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Authoring options

Following on from my work with the government department yesterday, I've just sent through my summary of the day, and my recommendations.

Looking at the options for authoring, these were my high-level recommendations:

• Develop a range of authoring tools, matched to the specific needs of the content, audience and authors.
• No single authoring tool will meet all needs, without considerably compromising the quality and maintainability of the intraweb.
• A long list of potential document types have already been identified. Examine each of these in turn, against the following criteria:

  nature of the content
  (length; degree of structure; formatting and layout needs; etc)

  usage
  (who are the readers; how will it be searched; publishing formats; etc)

  authors
  (number of authors; level of skill; writing ability; etc)

• When the criteria have been identified for each document type, determine an appropriate authoring tool.
• Follow these general guidelines:

  Capture only as much structure as will be needed.

  The greater the number of authors, the simpler the authoring tool.

  Ensure the authoring environments are in sync with the information architecture of the site.

• Looking at some of the common content types, the following recommendations can be made:

  News, FAQs --- develop a simple online form-based authoring tool, with limited (if any) formatting capability.

  Most web pages --- custom develop a more powerful form-based authoring tool, incorporating a ‘rich’ editing environment that supports paragraph styles, and limited formatting.

  Complex web pages --- it may be simplest to directly create the HTML for these.

  Business documents (agenda, minutes, etc) --- implement either an import facility, or store the Word documents directly in an online repository.

  Complex manuals (policies & procedures, etc) --- use an XML editor (such as XMetal) to capture the full structure of the content.

Hmm, I sense the beginning of another whitepaper here. What are your thoughts on these recommendations?

Posted by jamesr on July 18, 2002 03:45 PM
Categories: Content management

Comments

Sounds like a set of very useful guidelines

Posted by: Donna Maurer on July 18, 2002 11:08 PM

The type of feedback permitted / desired and the workflow around each document seems to be missing. Often these are as important as the formatting and may be responsible for a good part of the 'final' content.

A key distinction here is the degree of collaborative writing and the 'edit' chain that follows.

Some documents become 'boundary objects' which carry meaning between groups, functional silos and communties. Here the ability to change, append and critique is a key document feature.

Posted by: Denham on July 18, 2002 11:33 PM

On the whole, I would consider workflow to be independent of the authoring environment. That is, a very simple authoring tool may need complex workflow, or vice-versa.

I take you point, though, about the issue of collaborative authoring. I see this an important, but very tricky issue.

Indeed, I would ask: are there any good collaborative authoring environments on the market at the moment? (And I don't mean nifty workflows, or threaded discussion groups.)

Posted by: James Robertson on July 20, 2002 07:28 PM

Lots of neat stuff happening in Wiki's - take a tour and see for yourself:

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?TourBusStop

Here is the tour stop at my KmWiki:

http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?TourBusStop

Posted by: Denham on July 21, 2002 03:20 AM