Publish Accurate, Timely Content to Multiple Channels
Moving at the Speed of the Market
By Documentum and Arbortext
We’ve all seen the advertisements: busy workers receive critical information on cell phones and PDAs and are instantly connected to customers, suppliers or other employees. They make smart decisions based on timely, up-to-date information—and productivity and customer satisfaction skyrocket. Brilliant, you think. But what happens when the information behind those smart decisions is not quite timely, not exactly up-to-date? If the information isn’t reliable, can the decision be any better?Bottom line: The content you deliver to wireless devices and other channels must be absolutely consistent with the content you print or publish to the Web.
Automating Business-Critical Content
Every mid- to large-sized company must manage large volumes of complex information, coordinate between multiple authors, reviewers and workgroups, and translate content to multiple languages. People in every department are continuously creating some type of content: catalogs, data sheets, equity research reports, SOPs, reference books, technical publications, regulatory submissions and more.
Ensuring that all of this information is accurate and consistent—to say nothing of managing its publication and delivery—has been a major challenge. Many companies today are still using labor-intensive formatting and publishing processes for creating, managing and publishing content. Authors can spend up to 50% of their time on a document’s appearance instead of its content, and they rely on inefficient, proprietary tools that are not designed for today’s multimedia, multi-channel publishing environments.
As a result, the flow of business information is slow at best. Worse, traditional single-channel publishing tools do not allow these companies to easily reuse the content they create and do not enable the publishing of content to online and offline media.
An enterprise content management (ECM) system eases this pain by enabling people to collaboratively create, manage and deliver the content that drives business operations. An ECM system makes it possible for companies to automate traditional processes and distribute all their content in multiple languages, across internal and external systems, applications and departments. The productivity of subject matter experts is significantly enhanced by automating the publishing process, reducing the translation costs and relieving authors from responsibility for page layouts and design. And when your ECM system can leverage XML for simplifying content creation and delivery, it becomes a powerful competitive advantage.
The Power of ECM and XML
By using XML to standardize the creation, conversion, management and publishing of information, companies can automate business processes to bring products to market faster, increase customer satisfaction through delivery of higher-quality, more personalized content and cut the costs of publishing information to multiple channels. Because XML liberates content from formatting, it’s the best approach for delivering information to all types of media, including print, Web and wireless devices.With an XML-based ECM solution, authors across all departments easily create new XML content, convert existing formats such as Microsoft Word documents to XML and automatically publish XML content to multiple media. In this way, authors can use the same content for multiple outputs: content created for a PDF, for example, can be easily repurposed for Web delivery.
Once content is authored in XML, it’s saved to the ECM repository, enabling users to leverage the breadth of ECM functionality—including version control, searching, security and workflow. The ECM system then automatically processes all XML content imported to the repository—including validation, chunking, metadata population, link management, folder creation and storage—that models the native hierarchy of the XML document.
Case studies have shown that companies in diverse industries have achieved solid ROI with an XML-based ECM strategy:
- An automotive Tier I supplier reports a 90% gain in efficiency as a result of reusing their content;
- A large telecommunications company has saved $12 million by implementing electronic documents that increased author productivity, reduced production costs and eliminated warehousing; and
- An automotive manufacturer reduced their master manual publishing time by 50%. Before using XML it took 5 hours; now it only takes 2.5 hours.
Publishing to Multiple Channels
The Documentum ECM platform and Arbortext publishing software provides an end-to-end, XML-based solution for creating, converting, managing and automatically publishing information to all types of media. Built on native XML capabilities, Arbortext and Documentum jointly provides the ability to handle complex and demanding content management challenges.
Documentum, a division of EMC Corporation, provides enterprise content management solutions that enable organizations to unite teams, content and associated business processes. With a single platform, Documentum enables people to collaboratively create, manage, deliver and archive the content that drives business operations, from documents and discussions to e-mail, Web pages, records and rich media. For more information, visit Documentum on the Web at www.documentum.com
Arbortext delivers automated publishing software that enables organizations to provide more personalized, dynamic and easily searchable content for Web, mobile and print usage. Arbortext’s software is installed at over 1,300 organizations worldwide. Arbortext is a founding member and active participant in the XML Activity of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For more information, please visit www.arbortext.com