Single-Source Publishing for Consistent Documentation

The single source (single-source publishing) is the fundamental principle of reliable reuse of the company's sensitive or strategic content. It has revolutionized how to create and update corporate documents. The companies and communities that use it have simply abandoned traditional word processing or desktop publishing (DTP) tools.

The unique source (single-source publishing)

Background

In order to understand the meaning of this article and the importance of the single source principle, it is necessary to look for the productivity and reliability of businesses and communities.

• They face short deadlines and large volumes of document production every day.

• In addition, the content of these documents must be reliable and updated in order to be disseminated quickly in different formats.

Before it was relatively easy to control the information that was published mainly on paper or in PDF for its digital version. Today we are in the digital age with immediate dissemination of information by anyone with access to it. And to corser the case, this information can be read in the moment on tablets, smartphones, Web... It can also be distributed by folder attached in PDF. The challenge of creating and disseminating reliable information by businesses and communities is becoming crucial.

What is the unique source

By source a clearly identified content is designated.Unique indicates that this content exists only once for a selected work context. Moreover, if this working environment was so far limited to a person on his PC, it is now becoming collaborative. It can be shared among several collaborators.

The goal is that the content chosen is written once and can be reused by one or more editors to quickly create new documents with reliable, updated content. This avoids the risk of errors of "copying" or "copying and pasting" which cause serious consequences for the dissemination of incorrect information. And not to mention the waste of time that word processing has used to us.

Classification of reusable content in the single source

This is one of the highlights of the single source and reusable content that invites the editor to organize his document production for greater efficiency. The editor identifies the parts of the documents that he may determine as reusable content. On each one it will place one or more labels (or tags) that will allow to classify them to find them quickly. The performance of a single source is measured by the re-use rate of these selected content.

The advantages of single source

We all know the function copy/paste word processing. This is the way to reuse parts of documents without having to copy them. On the other hand, there are many disadvantages that we have to deal with:

While the first two points can make us waste a lot of time, the latter raises the problem of the reliability of the information disseminated within the company or the community and also outside, to customers or to the public.

The single source responds to this major risk of information dissemination Untrustworthy in businesses and communities.

Difference between inclusion and copy-paste

When you want to add reusable content to a new document you write you make a inclusion And not a Copier-Coller. That is, you do not create new content but you include the image of its original. The included image is then non-modifiable to ensure the reliability of the information.

In other words, to illustrate this we can imagine one or more mirrors in which content (source) is reflected. The contents are repeated identically on each mirror. Also when you change the content (source), the image of each mirror will be changed instantly.

Reusable contents of the single source multiply as an image on mirrors

In conclusion, imagine now that each mirror is a new document. You have the principle of reusable content from a single source. A little poetry in the document production of company...

You understand why with Calenco you can update in one operation all the documents that have been composed with the reusable content you have identified.

Easily, without any particular computer knowledge... as simple as reproducing an image in a mirror.

From the single source the content duplicates like its image in a mirror

Watch this short video that shows the speed and simplicity of this principle.