The ability to offer customers business content in multiple formats, such as Web pages, email messages, Word documents, PDF documents, etc., is vital for meeting customers' needs and expectations in today's hyper-competitive Internet economy.
WhitePaperGetting More from Your Content with SingleSource Publishing:
Scoping out the benefits, obstacles, and aunique starting point, Altova StyleVisionŽ 2005
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Executive Summary
The ability to offer customers business content in multiple formats, such asWeb pages, email messages, Word documents, PDF documents, etc., is vitalfor meeting customers' needs and expectations in today's hyper-competitiveInternet economy. However, this task presents a significant challenge sincethe popular formats in use today are generally not interoperable. XML tech-nologies provide a framework for implementing single source publishing toproduce multiple output formats from one source of content, but this stillrequires the time-consuming development of multiple intricate stylesheets. Inaddition, many XML-based single source publishing implementations do notaddress the need to publish content stored in the relational database, whichis the prevalent data storage mechanism in today's enterprise.
Only Altova StyleVision 2005 delivers on the promise of single source pub-lishing by simultaneously generating multiple stylesheets based on XML ordatabases, providing tremendous cost and time savings.
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Introduction
In the not so distant past, the dominant medium for communicating withcustomers was the hard copy, printed page. Today, however, the pace ofbusiness is such that printed materials often become outdated as soon asthey come off the presses, and advances in communication technology haveexploded the number of publishing options available.
Contemporary methods for communicating important business informationinclude multiple media options, such as email, PDF (Portable DocumentFormat) documents, Web pages, word processor documents, and so on. Thiswide range of formats for representing business content has allowed organi-zations to customize messages to meet the needs of a variety of consumers- and at the same time it's raised the bar when it comes to consumer expec-tations. Today's savvy customers expect real-time, up-to-date informationavailable in their preferred format. With the global marketplace online at theirfingertips, customers who don't find the information they want from you in asnap will just as quickly look for it from a competitor.
Companies, therefore, face the awesome challenge of producing the samecontent, such as product descriptions, marketing materials, purchase orders,etc., in multiple formats, while at the same time ensuring accuracy and timeli-ness. Given that each medium has unique requirements and technical speci-fications, publishing this content in multiple formats often consumes vastamounts of financial and human resources.
XML technologies offer the ability to implement single source publishing byseparating content from style. This inherent ability of XML allows you topublish a single source of content into multiple formats, such as Web pages,printed documents, and so on. However, though XML technologies lay thefoundation for single source publishing, only Altova StyleVision 2005 over-comes the significant challenges required to make it a reality.
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Multiplicity of Media
In many companies, the process for tackling publishing in multiple media isbased on legacy methods for producing printed materials. However, today thenumber of steps and people involved has multiplied. Content authors gener-ally write content using their preferred word processing program and sendfiles to Web publishers, graphic designers, etc., for publication. For instance,a common chain of events takes place when a marketing representativeneeds to add content to the company Web site. He/she writes the new con-tent in a word processing application and sends the file to the Web develop-er, who then has to code the text in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language),add formatting in the form of a stylesheet, add Web-specific features such ashyperlinks and navigation information, and so on. Because the content fromthe word processor application is incompatible with Web formatting, themarketing rep and Web developer are doing much of the same work twice.
Next, the marketing rep sends that very same content to the graphic design-er, who transforms it to PDF format. T... [download for more]
