In theory, the digital workflow makes things easier. Often, though, publishers have to go through multiple steps to get content (which is typically created in Microsoft Word) into the digital workflow or to get different applications working together.

XML server provider Mark Logic has introduced two services designed to streamline the digital workflow. The first is MarkLogic Connector for SharePoint, which automatically mirrors content from Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 to MarkLogic's server. Once in MarkLogic, users can create XML-based applications that make it easier to find and repurpose individual content components.

Users can also set up a folder in SharePoint and anything dropped into that folder will automatically be pushed to the Mark Logic server and converted into XML. Then it’s available to any content application built on top of Mark Logic, including dynamic delivery and syndication.

“There might be multiple authors saving work into it directly and anything that gets pushed in there automatically gets indexed and processed by Mark Logic,” John Kreisa, director of industry solutions for Mark Logic, told FOLIO:. “We see this as important in tough economic times. Publishers are looking to save money and want to get away from some of the bloated and expensive enterprise content management systems.”

Mark Logic’s second new service, Toolkit for Word, allows organizations to include any content application they build on Mark Logic into Microsoft Word.

“What that means is they do all the granular level creation,” said Kreisa. “For example, they might be authoring content using Word and they might want to take advantage of other content they’ve created. They can grab the content application plug-in, search across all their content, and grab components that they want. This dynamically assembles new content with the repository behind the scenes.”

The service also creates intelligent authoring. “Most people are cutting and pasting—they open two different documents and try to do that assembly themselves,” Kreisa said. “Now organizations can build content applications they want for that dynamic assembly. They can tag things in the content and apply custom metadata that can be loaded into the Microsoft Office document inside the XML documents.”

Toolkit for Word is distributed as open source under an Apache 2.0 license.