[Sigia-l] Distributed content authoring

[Listera]

"Gene Smith" wrote:

> * Does anyone work in an environment where distributed authoring is
> successful?

Forgive my buzzword detection apparatus acting up, again, but what exactly
do you mean by "distributed authoring"?

Multiple authors editing the same document? Serially? Simultaneously?
Multiple authors saving to a central archive? Multiple archives? One
physical file per document? Documents made up of multiple parts? Composited
in real-time? Multiple authors having access to a file or its multiple
document parts? Or any permutations thereof? Etc.

These pose all very different problems and thus there are many different
solutions. I will suggest two that many many overlook. The .NET versions of
the MS Office will essentially allow multiple site authoring and retrieval
from within the constituent apps in, hopefully, a more smooth and integrated
way. If you can wait and/or use the Office, there's that possibility.

Also, if you are looking for something that costs practically nothing, try
the PDF route. Have authors use *whatever* app they want on any platform and
save their output as PDF to either a central archive or to a local one. Get
a search engine to index all the PDFs and present that in a nice GUI to the
user.

Now these are for general purpose documents. Doing this within the
navigation, GUI and retrieval context of an existing website is, needless to
say, a bit more involved :-)

Best,

Ziya