Single Sourcing and Chinese Culture: A Perspective on Skills Development Within Western Organizations and the People's Republic of China    

Discusses the current state of technical communication in China and analyzes key Chinese cultural values compatible with single sourcing. Reports on a skills survey conducted among Chinese and U.S. participants.

Wiles, Debbie. Technical Communication Online (2003). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>China

Single Sourcing and the Technical Communication Career Path    

Considers how most technical writing uses a craftsman model and evaluates the applicability of that model to single sourcing. Proposes a technical communication career path with distinct job responsibilities for junior and senior writers.

Albers, Michael J. Technical Communication Online (2003). Careers>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single Sourcing: Benefits to the Life Sciences  

Life sciences companies are experiencing many pressures including electronic initiatives like eSubmissions and the eCTD, regulatory controls like 21 CFR Part 11, and decreasing times to market. Life Sciences companies are looking for ways to improve the way they create and manage content. Developing reusable content (single sourcing) is one solution. This session looks at the benefits single sourcing can bring to the life sciences industry.

Rockley, Ann and Steve Manning. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Biomedical

Single Sourcing, Content Management and the Otobase Project

This report examines some of the issues raised by multiuse publishing in the context of the Otobase software documentation project at the University of Washington. In doing so, it aims to contribute to our understanding of how single sourcing and content management might help us better adapt to users, and also to view the impact of a structured approach to documentation on writers and editors. The report will also use these ideas to suggest both current and long-term improvements for the Otobase project. First, it will briefly describe the project and its current documentation, and then look at theories of single sourcing, content management and structured documents before applying these theories to the project itself.

Burner, Dell. University of Washington-Seattle (2002). Books>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single Sourcing: Friend or Foe?

Single sourcing sounds good, but can you justify it in your organization? Reducing the need to maintain multiple versions of content produces real savings and improves return on investment (ROI). On the other hand, implementing single sourcing can be expensive and slow, and information developers will be on the spot to continue delivering content through every stage of the process.

Hawkins, John. MetroVoice (2004). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single Sourcing in Technical Communication

Technical Communication covers miscellaneous applications. So far you needed a separate tool for each purpose had to use several document formats for distribution and archiving. The xml-based format SVG cleans up with this misery, because SVG allows to use one single source for text, illustrations and animations ("Single Sourcing").

Fibinger, Iris. SVG Open (2002). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single Sourcing in Technical Communication

No term has caused such a sensation in recent years among technical writers and illustrators as 'Single Sourcing.' The reasons: Enormous amounts of text and image material builds up in documentation and illustration companies. It is not uncommon for individual documents to contain several thousands of pages. If this is translated into several languages, then the administration needs are greater for both texts and graphics (graphics can contain text which must also be translated).

Fibinger, Iris. SVG Open (2002). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Technical Writing

Single Sourcing: It's About People, Not Just Technology    

Cautions that failing to focus on the people in the organization may diminish the success of a single-sourcing initiative. Covers changes that need to occur in the organization to support a single-sourcing initiative and ways to address issues of change.

Rockley, Ann. Technical Communication Online (2003). Design>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single Sourcing: Our First Year  

Single sourcing creates multiple documents from a single content file. Developing single-source content is an efficient way to produce documentation. This topic has stirred considerable interest among technical writers the last few years and more and more departments are adopting the process. The following experiences and advice, based upon our use of FrameMaker and WebWorks Publisher Professional, are meant to assist a documentation department that is about to begin a single-source process or is considering making this transition.

Welch, Erin Beal and Lori Beard. STC Proceedings (2002). Design>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single Sourcing with RoboHelp and Word  

Details a nine-step process for single sourcing with eHelp's RoboHelp and Microsoft Word.

Barefoot, Darren K. Intercom (2001). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Microsoft Word

Single-Source Content Management   

More and more businesses are expanding into international markets. A critical success factor for this expansion is high-quality, cost-effective and timely translated written content. Responsibility for this typically falls on internal translation departments or localization partners. Translation comes at a high price, exceeding the cost of writing the original content after only a few languages.

Trotter, Paul. tekom (2006). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Localization

Single-Source Content Management: If, Why and How  

Introduces the five levels of single-sourcing.

Hackos, JoAnn T. ComTech Services (2002). Presentations>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single-Source Tools and Techniques  

Tools are a key component for the success of single sourcing. Tools should be selected to support the information model and development processes. Selecting the technology first, without a clear understanding of your information needs, may significantly restrict your ability to produce effective single source materials. This paper reviews the types of single source tools that are available to you today. The session presentation will review the available tools and provide their pros and cons.

