Bruce Sharpe

The most significant trend in structured content for 2010 will be the integration of authoring and reviewing. Now, people in technical publications departments are probably thinking, “It’s about time!” Elsewhere, however, the reaction may be more along the lines of “Huh?”

Understandably, the advantages of integrated authoring and reviewing will be lost on people who have trouble grasping the whole concept of structured content – documents that have been broken into meaningful component parts and tagged systematically. To them, structured content is an abstraction that makes little sense to their day-to-day work. So, let me put it in context.

Let’s say you’re working on a sales proposal or a product manual or some other document that requires the input and review of other members of your department, or maybe even another department, say legal or human resources. Or maybe it’s a simple, internal memo to team members that needs your manager’s approval. How do you create that document and solicit the input and review of other people?

Outside the tech pubs department, the document is usually created with standard word processing software and then emailed to a list of domain experts and other people who review it and email their edits back to the document author. By now the author has multiple versions of the document, each containing unique edits proposed or mandated for the revised document. The revision process, in turn, typically includes a lot of cutting and pasting, a lot of side-by-side comparisons (either on screen or in print), and a lot of judgment calls when edits from one reviewer conflict with edits from another, among other things.

In that context, integrated authoring and reviewing of structured content means “Stop emailing word processing documents to people for review”. It’s that simple. Integrated authoring and reviewing replaces a chaotic, error-prone process with a streamlined, organised approach to creating content and incor porating changes proposed by people reviewing it.

Instead of emailing a document to multiple reviewers – and creating the headache of juggling multiple versions of it – integrated authoring and reviewing gives domain experts, editors, reviewers and casual contributors a simple, convenient web-based environment to provide feedback in real time and in context.

By capturing and preserving comments across drafts, integrated authoring and reviewing eliminates miscommunication, backtracking, multiple versioning and other delays.

Some people still scratch their head when they hear “structured content.” But almost everybody pulls their hair out when they have to endure the document avalanche and related content co-ordination nightmare that comes after emailing a Word document out for review and approval. Integrated authoring and reviewing may well be the trend that brings the salvation of structured content to the organisation at large. n

Bruce Sharpe is a founding technologist at JustSystems: www.justsystems.com

bruce.sharpe@justsystems.com.bit.ly/7G9OK8

Advantages of integrated authoring and reviewing

• Faster approval cycles, faster release of content deliverables
• Parallel workflows, simultaneous collaboration
• Prevent duplicate efforts
• Simplified comment integration
• Auditable content production history
• Competitive advantage