Five Ways to Leverage Content
on the Web with
Automated Web Publishing
WHITE PAPER
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The volume and range of information being published on intranet, extranet and Internet
websites continues to grow at a frenetic pace. In light of this, acknowledged content
management problems and web publishing bottlenecks have been elevated from troublesome
inefficiencies to mission-critical challenges. This is true for both commercial businesses and
government organizations.
At a high level, web content management issues include:
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Effectively controlling the creation and approval of content to be published;
Publishing information to websites in a timely and efficient manner;
Ensuring that published information is always up to date and accurate; and
Leveraging content in source documents.
Automated web publishing software is often the ideal solution for addressing these
challenges in an integrated and cost-effective manner. This software automatically translates
documents created in a variety of formats—including standard office applications, graphics
software or technical software such as AutoCAD—into well-formed HTML-formatted web
pages, based on predefined templates. These pages can then be automatically published to
different types of websites on any preset schedule—weekly, daily, even hourly. This
eliminates the expense and delay of manually converting content into web pages and ensures
that web content is kept accurate and up to date.
This software is particularly useful to organizations that have substantial value contained in
standard business content and offline document formats not originally created for the web,
such as policies and procedures, manuals, technical documentation, meeting minutes,
ordinances, legislation and dozens of other types of information. The value of this
information could be significantly enhanced if a cost-effective and timely mechanism were
available to convert it to HTML and publish it to websites, providing users with easy
accessibility and simple navigation.
The five key benefits of automated web publishing are:
1. Leveraging the value of content you already have by enabling you to easily and
automatically publish it to websites;
2. Enabling authors to continue creating content using familiar tools, and eliminating
the need for web specialists to convert content to web formats and post it to
websites;
3. Efficiently publishing long documents to websites—not as PDF files or other
attachments, but as fully formatted and navigable web pages;
4. Reusing a single piece of content in multiple formats; and
5. Removing bottlenecks in maintaining web content.
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Five Ways to Leverage Content on the Web with Automated Web Publishing
LEVERAGING THE VALUE OF EXISTING CONTENT
Businesses and government organizations spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually
generating and preserving information. For many organizations, information is their single
most important asset. This information generally falls into two types: structured data, or
small discrete elements of information entered into specific fields; and unstructured data, or
documents that may be hundreds of (printed) pages in length and may consist of anything
from simple text files to complex documents that include formatted text, tables,
headers/footers, lists, graphics, and/or OLE objects.
The value of much of this content can be enhanced by extending access to it—via intranets,
extranets, and the Internet—to staff, partner organizations, vendors, nonprofits, the media
and constituents. Traditionally, this has meant editing the information and then converting it
from source formats into HTML or XML by specially trained personnel, or by requiring
content creators to learn HTML or XML in addition to the standard business applications
they used to create the original content.
When a significant amount of content is involved, requiring web experts or knowledge
workers to spend time manually converting critical content into a format suitable for the
web is an extremely inefficient use of resources and can significantly delay posting
information to websites. With an automated web publishing solution, information can be
created once, maintained securely in its original format, automatically converted into web
formats and posted to websites on virtually any schedule.
A key component of automated web publishing systems is the use of preconfigured
translation templates that automatically convert new or existing source content to HTML
(or XML). These templates determine the look and feel of documents when they are
converted to web pages.
With automated web publishing, content creators can continue to produce documents using
familiar office or technical applications. When a document is ready to be posted to a
website, the author simply saves it locally or to a specified folder on a network drive or into
a content management system (subject to all the security rules and workflow requirements
configured into that system). The automated web publishing software monitors designated
folders and translates any new or revised documents into web format on a preset schedule.
Templates can publish the same content into multiple output formats for printing or
presenting with a different appearance on different websites.
The business benefits of automated web publishing are compelling. Technology such as
Transit Solutions from Avantstar enables organizations to quickly prototype, create, and
update professional-looking websites, using content from any number of information
repositories, such as shared network drives and content management systems.
For many organizations, the key benefit of an automated web publishing system such as
Transit Solutions is the ability to efficiently publish long documents—such as policies and
procedures manuals and documentation, which can run to hundreds of pages—without the
need to break down these documents into smaller sections and manually code them for
websites. Another important feature is the ability to convert and publish multiple file types.
Some automated web publishing solutions convert only standard Microsoft Office
applications, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. But many organizations have important
content contained in many other file types, such as Microsoft Project and Visio, Corel
WordPerfect or OpenOffice. Transit Solutions has been designed to automatically convert
and publish 250 file types. It also maintains links within documents, not just between them. It
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Five Ways to Leverage Content on the Web with Automated Web Publishing
can publish content on a preset schedule, keeping web content synchronized with original
source documents with no manual effort.
The result is the unprecedented ability to manage and control large, dynamic collections of
web content that may change frequently and which require strict control over quality and
timeliness. Both overall web costs and the time required to update web-based content are
dramatically reduced. Website contributions can also be widely decentralized, while the
organization simultaneously gains greater web control and accountability. For any
organization with a significant amount of online content, this can mean savings of hundreds
of thousands of dollars per year, as well as better control over the timeliness and accuracy
of web updates.
