Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy

Chapter 20. Separating content from format

Once you take on a unified content strategy, authors will create content for a number of different purposes, but with greater integration and far less duplication of effort. An author may create a product description that will be used in a printed brochure, in a product catalog that forms part of the external web site, on an intranet that mirrors the external web site but provides additional details, in the user guide, and in training materials. In some cases, the same author may reuse the content that he or she creates, but other authors may also retrieve it and use it for their purposes. The whole idea behind reuse is to avoid “reinventing the wheel,” but for reuse to occur, authors must focus on the ...