General Meeting, 11 March 2003

Earlier

Later

"Single-sourcing Deconstructed"

This panel presentation walks through the steps and roles typically involved in single-sourcing. It closely examines a process for creating and managing a single structured document.

This month's STC meeting features resident experts from the Toronto STC Single-Sourcing Special Interest Group presenting on the topic of single-sourcing for online and print documentation. Clockwise from top: Andrew Brooke, Rob Hanna, Byron Hills, and Michele Marques

Our panel members will carry forward some key concepts introduced by Ann Rockley in her presentation on Enterprise Content Management in January. But this discussion is scaled down to focus on a single document that most of us know far better: our résumé.

By bringing single-sourcing down to a simple structured document, the panel will expose key concepts without calling for expensive tools or complex workflows.Members will see how single-sourcing applies to what many of us are already doing with our résumé and, by extension, in our workplace.

Members will walk away with a clearer understanding, realising that they knew more about single-sourcing than they thought.

• The presentation opens with the moderator, Andrew Brooke, giving a brief introduction and overview of single-sourcing.
• Rob Hanna will then discuss the process and planning that will go into building the résumé for single-sourcing.
• Michele Marques takes on the task of constructing the source in FrameMaker to create multiple versions of the content.
• Byron Hills extends this design to Microsoft Word, where he leverages features in Word to create multiple output formats.
• After the presentation, members are invited to ask questions of the speakers.

Meeting report by Phil Kahn

Several speakers at recent STC meetings have touched upon the benefits of single-sourcing. At the March meeting, three speakers delivered an excellent primer on this topic. The three are all members of the recently formed STC Toronto Single-Sourcing SIG, and they shared their hands-on experience with the audience.

Moderator Andrew Brooke began with a plea to stop the insanity! Storing the same information in multiple places leads to increased maintenance time and costs, and also results in variances where none should exist. The solution is single-sourcing. Andrew then introduced Rob Hanna to talk about planning a single source document.

Rob is a senior technical communicator with extensive single-sourcing experience; he owns ASCan Enterprises, a new media development company. He defined single-sourcing as “a process used to systematically create information from a single defined source of information.” Or, for a more concise definition, he quoted STC member and recent speaker Ann Rockley, “Write information once, use it many times.” Rob spoke about the benefits of single-sourcing, again emphasizing the reduced maintenance costs and improved consistency and quality. However, because single-sourcing requires significant planning, not all documents can benefit from this approach. Rob posed several questions to consider when deciding whether or not to use single-sourcing for a document. Is this a valuable document, perhaps one tied to a product? Will this document require updating? Will this document have a long life span? Will parts of this document be used elsewhere? If the answer to any of these questions is “Yes”, then single-sourcing may be a good option.

Rob then selected a familiar document as an example of one that could benefit from singlesourcing: a résumé. To begin, we need to set objectives for the document. For a résumé, we will want the document to be customized for different jobs and for different audiences; placement agencies, hiring companies, and résumé databases for example. We also need to publish it in multipleformats such as paper, PDF, Web and WinHelp. Once our objectives are set, we need to create a single, definitive source of information. In this case an existing résumé may be used, or we may need to combine multiple existing résumés. Finally a structure has to be decided upon: résumés are typically linear documents but for single-sourcing we need a modular structure that can be easily reorganized. The modules will contain different sets of information—skills, education, profile, and anything else that needs to be included.

Rob then introduced Michelle Marques, a senior technical writer with Baxter Corporation, who showed how to create the résumé using Adobe FrameMaker. Using FrameMaker, we can attach tags to all of the pieces of information in a document. Conditional text can then be used to determine whether or not these pieces of information will appear. These conditions could pertain to different jobs or target audiences; certain pieces of information will only appear when applying for certain types of job, for example. While FrameMaker is not a database and therefore has some limitations, Michelle showed how to use content items to take control over not just the content of the document but also the order in which the information is presented. Finally, she spoke about how FrameMaker makes it easy to output to paper, PDF, the Web or WinHelp using different features and plug-ins.

The final speaker was Byron Hills, a senior STC member with over 12 years authoring experience. Byron demonstrated how to single-source using an application familiar to most people: Microsoft Word. Word is more powerful than most people think and Byron highlighted some features that make single-sourcing in Word possible: main and subdocuments, mail merge, database links, search and replace, templates and others. Byron then demonstrated how variable fields and “If...Then” statements could be used to achieve the same results that conditional text makes possible in Framemaker.

After Byron concluded, the panel took some questions from the audience. When oneaudience member challenged Rob Hanna by asking what was wrong with just copying and pasting, Rob replied that there was nothing wrong with it, and went on to express his view that as long as you follow a system, even this qualifies as single-sourcing. This was an excellent point to end on as it deconstructed single-sourcing into a simple, unintimidating process that most of us use already. If you are interested in more details, the panel has made the Powerpoint presentation available on the STC Web site.

• Click here for a zipped PDF copy of the slides. This is a large file, 1.6 megabytes. (You will need both Winzip and a PDF viewer such as Acrobat Reader to see these slides.)
• Phil Kahn is a regular Communication Times.