Without a suitable solution, team members often end up replicating a document which already exists in the system, simply because they can’t locate it, they don’t know it already exists, or they just need to use a part of it again. Afterwards this content is the often rendered obsolete or disconnected from the source data and thus inconsistent. This can not only lead to huge inefficiencies but also leave the company exposed to risks and violations of compliance standards.
So how can we make this process more intuitive and simpler to navigate? To date, the technology that provided these capabilities was complex and not intuitive for users, allowing only highly technically trained users to work with them – but we are now in a world where such efficiencies of Structured Content Authoring / Component Based Authoring can be managed with tools that are very familiar to end users, allowing them to focus on the task of creating the content rather than learning complicated tools.
Component Based Authoring
CARA provides the ability to assemble a series of components which are in a familiar format (Word or other Office formats) and concatenate the assembly into a single document for editing in context, then breaking out the components when saved back to CARA, ensuring that components which are used in other assemblies can have the latest changes reflected in those assemblies as well. – authors of other assemblies will have notifications and be able to select whether or not to take the latest versions of components.
Structured Content Authoring
This involves more granular content, perhaps even created from individual pieces of data (product name, project number and so on) – using the CARA integration with FontoXML we are able to provide the easy-to-use Fonto interface embedded in CARA to work directly with such content, which again will get updates as the source data changes.
Traceability
The use of components or data in multiple contents / assemblies is clearly visible in CARA using the traceability and visualisation options, thus allowing users to assess the impact of any changes across all corporate content where it is used.
If you are interested in finding out more, sign up for our joint partner webinar : Structured Content Authoring with Generis and Fonto.[