Transit Solutions analyzes the structure of standard documents, then converts this information to
web pages that reflect the intelligence, behavior, look and feel you designate.
LET AUTHORS CREATE CONTENT USING FAMILIAR TOOLS, TO MINIMIZE TRAINING
REQUIREMENTS AND MAXIMIZE PRODUCTIVITY
The productivity of knowledge workers is greatly increased when content contributors can
stay in their familiar, office-productivity-tool environment. With automated template-based
web publishing, authors can create and update content using their preferred applications.
Translation templates then do the work of translating content into well-designed web
publications. There is no training on new tools required, and content can be used in multiple
places, such as an extranet, intranet, Internet, or printed publications. However, a limiting
factor for many automated web publishing solutions is the number of file types that can be
translated. Transit Solutions addresses this need by translating a wide range of office,
graphics, and technical application file types, making it easy to leverage the value of content
created in both current and legacy file formats.
The key to template-based publishing is that source content is separated from formatting.
Automated web publishing systems such as Transit Solutions first analyze source documents,
including formatting (font size, bold, italic, underline, uppercase, etc.) and paragraph and
character styles (first-level heading, body text, caption, footer, etc.). These formatting
elements are then mapped to elements that control the translation. Customizable translation
templates control the source document’s translation to HTML, specifying the web page’s
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Five Ways to Leverage Content on the Web with Automated Web Publishing
layout, appearance and navigation characteristics. Once a library of approved templates is
established, creating a web page is a simple matter of importing a source object and
associating a template with it.
Source content with formal styles makes template design a straightforward process. In the
case of Transit Solutions, the technology is sophisticated enough to analyze and map content
that has been manually formatted with bold, italic, font size, and other settings. The
Abstraction feature in Transit Solutions automatically analyzes content and determines the
major components, such as the title, the first-level heading and body text. Once this has
been determined, templates convert the print-ready content into useful web pages. This
process includes adding behaviors and creating the navigation system. The template also adds
reference pages and gives the site a professional appearance. The software then displays a
preview of the web page based on template settings.
With templates, content from a single source can be published in different web formats. Templates
allow different source objects to be published as consistent web content.
The template technology in systems such as Transit Solutions can also be used to add special
graphics, custom HTML tags, custom XML tags, JavaScript, ActiveX controls or special text
to each document converted for the web. The program can customize templates to omit
selected source text. Confidential text can be published by some templates, such as those
for intranet usage, but not by others, i.e., to an extranet or Internet website.
Templates are also used to define the navigation and structure of reference pages in web
publications. These characteristics are generated automatically when source objects are
translated into web publications. Transit Solutions can designate certain elements to be
included in reference pages for the web publication, such as tables of content, keyword
indexes, lists of figures, abstracts and/or list of tables. For example, all of the first-level
heading style elements in source content might be included in the table of contents for that
online document, with each table of contents listing hyperlinked to the corresponding web
page.
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Five Ways to Leverage Content on the Web with Automated Web Publishing
EFFICIENTLY PUBLISH LONG DOCUMENTS TO WEBSITES
Content written directly for websites usually consists of short chunks of information that are
easily navigated. Content not written for websites can often be just the opposite–long,
complex documents that easily run into dozens or hundreds of pages. These documents can
include product and policy manuals, operating procedures, technical documentation,
ordinances, meeting minutes, and the results of government agency and legislative
procedures. Simply translating this longer content into web formats produces endlessly
scrolling pages that quickly tax the patience of website visitors, making it impractical to rely
on many automated web publishing solutions, which are designed to automate the
translation of short, “blog-like” documents. A 200-page policy manual may be very
appropriate as a printed publication, for example, but certainly not as a single web page
containing 200 pages’ worth of scrolling content.
An alternative is to attach this content to websites as PDF files, but this does not provide
many of the advantages of website access and presentation of information, including the
ability to quickly load and navigate among different pages and documents.
An automated web publishing solution like Transit Solutions, however, is ideal for
automatically publishing and updating long documents on websites, due to features like the
ability to split long source objects at every occurrence of a specified element, such as a
second-level heading. The same elements can also be used to automatically create tables of
content, keyword indexes, lists of figures, abstracts and/or list of tables. This produces a web
publication with a number of shorter, fast-loading, easy-to-navigate, linked web pages rather
than long, scrolling pages or a single, slow-loading document.
REUSE CONTENT IN MULTIPLE WEBSITES AND OUTPUT FORMATS
Once content is approved for publication, there must be an efficient means of publishing it to
one or more websites. It may need to be formatted for printing as well. Re-creating the
content using HTML-authoring tools is one option, but this is an inefficient approach. With
the increasing volume of content being published to websites, IT and web specialists have
become overloaded with time-consuming coding work. An efficient means of publishing
content to websites must eliminate this bottleneck while addressing the unique formatting
requirements of the web. Publishing to the web has other unique formatting requirements as
well, including the incorporation of linking and navigation icons.
