The creation and maintenance of business-critical documents can be a long and costly process. There is an increasing drive to make this process quicker, involving less rework and re-entry of information by reusing document content in small segments across multiple documents, as well as to construct documents from data rather than “black box” text. This is where Structured Content Authoring comes in.

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 often rendered obsolete or disconnected from the source data and thus; inconsistent. This can not only lead to huge inefficiencies, but can 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 unintuitive 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 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 as well. Authors of other assemblies will receive 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 update 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.

Find out more about CARA’s Content Services capabilities. Or, to see Structured Content Authoring in action, book a demo today!