by Søren Weimann | Mar 22, 2021 | Blog
A review can be a complex thing to manage. And when you have component-based content and reviewers who want to review the full document – let’s be honest, most of us do – then the process of getting the approved review comments back into your components can be a very time-consuming task. So, there is a lot to gain by streamlining and automating this process as much as we can… without losing full control. With the new features in Dx4 called Compound Doc Publishing and Sync Components, we can take major steps in reducing complexity, saving time and manual effort. Let’s break the process down into five steps – well actually three of them are not much more than clicking a button or two… and getting coffee. The goal of the review is to have a component library in Dx4 that is up-to-date at the beginning and end of all review cycles. This allows us the security of having a full version history for each cycle and allows to repeat the cycle as many times as needed. In order to achieve that, we really only need two roles: A Content Architect that knows his way around Dx4 and can kick off the review and sync the results back to Dx4.A group of subject matter experts (SMEs) and other reviewers that are responsible for the content to be current and correct with their expert knowledge. To complete a full review cycle there are generally five steps to complete, and only two of them involve the SMEs: The Content Architect publishes the relevant components into full Word document.The Content Architect makes...
by Søren Weimann | Mar 1, 2021 | Blog
Writing in full documents is preferred by most authors who are not used to component-based content. And with the Sync Components feature in Dx4, this is now possible to do this in a component-based solution – without all the manual work of replicating the changes in components. You can simply use the updated full document to automate the updating of components.But what do you do when parts of the document are reused across multiple documents? Do you want to risk the updating of content messing with already approved content in other documents? Of course not!That is why the Sync Components feature comes with flexible synchronization that allows you to protect any topic in approved state from unwanted changes. Let’s go over how to approve reused components and ensure that they are not updated when syncing components from a Compound Document. We will start with three document models that have a few components that are reused across all documents, and some that are specific to each document. I’m doing set of small country specific manuals for an international bank. Let’s focus on the documents for Australia, Ireland and the USA. Components in a red frames are reused across all three documents. They are centrally authored and approved before the country specific versions will be authored. The two remaining components in each manual are country specific. Let’s start out making sure that single sourced components are correct. We will have them reviewed and approved. In DxNavigator I can approve an individual component by right-click it and selecting Approve Node. Once approved, the component icon will appear with a green checkmark in...
by Søren Weimann | Jan 22, 2021 | Blog
I think we have all been there. I know I have certainly asked people to review and comment on a few topics og content components, only to be confronted with the fact that context is needed. Well, even though I have been working with components for more than 15 years…to be honest, I have been doing updates of components myself and realized that I need more context to do a proper job. And sometimes it is bit of a clunky process to open or preview one component at a time from a map editor. So this has left me with two choices: I can provide the full document on the side, and ask the reviewer to update the componente while getting the context from the full document.Or I can provide the full document, and tell the reviewer to forget about the components. I’ll just ask the reviewer to write comments and amend the full document. None of these solutions are ideal. If I go with the first solution, the reviewer will have to jump back and forth between the component and the full document. That will be a pain for the reviewer. If I go with the second solution I am left with the job of having to update the components myself when I receive the full document from the review including comments and changes. This is time consuming and prone to error. Fortunately, this problem is nolonger there. Now there is a third option. Now I can actually provide the reviewer with a full Word document for commenting and updating, and I can automate the process of getting...