Automated web publishing solutions such as Transit Solutions meet these challenges by
adhering to a web publishing model wherein content is maintained in a single source object.
Regardless of where information is published (print, intranet, extranet or Internet), the
source object remains the sole definitive document. In this single-source publishing model,
content is authored only once, using familiar office, graphics or technical applications. All
subsequent revisions are made to the same source document, using the software that was
used to create it. When the object is approved for web publication, Transit Solutions
accurately translates it and automatically retranslates it whenever the source object is
revised.
REMOVE BOTTLENECKS IN MAINTAINING WEB CONTENT
Efficiency results from not just streamlining the process of creating, approving and publishing
web content, but also from updating online content—for some organizations, on a daily
basis. Automated web publishing systems automate this web maintenance challenge by
updating web publications under template control according to a preset schedule. If
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Five Ways to Leverage Content on the Web with Automated Web Publishing
documents change frequently, Transit Solutions can be configured to translate the last saved
version of these documents daily, hourly or even every few minutes.
Automated web publishing systems such as Transit Solutions can also be integrated with
content management systems to provide event-triggered web publishing. In this case, the
content management system, which tracks and controls documents in a content
management repository, tells Transit Solutions to translate and publish a document every
time the document has changed or whenever source content has been added or removed.
ORGANIZATIONS USING AUTOMATED WEB PUBLISHING
United Clinical Laboratories
United Clinical Labs uses Transit Solutions to automate online publishing of 5,000 Microsoft
Word files that contain policies and procedures for analytical and testing documentation and
certification paperwork. Hundreds of contributors drive initial documentation and change
approximately 400 pages every day, without anyone having to perform time-consuming
HTML translation. Three to four times a day, Transit Solutions automatically posts changes.
In addition to making documentation updates more timely and efficient, Transit Solutions
provides considerable savings on printing and postage—and reduces environmental
impacts—by eliminating the need to mail updated publications each month.
Orange County (California) Social Services
Orange Country Social Services uses Transit Solutions to automate online publishing for 41
field manuals. Staff make daily changes, many based on new and evolving federal mandates, in
familiar office applications; Transit Solutions then automatically publishes the updates across
six intranet sites so that the latest policies and procedures are available to every social
worker at any time, from any location. The county has saved millions of dollars in labor and
printing costs, reduced its environmental impact, and improved productivity, while more
effectively keeping staff up to date with the most-current information.
National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor uses Transit Solutions to automate online publishing of
approximately 2,200 Microsoft Word and Excel documents that contain its wafer-processing
work instructions. Transit Solutions’ navigation features make it fast and easy to locate
desired sections of any document. Instead of relying on memory or having to scroll through
long documents—sometimes up to 100 pages—users simply click the link in the table of
contents and immediately get the required information. The software also enables
intradocument hyperlinks, as well as hyperlinks to referenced documents. Transit Solutions
saves 200 users at National Semiconductor an immeasurable amount of time locating
information, while improving accuracy and helping to prevent costly wafer scrap.
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Five Ways to Leverage Content on the Web with Automated Web Publishing
SUMMARY
Businesses and government organizations rely more heavily on intranets, extranets and
Internet websites than ever before. But this reliance requires a more disciplined process for
controlling and publishing web content. Content accuracy is a critical issue. If the credibility
of website content is questioned, the site’s usefulness is diminished. Alternately, if web
content is carefully managed and published in a timely fashion, the web’s power as an
information resource is enormous.
In the knowledge economy, an increasing amount of value lies in the information that your
employees create and maintain. This value is often trapped in proprietary document formats
that are poorly suited for the web. And despite their claims, Enterprise Content
Management vendors don’t provide cost-effective alternatives for quickly publishing business
content to the web.
The five process improvements enabled by automated web publishing outlined in this white
paper provide powerful yet affordable, high-volume web publishing. Systems like Transit
Solutions enable organizations to quickly build and maintain web content from standard
business content and fully leverage the economic value of that content.
Because Transit Solutions isn’t a new authoring environment in which your content creators
need to be trained, but is rather an application that automatically converts and publishes
content from the tools you’re already using, it costs significantly less than a traditional web
content management system.
Contact Avantstar to learn more.
ABOUT AVANTSTAR, INC.
Avantstar, Inc. is a software development, marketing, and technical services company with a
focus on the digital content viewing, content conversion, and content management markets.
Avantstar products have more than 1,200 business installations and over 1 million users
worldwide.
Avantstar, Inc.
18872 Lake Drive East
Chanhassen, MN 55317
Phone: 877.829.7325
952.351-8500
Fax:
952.351-8550
www.avantstar.com
Avantstar, the Avantstar logo, and Transit Solutions are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Avantstar, Inc. in the USA and other countries. All other trade names are the property of their
respective owners.
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Five Ways to Leverage Content on the Web with Automated Web Publishing