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