David Heller RE: [Sigia-l] Distributed content authoring

[Richard Hill]

[Re-posted for David Heller because of HTML problems.  Dick Hill]

Ziya,

I think he is speaking of where a single "screen" of a web site is produced
by multiple authors. Each section has content that is contributed to by
separate individuals sometimes over time, to finally generate a screen. This
process usually uses templates, XSL, and other fancy stuff to make it
happen.

Since I'm a little biased about CMS, I'm just interested in listening, but I
think that's his direction.

-- dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Listera [mailto:listera at rcn.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 2:12 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Distributed content authoring


"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

Executive Director
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