January Meeting Summary
by Drew Abas

On a cold winter evening with a smidgen of snow on the ground, the chapter convened at Dewey's Pizza in Harpers Station in Symmes Township. This was definitely a good call: a selection of four great-tasting pizzas, and two salads were perfect. Well done, event coordinators!

After a bit of socializing, networking, and dinner, the chapter listened to a single-sourcing presentation by representatives from Arbortext: Patrick Doyle, District Sales Manager, and Michael Muha, Senior Sales Applications Engineer.
The presentation centered upon how Arbortext has advanced the concept of single sourcing using XML as its foundation.

Patrick argued that all companies, especially larger ones, in addition to their primary mission, are also publishing companies. For example, one slide in his PowerPoint presentation noted that Aventis Pharmaceuticals generated well over 100,000 pages of documentation annually. The ability to manage such a volume of information hinges on a company's use of single sourcing technology. Although Patrick stated statistics that indicated technical writers spend as much as 30-60% of their time manipulating the look and feel of content, in other such presentations, audience members estimated they spend upwards of 80% of their time performing this task. Strategic implementation of single sourcing technology, would eliminate this task all together, freeing up this time and increasing productivity.

The concept of single sourcing suggests the same content can be used in many different documents across many different output formats such as internet, intranet, online manuals, PDAs, .pdf files, stand alone CD-ROM as well as the more traditional hard copy. The key is that once it is entered as data, it can then be made available for delivery in any format without any additional manual intervention. In other words, multiple documents 'point' to the desired 'chunk' of content. If this same chunk is edited in its central location, the same revisions would then appear in all documents pointing to the same chunk. There would be no need to perform the administrative task of copying and pasting the same revision in multiple documents which use the same chunk of information.

After Patrick completed a presentation of the concept of single sourcing and a high-level discussion of Arbortext's implementation of this concept in its various applications, Mike Muha presented several of Arbortext's single sourcing applications. Arbortext employs several different applications to achieve single sourcing depending on the task.

'Epic Editor' is at the heart of this approach. Content and styles are entered here and saved to the central repository. But whereas the traditional approach to a style dictates its appearance based on font, size and other textual features, style in Arbortext's single sourcing is based on the type of information to be communicated. This allows the ability to manipulate presentation of information to meet the needs of different output types.

For example, a title style as used in MS Word would traditionally indicate the font and size in which it is to appear. However, this concept constricts its usage across different output types. Rather than enforce the same font and size across all output types, the title style can be set for a given output type so that any title will have the same look and feel as any other title within the same output type, but can vary across different output types. The title style with Times New Roman, 14 point bold may be an appropriate for a white paper, but if the same content is to be used in promotional material, that same title might need to appear as Trebuchet, italic, underline and 20 point: same content, different output appearance, but with no further manual intervention.

Mike Muha demonstrated this as he entered content into Epic Editor, saved it to a central repository server on his laptop, then opened up a document which differed in appearance compared to the style in his point-of-entry application, but still displayed the exact same content.

'E3' is a web-based application which can be used to create virtual manuals by pulling desired content from the central repository and integrating desired styles to meet output needs. Using Dodge auto engines as an example, Mike specified the desired content chunks maintained in the central repository which would make up his engine manual. Upon executing the manual generation command, content was immediately accessible via hyperlinks based on the title of the various chunks of content selected to be part of the manual. To capture revisions made in content maintained in the central repository, preferences can be set when to re-generate such a manual accessing revised content in the central repository.

Depending on audience need the concept of 'profiling' can employed to include or suppress various content for such manuals. As an example, all content identified for use by novice employees can be included in their manuals, while more experienced employees would receive the 'expert' version of the same manual.

Another example was a jet engine manual which would include content addressing repair needs in desert conditions, such as what might be needed by the Israeli Air Force while suppressing such content for an air force which does not operate in such conditions. Rather than create two different stand-alone manuals which would require duplicate revisions should the need arise, by integrating the concepts of single sourcing and profiling, only one manual would be maintained in the central repository and generated appropriately to include or not include the section on desert conditions to meet specific customer needs.

'Contributor' is another application which allows subject matter experts (SMEs) to enter content via a web-based GUI. Little training is needed here and is very appropriate for nontechnical writer employees to capture information and make available to others via the central repository.

Integration of all these Arbortext applications comprises an end-to-end single sourcing solution.

Though time restricted Patrick's and Mike's presentation, chapter members came away with a heightened understanding of the current status of single sourcing in our industry…and if they hung around long enough, some left over pizza, as well.