Where Source Development Meets Documentation
In traditional publishing environments, source control is minimal if it exists at all, and often follows the lock-modify-unlock model that prevents simultaneous, collaborative, content authoring. Single-sourcing environments require content management (source control) to manage the reusable content stored in topology-specific libraries (including images).
- Independent Change Tracking
- Historical Change-Tracking Reporting
- Simultaneous, Collaborative Document Authoring
- Partial-Regeneration for Fully Updated Output
- Multiple Documents Created from One Source
- Reduced Translation Costs
Source Control and Content Management
The best content management system is the one that matches your business requirements and your information model. Choosing a content management system can be easy or hard, expensive or cheap. If your analysis is sound, and your information model well developed, you can always avoid both expensive and hard.
Multiple-Document Profiling
XML technology and metadata provide a way to create multiple virtual documents from one original source document. This can be differing level of detail based on the audience (experts get more terse instructions than novices; internal staff documents get more detail than publicly visible documents) or the delivery target (PDF gets one graphic, HTML another), or anything you can think of...
Reduced Translation and Localization Costs
XML is ideal for reducing translation and localization costs. Because information authored in XML is in a structured, non-proprietary format, translators can get document fragments that show only the changes between one revision of a document and another. Translators only translate the changed parts
Integration with Product Development
In some cases, the document creation and publishing process can be integrated directly into the source development system. In other cases, the source development system may be an output target of the publishing process. With proper planning, the single-sourcing system can be integrated directly into the source development system.
Key Concepts:
multichannel (omnichannel) publishing, single-sourcing