How do you store your information?

[russ at weststreetconsulting.com]

Gordon, 

I think the simple answer is that your storage medium should allow:

- Content authoring, management, and reuse
- Publishing

If you are publishing from FrameMaker exclusively (Save as PDF, Quadralay, etc), then I see no real problem with FrameMaker binaries as being your repository format. This notion is what inspired some of the plugins I've written, such as InsetPlus, which allows you to modularize a single structured FM file for reuse of individual components. This way, you can reuse modules of content between FM files at any granular level, without the need to leave the FM format.

In my own practice, though, I've found more and more of a need to publish in ways that FrameMaker cannot handle, such as live delivery over a web interface. For this sort of publishing, I've moved into the interesting world of FM and XML, because XML lends itself well to transformations on a webserver to HTML. What's cool about it is that FM still serves the PDF publishing purpose it always did, since it can load and format XML.  Plus all the plugins still work when the XML content is in FM.

So, I've found that with some tinkering, I can get extensive reuse and multi-faceted publishing with the combination of FM, an XML file system, and a home-grown web server interface. It's pretty cool stuff, but I can see that if it were to get much more complex, some sort of CMS functionality would become required to keep track of it all. At that point, maybe a database repository format would be in order.

You can do a lot of the same things with DITA. I've decided against it for the time being, because modular file storage just doesn't make sense in my situation. Plus, the DITA schemas are just too complex and I'd need to do a lot of modification anyway to get the live web delivery working.

Just some ideas. If you are using structured Frame, you are right on the cusp of some real fun with reuse.

Russ

***************************************  
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 09:27:18 -0000
From: "Gordon McLean" <Gordon.McLean at GrahamTechnology.com>
Subject: How do you store your information?
To: <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Message-ID:
<20070226092720.F2BF7107D3 at atlantis.inchinnan.grahamtech.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

We use structured FrameMaker. We have a mature EDD, we are happy with the
way things are.

But it's not really any closer to single source, or modular documentation,
as we still have the content stored in .FM files and organised in books.
However, trying to find out the best way to store the documentation, so it
will be properly modular, is proving tricky (of course, it may just be my
interpretation and understanding that is lacking).

Does anyone store their content in a database? Or as XML? How re-usable is
your solution?

We have a lot of similar areas of our product, and I want to make the best
use of the existing content but at present it's still a lot of cut-n-paste
which is not good. 

Where am I going wrong?

Gordon 
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