Rockley, Ann. STC Proceedings (2000). Presentations>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single-Sourcing Online Documentation for Multiple GUIs, Languages, and Software Releases  

A small documentation team devised an innovative workflow to provide documentation for Interleaf publishing software for Windows and Motif, in English, French, German, and Japanese, using a single set of online source documentation. We used technology to streamline tasks, maximize communication, and optimize the documentation for future updates.

Bayer, Douglas, Rosalyn Reiser, Andrea Muren Shanahan and Margaret Waters. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Documentation>Single Sourcing

Single-Sourcing Tools and Techniques  

This paper describes how our publications team built a new single-sourced documentation set consisting of five printed manuals totaling 1,470 pages and seven Windows online help files totaling 7.5 megabytes. To accomplish this project, we used detailed writing guidelines, specially-designed templates, and a powerful online help authoring tool.

Hart, Jessica, Nola J. Hague and Diana Peh. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Single-Sourcing with FrameMaker and SiberSafe

Like many of you, I’ve struggled over the years to find the right combination of tools and processes to reliably manage large volumes of volatile text under the duress of seemingly impossible deadlines. Inevitably, I had to learn to customize my tools and automate as much of the process as I could. This meant getting under the hood and learning numerous scripting and markup languages. I was constantly exploring new technologies and applications that could take on some of the heavy lifting.

Hanna, Rob. STC Puget Sound (2005). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Adobe FrameMaker

So, What is a Content Management System?

A content management system (CMS) is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet, and yet many organisations are not familiar with this technology.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2003). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

A Solution to Writing Winning Sales Proposals and Other Sales Documents

This article explains how we built a solution to producing sales proposals and other sales literature for our own company using an affordable content management solution.

Pratt, Ellis. Cherryleaf (2003). Articles>Business Communication>Single Sourcing>Documentation

STC Single Sourcing Special Interest Group

A special interest group dedicated to work using a single document source to generate multiple types of document outputs; workflows for creating multiple outputs from a document or database source.

STC. Organizations>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Structured Content: What's in it for Writers?

Everyone has heard (or experienced) stories of CMS or knowledge management initiatives that did not work because content contributors refused to use the tools deployed or were unwilling or unable to supply content in the format required. The conclusion often reached is that writers cannot give up their WYSIWYG tools and that any attempt to make them do so is doomed to failure. On the other hand there are always those who will reply with stories of systems where writers have successfully adapted to the use of XML or SGML, and the CMS is working well. All that is required to duplicate this success, they maintain, is that writers must be forced and/or trained to use the new tools.

Baker, Mark. CMSwatch (2002). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Writing

The Technical Editor and Document Databases: What the Future May Hold      

Technical editors ensure a document communicates with the reader. With XML, active server pages, and dynamic document creation, Web pages are no longer simple hand-crafted text objects, but dynamic groupings of text assembled moments before the reader views the page. With dynamic documents, high-level editing tasks will be, at best, vaguely defined during text creation. To maximize the information content, future technical editors require tighter control over information consistency and content.

Albers, Michael J. Technical Communication Quarterly (2000). Articles>Editing>Single Sourcing>Technical Editing

Ten Practical Techniques for Single-Sourcing with FrameMaker  

A PowerPoint slide show about using FrameMaker for single-source document creation and management.

WritersUA (2002). Presentations>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Adobe FrameMaker

Ten Problems With Single Sourcing  

Though there have been numerous conference papers, articles, and books devoted to the topic of single sourcing, there have been fewer works about potential problems that should be identified before adopting a single-source documentation strategy. This study looks at ten specific problems (including issues of training, productivity, and morale) that can arise during the implementation of a mature single-sourcing model of documentation management. This list of problems, while not comprehensive, does provide some points of reference and a framework within which technical communicators can consider the implications of adopting a single-sourcing documentation model.

Yeats, Dave and Heather Hull. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Assessment

Tips and Techniques for Single-sourcing with RoboHelp X5

RoboHelp now offers a rich set of features for delivering multiple customized outputs out of a single project. This article by Matthew Ellison provides some guidelines and tips on using the key single-sourcing features.

Ellison, Matthew. WritersUA (2004). Articles>Documentation>Single Sourcing>RoboHelp

Tools and Technology: A Work-Flow Paradigm for Single-Source Publishing  

Today's organizations must consider the effect that new tools and technologies are having on work flow. Web technology has raised the importance of information. This change in the customer/supplier market is allowing the company with the best information to have an edge. It is our responsibility as communicators to find better, faster, and cheaper ways to distribute information. An effective work flow can accomplish this. In the most common work-flow scenarios, Web technology is placed on the back end of the production schedule. All of these scenarios are flawed in different ways. Solving Web work-flow problems requires a paradigm shift.

Christner-Vorhes, Jamie and Bill Pollak. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Workflow