Making The Move To Creating Structured XML: An Interview with Thomas Aldous

March 1, 2009 Blog 1 Comment

Scott: Thomas, thanks for agreeing to chat with us a little today about making the move to structured XML. For those readers who don’t yet know who you are, tell us a little about yourself and your experience in the content industry. Thomas: Thanks, Scott. I am a principal owner of a company called Integrated Technologies, better known as InTech. We began as a UNIX training company back in 1989. Within a few years, we made major inroads in the Engineering, Financial and Telecom industries. One of our first financial …

Hard Truths About Content Conversion

February 14, 2009 Blog 1 Comment

By Joe Gollner, Stilo International When organizations first look at migrating their content from unstructured to structured forms, there appears to be some common patterns that emerge. Sometimes the people involved don’t believe that adding structure to content is something that automation can provide any assistance with. We can call these people the “skeptics”. Teams operating on this assumption budget time to perform the conversions manually – diligently adding markup to text files exported from their legacy authoring environment or, as a personal favorite, copying and pasting from the legacy …

Moving Legacy Content To XML: Affordable, Self-Service Analysis/Modeling Tools Needed, Survey Says

September 24, 2008 Blog No Comments

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and The Content Wrangler Community

DocTrain Ticket Winners Announced

September 18, 2008 Blog No Comments

The Content Wrangler recently conducted a survey of content professionals on the need for legacy content conversion tools. Those who completed the survey were entered into a drawing for free tickets to the Documentation and Training conference of their choice. The winners are: Todd Nowlan, Nortel Jason Campbell, Macquarium Intelligent Communications Dave Davis, AT&T Matt Ceglia, Google Marsha Glassner. GSA Magdalen Neuwald. Yahoo! Ralph Nissler, IBM Jennifer Campanile, GMAC Julie Waxgiser, Thomson Reuters Nancy Thompson, Epson Congratulations to each of the winners. Look for a summary of the legacy content …

MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter

May 14, 2008 Blog No Comments

From TechCrunch: Michael Arrington writes: “By acting first, MySpace takes the lead and has a shot at being the long term winner – meaning lots of people use MySpace as the place to store data, and share it out to other applications from there. Look for Google to make their move next.” Arrington was commenting on a new MySpace project dubbed “Data Availability”, an example, the company says, “of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.” In this case, playing nice means data sharing partnerships with …

Slide Decks From Content Convergence and Integration Conference Available Now

March 14, 2008 Blog No Comments

If you missed this year’s Content Convergence and Integration Conference in Vancouver, BC, you missed some great presentations. But, thanks to the conference organizers, many of the presentation slide decks are available online. The online offering includes: Fun with XSL: A Case Study of CHC Helicopters, Superheros and a Leprechaun, with Flare: A Case Study in Breaking Down Silos, Making Content Portable, and User generated Rich Media: Make it, Manage It, among others.

Improving Your Legacy Content With Content Tagging

March 14, 2008 Blog No Comments

By Michael Gross, DCLNews In the early days of digitizing information, five years ago, it was enough to just make more and more content electronic, but that’s no longer enough. With the ever-enlarging mounds of data out there, it’s not enough to create more ‘electronic paper.’ There’s a tremendous need to enhance the information so it can be more readily found, more easily accessed, and more easily reorganized. Content tagging in XML and SGML is key in this effort. This article discusses content tagging, and how one might incorporated this …

Finding the Hidden Trouble Spots in Your Content: Michael Gross on Content Conversion

November 19, 2007 Blog No Comments

If everyone in your department—better yet, your organization—formatted documents following all the rules (they don’t—don’t even pretend they do), document conversion would be quick and easy. It’s neither. It’s not quick because most content creators break existing rules, prefer to develop their own personal style (“I do it this way because…”) or workarounds, and it’s not easy because authors find creative ways to achieve the same goals (making a font bold instead of using a formatting style, for example). As a result, automated document conversion tools—necessary as they are—can’t alone …

Finding the Hidden Trouble Spots in Your Content: Michael Gross on Content Conversion

November 19, 2007 Blog No Comments

Repurposed with permission from Data Conversion Laboratory, DCLNews If everyone formatted documents “correctly”, following all the rules, document conversion would be a “piece of cake”, as Michael Gross likes to say. But that’s not the real world. People don’t “always” read manuals, they might take some shortcuts, and sometimes they use software in ways never conceived by their developers. In this interview Michael Gross tells us about the hidden traps that can ambush a conversion effort. Q: I recently saw a website advertising fully automated legacy document conversion to XML. …