Connecting a content planning system to a production environment sounds straightforward on paper. In practice, it involves a series of decisions that either hold up at scale or quietly unravel under the pressure of daily operations. 

Erdee Media Groep built that connection between Kordiam and WoodWing Studio, running story ideas through to published content across both print and digital channels. What made it work wasn't just the integration itself, but how it was approached from the start. 

Gert Blekkenhorst, Senior Business Process Consultant at WoodWing and lead consultant on the Erdee project, walked through exactly how that happened. His account is worth unpacking for anyone facing the same challenge. 

Start With a Principle, Not a Feature List 

Before any technical work began, Gert's team had to answer a more fundamental question: where does planning live, and what authority does it have over production? 

WoodWing Studio is a strong production environment, but it is not a planning tool. Kordiam was already the established planning system at Erdee. Introducing a second system without a clear ownership model could lead to conflicting data, duplicated effort, or workflows that nobody had agreed to maintain. 

The decision was made that Kordiam would remain the leading system for planning, and the guiding principle would be planning is production. Everything in production had to be driven by planning. 

That principle also came with an important nuance that not every story in Kordiam should immediately trigger production work. Ideas and early-stage stories are part of editorial planning but are not yet commitments. The integration was designed to respect that distinction wherein only stories that have received an editorial go-ahead create an article in WoodWing Studio. 

Aligning the Data Models Before Connecting the Systems 

Once the ownership principle was established, the next step was making sure the two systems could actually speak the same language which entailed mapping Kordiam's content structures to WoodWing's before connecting them. 

This meant defining how Kordiam's platform structure corresponded to WoodWing's structure and publication hierarchy, how deadlines translated across systems, and how metadata entered during planning — author, article type, scheduled date — would populate the correct fields in Studio. It also meant mapping workflow statuses like a story moving to a new stage in Kordiam needed to translate correctly into the right routing and assignment in WoodWing. 

This alignment work is the foundation of the integration, not a refinement of it. Without a shared understanding of what data means in each system, there is nothing reliable to connect. 

Event-Driven Integration: Why Real-Time Sync Matters 

With the data model aligned, the team evaluated how to connect the two systems technically. The team ultimately chose Kordiam's message queue mechanism to build an event-driven integration. 

The reason was reliability and decoupling. An event-driven approach means the systems respond to planning changes in real time, but neither system is directly dependent on the other being available at any given moment. Events are queued and processed so that nothing is lost if one system is briefly unavailable, and the two systems remain independent enough to function without continuous synchronization. 

In practice, the integration works like this, when a story in Kordiam reaches the approved-for-publication status, an event is triggered. That event creates or updates the corresponding objects in WoodWing Studio, such as the article, its workflow status, and its assigned users. From that point on, updates in planning continue to flow through automatically. The journalist does not create anything in Studio manually, the data is already there when they arrive. 

The Outcome: One Workflow, One Source of Truth 

The result at Erdee Media Groep is a publishing operation where a newsroom of around 200 people, producing roughly 100 stories a day across print and digital, works from a single, coherent workflow. 

Gert summarised the broader lesson from the project in a way that applies well beyond this specific implementation: 

"Successful integration is not just about connecting these systems. It's also about making clear decisions about ownership and workflow and aligning the underlying models and then implementing that in a way people can actually work with it." 

— Gert Blekkenhorst, Senior Business Process Consultant, WoodWing 

When planning drives production, not the other way around, the result is a workflow that is both predictable and maintainable. That is what the 'planning is production' principle delivers in practice 

Thinking about connecting Kordiam to your production system? Explore our integration options or speak with our team about your setup.