Often, the reason we first hear from potential new customers is because they've seen or heard about one of our award-winning e-catalog portals. They tell us they love the interactive e-catalog, especially since they're looking to reduce or eliminate print catalogs. But they also tell us they must have a way to improve their catalog revision process. We've spoken with hundreds of people in registrar's offices, publications, and marketing who are responsible for the catalog. The most common description of process we encounter goes like this:

We maintain our catalog in Word. After we get through publishing our new catalog, we make a copy of the Word document and distribute it (or portions of it) to all the departments across our campus. Sometimes we get edits back in email, or on printed pages with sticky notes. We then have to compile all those changes, make our revisions, and then send the document out again for approval. This may happen many times, and we're forced to beg, cajole, and even threaten in order to get edits back sometimes. The process is long, tedious, and results in too many errors. What we need is to be able to centralize all editing in a single system, and to provide departments with the ability to edit their own content. We also need to be able to track everything!

We hear you! And we have the solution.

Our product, Acalog™, is a best-of-breed academic catalog management system (ACMS)™ designed specifically to support a distributed process within colleges and universities for the editing, approval, and publishing of academic catalogs, for print and online.

Acalog™ was built from the ground up for academic catalog management. This is not just some "content management" system with a fancy name. We know that managing academic catalogs, getting them ready for printing, and presenting them on the Internet require unique workflows and processes which support the exacting standards associated with compliance and accreditation. We know the academic catalog is a contract between an institution and its matriculated students. We know accreditation is on the line.

We also know that relationships among the stakeholders involved in recommending, approving and making changes to academic curricula can be complex. The Acalog™ ACMS™ was designed with those complex relationships in mind.

Acalog™ provides a platform from which an institution can effectively:

Extend the editing and approval process to content "owners" in schools and colleges, departments, and administrative units. There's no longer a need to have one person be responsible for applying edits to an entire catalog of disparate content. Empower editors across campus with the ability to engage in a collaborative edit-and-approval process while you act as facilitator and assume responsibility for finalizing edits after all approvals are in place.

Centralize the Academic Catalog Management process within a single, powerfully intuitive, Web-based platform. Manage your catalogs and the curriculum change process from a higher level. When each department finalizes their edits, easily apply them to your catalog, without copying and pasting, or making any other content changes. Acalog™ provides a truly paperless environment to manage your catalog revision process. But it does even more: you will realize efficiencies in content editing that can shave weeks and even months off your current revision catalog cycle.

Publish your e-catalog instantly to the Web with one easy click, perfectly formatted and searchable, with no impact on campus IT. Make corrections to a live catalog in real-time, and deliver a highly interactive catalog for your students that includes optional social media integration, personal catalog portfolios, and even a mobile device version of your catalog, accessible from any smart phone.

We invite you to learn more about this unique product to discover how its intuitive workflows and robust features can help your organization simplify the academic catalog management process. Schedule a live demonstration today!