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What is XML for Business

In the modern world of business globalization, the quality, consistency and timeliness of documentation has become a crucial point for enterprises. Customers' demands dictate new standards of quality for a business to stay competitive. On the other hand, it is critical to reduce the costs of content creation and to shorten time-to-market as much as possible.

When it comes to documentation, XML gives a number of benefits for businesses. It helps to automate many tasks related to document creation, maintenance, and delivery. XML enables collaborative authoring and content reuse of any kind. Finally, XML significantly reduces the possibility of human mistakes.

Traditional Authoring is Ineffective

Traditional word processors impose serious limitations on enterprise businesses. Being useful for small isolated documents, they make it almost impossible to handle large volumes of documentation, reuse repetitive content, collaborate on authoring, consistently translate documents and deliver content in standard formats.

The traditional approach to authoring presupposes the fusion of the document with its presentation. This leads to the necessity to constantly watch the look of the document when you need to edit the document. Such approach is ineffective in many ways:


  • It is costly - companies report product documentation creation costs often reach 10% of development costs of the product itself.
  • It is long - the cycle of authoring, reviewing, editing, translating, and publishing is very long. Many people are involved and depend on each other, thus increasing the risk of not meeting the deadlines.
  • It is faulty - a significant amount of manual work leads to mistakes that are very hard to spot and correct.
  • It is proprietary - choosing a proprietary solution, you get trapped with its vendor, format, costs, and lifetime. Due to its closeness, it is difficult to migrate from one such solution to another when needed.

It would be strange not to have a solution to such widespread and serious problems. And don't get frustrated - there is a way out called XML and structured content.

XML is the Way to Highest Productivity

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) makes content structured to perfection and gives businesses a wide range of significant benefits. XML is not the solution itself, but methodology. Properly used, it will save you up to 75% of time and money and allow you to meet time-to-market, which is a great competitive advantage.

Structured Content Saves Money

XML brings the structure and semantics to the content and makes it possible to automate many tasks accompanying documents development. Automating routine tasks and eliminating excessive manual work, it releases valuable resources for something more creative.

Structured Authoring Saves Time

XML enables collaborative authoring and facilitates content reuse in all possible manners, which drastically boosts productivity and improves documentation quality and consistency. Restrictive in nature, a well-defined structure minimizes the possibility of human mistakes.

XML Brings You a Freedom of Choice

A rich set of open standards covers almost any aspect of structured documentation development and maintenance. A variety of XML formats - DITA , S1000D, Docbook, TEI, and others - allows virtually any industry, from aerospace to publishing media, to benefit from structured documentation.

A vendor-neutral format widely adopted by many software vendors, XML offers you a large selection of tools. Whether you choose the Syntext product or a competing one, you are free to choose another solution any time if you find it more suitable, without having to convert your XML documents to yet another proprietary format.