Managing
Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy
Ann
Rockley, with Pamela Kostur and Steve Manning
(Indianapolis: New Riders Press, 2003)
Reviewed by Karen Field
Managing
Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy provides a hands-on
perspective of content management (also known as single sourcing). Author
Ann Rockley, an Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication
and president of The Rockley Group, addresses aspects of content management
based on an organization’s needs.
The
book opens with a discussion of the basics of content management, which
the author calls “unified content strategy.” Section 2 helps
readers determine whether a unified content strategy is worth the time
and money needed to build a content management system. The final sections
describe how to design a content management system and the tools and techniques
required for such a system.
I found
chapter 2, “Fundamental concepts of reuse,” and Chapter 14,
“The role of XML,” interesting from a technical writer’s
perspective. In Chapter 2, the author describes the vital role of generating
multiple “documents”—meaning brochures, online help,
web pages and so on—from one source. She acknowledges that content
must be modified for different audiences. What works in a slick marketing
brochure, she says, is not appropriate for user documentation. With that
in mind, she shows how to adjust the wording of content to target a specific
audience.
In Chapter 14, “The role of XML,” Rockley explains that XML
is the backbone of any good content management system. After a brief history
of the evolution of XML and a description of XML itself, Rockley writes
that XML is the tool of choice because so much data gets exchanged over
the Internet. In the summary of this chapter, she says, “XML is
not the only technology solution for reuse, but it is the most powerful
by far. XML combines the best functionality of SGML with the ease-of-use
of HTML, which is the best of both worlds.”
There are many good books on content management on the market. This book,
although rife with business jargon, is rich with information technical
writers can use, from a discussion of tools to a description of the role
of the technical writer in the content management process.
Managing Enterprise Content can help technical communicators take a leading
role in helping an organization structure and manage information.
