If you require to generate and maintain XML-based data or documents then one of the decisions you'll have to make will be how to author it. This may be a new area for you - we can provide expert resources to:
If you're already familiar with XML authoring, we invite you to look at our Custom Authoring Solutions. If your requirement is to prepare and publish business and technical documentation, or if you build Windows Help (CHM files), take a look at The Manuals Machine.
With the emergence of XML as a popular open standard, numerous general-purpose tools have emerged for authors to enter and edit content. Technical editors such as those used for HTML and program code also now include specific support for XML as a content type
Some of these products can reference a document schema, and guide or force the user to provide content that matches the schema rules.
SMH Systems has considerable experience of these tools and their shortcomings (we use them for our owm development work). If your users are technical and your documents relatively straightforward, a free or low-cost validating editor may be all that you need. We can advise on the possibilities, and the limits, and develop the schema for you.
You can build custom solutions that can offer much greater user appeal and productivity through convenient and relevant user interfaces, and the ability to include validations, lookups and business rules. But these all require programming of some kind, using:
As part of the solution you may be able to supply stylesheets, to provide presentation views of the content under editing.
The programming environments usually produce standalone executables that can be deployed quite simply, or run from a network server. The macro and forms approaches generally execute within the product that was used for development (such as Microsoft Word or Excel), which therefore has to be available at runtime. This does raise some issues that may increase cost, complicate deployment, impair stability or performance, and raise long-term support concerns. Our custom solutions employ an innovative 'zero-footprint' approach that largely eliminates these issues.
We offer two approaches:
For both options we can either provide a complete solution, or we can contribute XML / XSLT / XSD expertise to work with your staff who are already experienced in development of scripts and macros. We can also train your staff to maintain and develop HTML Applications.
Never heard of HTML Applications? Click for links on our Downloads and Resources pages.
Want to learn more? Click here.