Documents publishing tools
ECM (Enterprise content management ) - is a set of technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents and content related to organizational processes. ECM tools allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.
ECM employed the technologies and strategies of content management to address business process issues, such as records and auditing, knowledge sharing, personalization and standardization of content, and so on.
One thing mainline DM vendors have traditionally been good at is reference-oriented publishing. For example, Documentum has focused on regulatory compliance processes. Now XyEnterprise (long known for its SGML and other publishing tools) has released a new version of its CM product, Content@, geared specifically for editorial workteams managing product documentation. As the pace of complexity grows in the CM software space, maybe some of their competitors will also be Content@'s first customers...See the XyEnterprise Press Release
XML editor and tool vendor Arbortext has been acquired by PTC, a maker of "product lifecycle management" software. Though they paid a whopping US$190M for $40M in trailing annual revenues, the deal makes sense for PTC, who can now extend its reach from handling the information around product management to also handling product documentation, which is really where Arbortext excelled. Note that Arbortext has taken to calling itself a "dyanamic enterprise publishing" solution. This is a sexy new analyst label for a category of products once known quaintly as "compound document management," or more recently "component content management," or "structured content management," or just simply "XML content management." Sometimes I think the number of labels assigned by a software segment is inversely proportional to its market size.
One of the bigger conundrums in single-source, multichannel publishing is "roundtripping": getting changes that you make on a particular rendition of a document (usually in Quark or some other layout tool) back into the original source repository from whence that content came, to retain a sole source of the truth. Michael Gross, CTO of Data Conversion Labs, has put together a short primer on how to improve roundtripping. Not surprisingly, a lot has to do with how you structure the document once it's passed to the word processing or layout environment, where editors and designers may be tempted to get more casual in their use of elements and styles. Our favorite bit of wisdom: "Tables should be tables" (something SGMLers can relate to)...Seven Golden Rules For Making Convertible Documents
|
|
