A document database will offer sizable benefits to the company by consolidating and managing all documents within a central repository. The major benefits will be:
· improving access to crucial technical and implementation material for both internal (Professional Services) and external (third-party integrators and partners) use through search and retrieval of dynamic personalized content in the repository via the Web. See the Dynamic Delivery section for details.
·
enforcing and automating re-use of content, thereby
lowering costs and reducing duplication of efforts across departments. See the
Shared Content section for more details.
· customizing online help systems by customer and by market or product version will be possible using document database metadata. See the Metadata Tagging section for details.
In addition, there are potential savings resulting from pushing information to the Web instead of providing printed material.
A document database will extend current savings as well as solve larger issues of documentation management within the company.
The current single-sourcing model, as utilized by the company, is based on re-use of shared content through imported text and specialized tagging of FrameMaker files. The cost savings from this single-sourcing alone results in:
· reduced translation costs of $8427 per language, resulting in a total cost savings of $18,724 for the 5.5 release, a savings of $34,896 for the 5.6 release, and a savings of $43,620 for the 6.0 release.
· increased productivity with no increase in staffing, because shared information is written and handled once.
The current single-sourcing model is a preliminary step, and will not scale effectively beginning with the 7.0 release and it will continue to degrade as more products, versions and languages are introduced. To continue to realize and further extend the cost savings of single-sourcing, the company needs to move to a document database.