October 2003 Columns

Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery | Single Sourcing Deconstructed | Getting Started in Single-Sourcing

Single-Sourcing Deconstructed

By Phil Kahn (www.digitaljive.com)

Several speakers at recent STC meetings have touched upon the benefits of single-sourcing. At the March meeting of the STC Toronto chapter three speakers delivered an excellent primer on this topic. The three are all members of the recently formed STC Toronto Single-Sourcing SIG, and they shared their hands-on experience with the audience.

Moderator Andrew Brooke began with a plea to stop the insanity! Storing the same information in multiple places leads to increased maintenance time and costs, and also results in variances where none should exist. The solution is single-sourcing. Andrew then introduced Rob Hanna (rob.hanna@ascan.ca), to talk about planning a single-source document.

Rob is a senior technical communicator with extensive single-sourcing experience; he owns ASCan Enterprises, a new media development company. He defined single-sourcing as “any process used to systematically create information products from a single defined source of information.” Or for a more concise definition, he quoted STC member and recent speaker Ann Rockley, “Write information once, use it many times.” Rob spoke about the benefits of single-sourcing, again emphasizing the reduced maintenance costs and improved consistency and quality. However, because single-sourcing requires significant planning, not all documents can benefit from this approach. Rob posed several questions to consider when deciding whether or not to use single-sourcing for a document. Is this a valuable document, perhaps one tied to a product? Will this document require updating? Will this document have a long life span? Will parts of this document be used elsewhere? If the answer to any of these questions is “Yes”, then single-sourcing may be a good option.

Rob then selected a familiar document as an example of one that could benefit from single-sourcing; a résumé. To begin, we need to set objectives for the document. For a Body, we will want the document to be customized for different jobs and for different audiences; placement agencies, hiring companies, and Body databases for example. We also need it to be outputted in multiple formats; paper, PDF, Web and WinHelp. Once our objectives are set, we need to create a single, definitive source of information. In this case an existing Body may be used, or it may be necessary to combine multiple existing Bodys. Finally a structure has to be decided upon; Bodys are typically linear documents but for single-sourcing we need a modular structure that can be easily reorganized. The modules will contain different sets of information; skills, education, profile and anything else that needs to be included.

With the planning of the document complete, Rob introduced Michelle Marques (msmarques@rogers.com), a senior technical writer with Baxter Corporation. Michelle showed how to create the Body using Adobe FrameMaker. Using FrameMaker, we can attach tags to all of the pieces of information in a document. Conditional text can then be used to determine whether or not these pieces of information will appear. These conditions could pertain to different jobs or target audiences; certain pieces of information will only appear when applying for certain types of job, for example. While FrameMaker is not a database and therefore has some limitations, Michelle showed how to use content items to take control over not just the content of the document but also the order in which the information is presented. Finally, she spoke about how FrameMaker makes it easy to output to paper, PDF, the Web or WinHelp using different features and plugins.

The final speaker was Byron Hills (byron.hills@verextech.com), a senior STC member with over 12 years authoring experience. Byron demonstrated how to single-source using an application familiar to most people: Microsoft Word. Word is more powerful than most people think and Byron highlighted some features that make single-sourcing in Word possible: main and subdocuments, mail merge, database links, search and replace, templates and others. Byron then demonstrated how variable fields and ‘If...Then’ statements could be used to achieve the same results that conditional text makes possible in FrameMaker.

After Byron concluded, the panel took some questions from the audience. When one audience member challenged Rob Hanna by asking what was wrong with just copying and pasting, Rob replied that there was nothing wrong with it, and went on to express his view that as long as you follow a system, even this qualifies as single-sourcing. This was an excellent point to end on as it deconstructed single-sourcing into a simple, unintimidating process that most of us use already. If you are interested in more details, the panel has made the PowerPoint presentation available on the STC Web site: http://www.stctoronto.org/pdf/presentations/ssrcSIGToronto_03-03-11.zip.

For more information about single-sourcing your Body, read Milan Davidovic's article reprinted from the  February STC Toronto Newsletter, and found at: http://www.stcsig.org/ss/articles102003/GettingStartedinSingle-Sourcing.htm. To learn more about the STC Toronto Single-Sourcing SIG, visit their Website at: http://www.stctoronto.org/sigs.
 

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