It's time for a new approach to authoring

Despite more than 30 years of mainstream use, not much has changed about office authoring tools. Increasingly, enterprises deliver documents to customers in forms that aren’t fit for purpose. The next decade will reveal new cloud-native, data-driven, and structured approaches to document authoring. And enterprises must get ready now.

Most of the content produced nowadays is unstructured. Word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs produce unstructured content. With these tools, the author focuses more on the way the content looks rather than on what the content actually is. For example, an introduction is marked as “bold” instead of classified as an “introduction.”

 

In structured content, “molecular,” “component-based” or “topic-based” authoring is a fundamental paradigm. At Fonto, we call these reusable content sections “fragments.” Each individual fragment is classified with metadata.

 

Because fragments are stored and managed as separate files, they allow refined work and approval flows. Handling a section of content as a fragment promotes it to a separate asset, which then becomes usable across multiple documents. Because fragments are reused, they increase control over content consistency and quality.

 

Structured content requires a schema, which is a set of rules for validating the content. This is the so-called XML Schema Definition (XSD). The XSD consists of elements (e.g., an introduction) that are allowed within the content itself, and it defines how the content is structured, (e.g., where the introduction can and cannot be inserted).

The report 'The Future of Documents,' published by Forrester in December 2020, highlights the disruption their research team expects over the next five to seven years in the very first phase of the classic content lifecycle: content authoring.

 

At Fonto, we believe that the Future of Documents is shaped by a fundamental change in how information is shared and agreements are secured. This future sees a shift from traditional “e-paper,” formatted and optimized for reading by humans, towards semantically tagged information in an open digital format. We’re moving from documents to data.

 

We believe that the Future of Documents is shaped by a fundamental change in how information is shared and agreements are secured.

Content—be it rules, policies, procedures, corporate and regulatory compliance, R&D information or product documentation—often involves authoring and reviewing from company-wide subject-matter experts (SMEs). However, collaborative authoring is usually cumbersome and inefficient. Reviews are often error-prone, typically involving many emails, multiple versions of marked-up files, and labor-intensive copy-paste actions.

 

Fonto streamlines structured content creation, review and collaboration. It provides authors and reviewers with a simplified approach to centralized collaboration in an easy to use, MS Word-style user interface. Tracking changes, adding comments and providing feedback to the author becomes a well-managed, traceable process.

 

Fonto is the leading provider of structured-content authoring solutions. We enable anyone to create structured content without any knowledge of XML. From an interface that feels familiar to their Word-processor of choice, subject-matter experts are able to create fully valid XML. Adding structure becomes as easy as running a spellchecker.

At Fonto, our mission is to open up structured-content authoring (SCA) for anyone.

 

By doing so, we help organizations make the strategic shift from traditional documents to structured content. We help them by engaging the people who are the most important stakeholders in any authoring process: the authors. Read the full post in which we share our thoughts on the future of documents.

 

Our latest major release, Fonto 8, contains exciting new features for both end-users and partners alike. For end-users, there will be significant improvements to the usability of Fonto. With the introduction of the balloons’ user interface, comments and change tracking information will be displayed in context of the document.

 

For partners, and specifically their devs configuring Fonto, the development experience is state-of-the-art with the introduction of TypeScript and other code intelligence.

 

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