Talk about value for money. With four guest speakers discussing “Strategies in Content Management,” the March meeting provided enough information to fill an all-day seminar. Every Chapter member in attendance got their 10 bucks worth — and then some.
Kirk Digitale kicked things off with a look at single sourcing with the content management software, AuthorIT. Designed for software documentation, and policies and procedure document sets, AuthorIT allows you to reuse content for different audiences and map content elements across different document types, which become database objects for flexible reuse. AuthorIT seems a good introductory content management tool, offering a WYSIWYG interface and drag and drop functionality in a familiar Windows environment. The software can also output to HTML or XHTML, compiled Help, and print (via Word).
Kirk demonstrated the time and money-saving capabilities of AuthorIT using a typical translation project as an example. Starting with an estimate of $14,500 total per language for translation and formatting, Kirk showed how the software could save translation costs on exact matches by creating its own translation memory database and eliminating formatting charges for a savings of $4,100 per language. By purchasing AuthorIT’s five-language Localization Manager module at $7,000, the cost can be recouped after the first major project. For more information, contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or visit http://www.author-it.com.
The next presenters, Sue Andrews and Tara Immell from Selkirk Financial Technologies then took the floor to present an innovative “home grown” content management solution (CMS). Their company wanted to develop a new web-based .NET solution for their product, a solution that would enable them to rebrand a project for different clients in three days. (.NET is Microsoft technology, which enables the creation and use of XML-based applications, processes, and websites as services that share and combine information and functionality with each other by design, on any platform or smart device.) They also wanted a WYSIWYG interface and freedom from vendor-based software.
To get the results they wanted for minimal cost, Selkirk Financial ended up using a multi-step, multi-tool process. They used DocBook (available free on the Web) for their document type definition (DTD), an XEP transformation engine to convert XML to PDF, xmlspy to edit text files in a WYSIWYG editing environment, and a developers’ tool, ObjectBuilder DB, to move the XML granules, add chapters, and edit books. The total cost of their home-grown content-management solution? About $3500.
Dennis Borsoi followed with a demonstration of MaestroCMS, an all-in-one Web content management solution for non-technical business users. Maestro is a hosted application that allows users to focus on content, not formatting, and get their content on the Web when they need it and when they want it. One of the key advantages for companies that use MaestroCMS to manage their Web sites is that it maintains a strict separation of the site’s structure and design from its content, helping maintain a consistent branding image. It also gives the content owners complete control over content—a concept that makes sense in theory, but not always in practice. Companies can subscribe to MaestroCMS for $399 per month. You can view the results at the BCTIA site (http://www.bctia.org).
To end the meeting, Tom Magliery, an XML specialist with Blast Radius, presented XML authoring and content management using the tools, XMetaL and Documentum. Unlike xmlspy, which is more of a developer’s or techie’s tool, XMetal, the first XML editor, he explained, is more of a “word processor on steroids” for the end user.
Tom showed how XMetaL is designed for the average knowledge worker, who can view their work in plain text, formatted text, or text with XML tags. XMetaL also offers customizable styles, toolbars, macros, and scripting. Tom also demonstrated how XMetaL integrates with Documentum, an “industrial strength” content management system that also works with desktop applications like Word, Excel, and Outlook. Working with XML documents, Documentum’s features include automatic versioning and automatic chunking. For a work-weary Tuesday evening, this was almost too much information to fully process, but Tom concluded with an apt summary: “XML is cool. XMetaL is cool. Documentum is cool.” The same could be said of the whole meeting.
