formatting - we were doing some PDFs, stylesheet transformations to PDF for FO, and we were familiar that you use it straightaway. Serna also has got general basic features, which just meets our requirements for editing.

Why did you choose Serna rather than a competing tool?

We were offered a complete solution with X-Hive Docato, and Syntext was a partner with X-Hive.

Did you customize Serna?

We've helped develop both Docato and Serna customization. I suppose it has given us advantage because we can change things rapidly when we are doing product development. We made our own customizations to Serna which present our authors with convenient user interface tailored specifically for our application.

There are customized dialog boxes for very specific things. For example, there is a dialog to find related resources in the CMS to create links to - that'll be one major feature. And another one would be a dialog to insert term markup in the drugs database that we have.

What do you see as the main benefit of using Serna?

Structured data is guaranteed. And also we are working with not just a single XML document, but there's XInclude that helps to build up a document that's made up of segments like tables, references, or any other important sub-document components - so that gets done on the fly as well. We reuse some of these components later. So the fact that we can edit it all - that's one advantage, and the fact that we are all using the same interface again rather than use Word documents and work with Word conversion.

What advice would you give to another company about when or why they should use Serna?

First, it's working with CMSes, and that's probably the first business benefit. And the fact that you have been a partner with X-Hive Docato is good. If someone has already chosen a CMS that you are already partnering with - that's an obvious reason to look at you first-hand.

Then, it is a WYSIWYG editor. It allows you to edit the XML that has customization. You would build lots of different types of articles, article templates.

And the support is there. You normally help with expected response which happens. You are also willing to take on board suggestions to improve the product suite. Maybe the licensing is convenient or not too weighty.

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"Aside from the affordable pricing, positive feedback from our users and good support from Syntext, Serna made our transition to XML painless for users." - Tim van Niekerk, Editor - Systems Developer, Dictionary Unit for South African English, South Africa.

Serna Enterprise XML editor has been used successfully by customers worldwide in all kinds of industries:

• Airlines
• Aerospace&Defence
• Electronics
• Health Care
• Media
• Publishing
• and others