Automated Publishing is More Than ECM
What defines a formal publishing process? When should an organization consider not only adopting ECM but also adopting an automated approach to publishing? You should consider evaluating the benefits of replacing traditional desktop publishing or word processing software if your content has one or more of the following characteristics:
- Multichannel delivery—When you have to deliver content in print, on the Web, in online help, to wireless devices, or to additional formats and media types, traditional publishing software requires you to assign someone to manually format your content for each different media type.
- Large volume—The more content you create, the more costly the use of traditional publishing software (where an author can spend as much as half the time formatting—a waste of time and money).
- Repeatable processes—The more frequently you create and publish documents of a particular type, such as datasheets, technical manuals or regulatory submissions, the more consistent the documents should be in style and structure.
- Customized content—Consumers of information increasingly expect information to be tailored to meet their needs. They want all the content that is relevant without any information that does not apply. Using traditional publishing software to produce tailored publications is too costly and time-consuming to be practical on a medium or large scale.
- Dynamic content—If portions of the content change frequently (such as prices or availability), or if the content is assembled on demand based on individual consumer requests, traditional publishing software contains little or no support for such requirements.
- Interactive Content—The Web—and to varying degrees other electronic delivery media—are great at providing an interactive experience to the consumer. Features such as advanced navigations aids, hyperlinks and dynamically showing or hiding content engage the consumer and provide a faster, more satisfying experience. However, when you convert a word processing or desktop publishing document to a Web-friendly format, you must manually add these features. Web usability experts have pointed out that PDF documents usually offer an inferior interactive user experience and that your customers vastly prefer HTML, the Web standard for information delivery.
ECM alone does not address the issue of how your organization creates the majority of your content and only partially addresses the need to automate and improve the content publishing process.
But I Thought My ECM Vendor Provided it All
Many ECM vendors promote their products as "solving the content problem," so it's understandable that many people believe that ECM provides all of the technology they need. Moreover, many ECM systems provide content creation and dynamic publishing capabilities, which make such systems look, at first glance, like complete solutions.
For example, some ECM systems provide Web-based forms for controlled content creation and some include in-place editing of HTML pages in a browser. These applications, while useful for some types of content, cannot solve the needs of publishing to a wide variety of formats and are poor at handling longer, more complex content.
More advanced ECM systems provide some features for automated publishing such as batch conversion of word processing documents to HTML or PDF. This capability can be useful as a quick—but limited—way of getting your documents distributed electronically. But this approach does not easily or automatically provide Web output that is customized, dynamic and interactive.
Why not? Because the automated process of converting word processing documents to HTML or PDF is, by necessity, unsophisticated. For example, an ECM system can automatically publish word processing files to the Web by using the word processor's "Save as HTML" capability. The resulting HTML document looks very much like the original word processing document, but the process does nothing to enhance the content to take advantage of interactive Web features. Such enhancements could include automatically breaking up long documents into shorter Web pages, providing hyperlinked tables of contents and indexes and automatically enhancing part numbers in the document to become hyperlinks targeted at an e-commerce site to allow easy purchasing.
Why Desktop Apps Fall Short
Companies store their financial information in databases because a database provides security, data verification and a single source from which a variety of reports can be automatically generated. This enables companies to ensure their financial information is always accurate, up-to-date and consistent wherever it is used.
Using desktop publishing software to manage your organization's intellectual content is like implementing a financial reporting application using spreadsheet files stored on individual users' desktops. Without constraining data entry through input forms that interactively guide the user and prevent errors, the data input into this financial system would require manual interpretation and clean-up every time you changed or added data. If each user could modify the spreadsheets as they see fit, the data embedded in those spreadsheets would quickly become impossible to automate, difficult to use and inflexible to meet new needs. Without the ability to automate calculations and report generation, the system would collapse.
Arbortext is the leading provider of Enterprise Publishing Software that enables organizations to create and automatically publish large amounts of information, such as technical manuals, pharmaceutical product information, legal information and software documentation. Enterprises around the world use our software to publish in multiple languages to multiple audiences in multiple hardcopy and electronic output formats. Arbortext's software is installed at over 1,700 organizations worldwide. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, Arbortext has offices around the world. For more information, please visit Arbortext