October 2003 Columns
Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery | Single Sourcing Deconstructed | Getting Started in Single-Sourcing
Review of JoAnn T. Hackos, Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery
You’ve probably heard JoAnn Hackos explain single sourcing at an STC meeting. In this book, she pulls together enough material for a three-day workshop, and makes it easy to understand. She answers questions such as:
- Why should my department, or organization, move to single sourcing?
- How can I plan for a static or dynamic site?
- How should I develop the content?
Creating an Information Model
Hackos urges you to start by analyzing what your customers, staff members, and authors really need, creating an Information Model to serve them, defining:
- Dimensions (attributes) such as creation date, version number, language
- Information types (equivalent to a DTD or schema) such as procedure, conceptual overview, reference
- Content units (equivalent to XML elements, or OO objects) such as steps, captions, product names
She urges a top down approach (from customer needs to information types).
But she recognizes that, at times, we must also work from the bottom up
(identifying information types that we already have). The problem with bottom
feeding, she suggests, is that a lot of the old information serves no one.
Paperback: 352 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.04 x 9.19 x 7.52
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; 1st edition (February 28, 2002)
ISBN: 0471085863
Static & Dynamic
Hackos shows how you can use this Information Model to organize a static web site around user roles, workflows, subject-matter relationships, product lines, service categories, or chronology.
To Hackos, a static site is one in which the structure does not change in response to different users, or circumstances.
Sure, people keep updating stuff, archiving old content, generating new articles. But all content has to move through the human workflow, from author to editor to approver and into production. The user gets no control over the content, and there are no data feeds. The overall structure does not change very much, for months or even years.
On a dynamic site, though, you can
- Customize your content, offering subsets of information for particular communities
- Personalize so that individuals can create their own views of the information
- Provide up-to-the-moment data such as stock quotes and weather alerts.
From her title, you can tell that Hackos prefers the dynamic sites, but she understands that you may not be able to go this far unless you are in an organization that depends on these forms of interaction for its survival (through ecommerce, say, or news). But if you have an opportunity to create a dynamic site, she shows you how to build the information model.
Static & Dynamic
Whatever Information Model you create, you need to persuade upper management to kick in with a budget, and support. Hackos has honed the business case for single sourcing so that you can:
- Analyze the current costs associated with creating, maintaining, and delivering content
- Identify the benefits that single sourcing could bring to customers, partners, and staff members
- Sell the value of content management to colleagues
A Warm Style
You can tell that Hackos has explained these ideas to a lot of companies, because she has organized this complex material very clearly.
- She uses homespun analogies based on her hobbies (tracking recipes, birds, and the weather).
- She writes clearly even when describing DTDs.
- She clarifies most points with anecdotes from her vast consulting experience.
- She also provides great sample documents, just when you want them, tasty
case studies, simpatico cartoons, and even some guest lectures from experts
such as:
- Judson Slusser of Prosoft Training
- Tina Hedlund of Comtech
- Eric Freese of Isogen
- Michael Priestley and Dave Shell of IBM.
Conclusion
If you want to get a sophisticated overview of content management, look to this book for a friendly guide.
If you need a refresher on some aspect of single sourcing, or you want some ammunition for a debate on your team, skim through the guidelines and examples.
And if you need to win over a manager to single sourcing, I would say: Use
this book to present your case.
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