Cool Content Concepts

I’m surrounded by people who template. This intimidates me – my comfort level sits somewhere between Notepad and Word, and I just threw out my Lotus 123 diskettes (5 inch…). So from my standpoint, content management was not something I was ready to embrace. Until now.

I realize there are lots of people who appreciate authoring environments and source control and all that HTML stuff, but not me. I’m usually too busy just trying to get my ideas down on paper. But even for me, content management systems have two compelling benefits I can appreciate and value:

The first is single sourcing: interchangeable pieces of content you can reuse over and over in many places. You only need to maintain content in one place. You know who changed it and where it gets published. And when you change it, everywhere it appears changes too (well, if you want it to). No more version confusion. No more out-of-whack documents.

The second benefit is multi-media publishing: my content is endpoint agnostic. Write something once and use it in manuals, white papers, web pages, online help and any other place it fits. Sure, some guy smarter than me has to build some templates, but once we get past that little bump everything zooms out with something only slightly more complicated than the push of a button. I love it.

The whole thing makes me want to learn about templates. Tomorrow.

--- Jeff Klein, COO, Documentation Strategies