The growing importance of single-sourcing.

During the past decade, document management was a solution targeted at big organizations. The leading document management software vendors were mostly US companies and their offering was designed to meet the needs of Global 5000 or Fortune 2000-like companies.Today’s organizations produce an overwhelming amount of content to describe products and services, rules and procedures. When taking a closer look at this content and documentation, you will notice that in most organizations content is created by many different people from different departments without any form of collaboration:

• Engineering creates all kinds of technical documentation
• The training department creates manuals and learning materials
• Marketing creates fact sheets, brochures and a commercial website
• Sales creates elaborated proposal documents
• Support creates a knowledge base for internal and public use

It is clear that quite a lot of the content produced by these different people may overlap significantly. As the costs for creating and maintaining this content are very high, you can understand the benefits of "writing information once and using it many times". This is exactly what “single-sourcing” is trying to accomplish.

Studies have shown that by adopting single-sourcing, you can reduce time-to-market and the associated costs by 30 to 60%. That’s why the paradigm is starting to shift from individual documents to object-oriented information where we create reusable content “chunks” or “objects”.

Other reasons why you should adopt single-sourcing:

• Multiple media: by separating the actual content from its presentation layer, it is possible to output the same content to different media like web, PDF, paper, help files, etc. This also will boost the consistency of the content throughout it’s lifecycle as changes to a specific chunk of content are being reflected in all media
• Product variants: organizations sell product families which have functionality in common that is documented as a single source; additional content is customized to reflect the product-specific aspects
• Customized content: one of the most important benefits from single-sourcing is the ability to create customized, customer-driven information. Your customer will be able to get the support information relevant for his customized product in the format he wants (web, print, mobile,…) and possibly “on-the-fly”…
• Language variants: if you need to make your content available in different languages, the savings for translations can become impressive if you combine single-sourcing with a translation memory

The practice of single-sourcing has been around for some time but supporting standards (XML/XSL) and technology platforms (document/XML component management systems) only started to mature the last couple of years. Combine this with dropping software prices and you will understand why companies are starting a single-source project.

But the main challenge for implementing single-sourcing is change management. Your organization - across departments - will need to start creating and maintaining content in a different way than it used to. You will need to set-up well-defined processes and define rules for all parts of the processes.

And should you apply single-sourcing for ALL of your content? No! Content suitable for single sourcing typically:

• Is off relatively high value
• Is updated from time to time
• Is destined for a few different output formats
• Has a quite long lifecycle

Amplexor organises a free seminar on this topic on September 15th, 2005 at 14.00h.

Want to read more about Single-Sourcing? Check the STC’s Special Interest Group website on this subject: http://www.stcsig.org/ss/

Amplexor Webwatch - Useful ECM resources on the Web

Blogs and wikis in your organization?

People are often wondering if blogs or wikis are a possible alternative to full blown content management solutions. In The Gilbane Report, Lauren Wood is giving a nice overview of what Blogs and Wikis really are and how and when to use them in an organizational environment. (Source: Gilbane)

Intranets for decentralized organizations

Quite a lot of organizations have a central head office and a number of local branches (sales offices, bank branches, production plants,....). An Intranet should be an ideal way to overcome the information sharing/dessimination problem that these organisations encounter. In practice however, this remote staff seems the hardest to reach.
In the article below, James Robertson discusses this paradox and provides some practical approaches to overcome the problem.
(Source: Steptwo by James Robertson)

Multilingual Search

Monolingual search is relatively straightforward, but things get much more complex when you start offering search options in more than one language. Given that the Web is increasingly multilingual, the need for robust search options in a wide variety of languages is growing. But in a typical Belgian corporate environment, multilingual search within the enterprise is also a hot topic. Apart from mono- and multilingual search, one could also have the need for cross-lingual search.
(Source: Econtent Magazine)

Unofficial Intranet sites in your organization?

Every Intranet manager knows them: unofficial intranet sites which have grown apart from the official corporate Intranet. Paul Chin gives an overview of the causes, the consequences and the cures for these renegade intranets.
(Source: Intranet Journal by Paul Chin)

Amplexor News and Partnerships

RaboDirect gets off to a flying start thanks to collaboration with 3 Belgian partners.

Thanks to RaboDirect, Irish customers will be able to open a savings account, buy investment funds and, in time, other financial products – all online. The bank called on 3 Belgian partners to develop RaboDirect.
Amplexor is the partner of choice for Enterprise Content Management system integration. Its experience of Tridion software, an intelligent enterprise content management product, was the determining factor behind Rabobank’s choice.