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This section overviews the tools that can help make document management efficient. They can be broadly divided into three main categories: Web-based authoring tools, enterprise 2.0 tools, and XML-based tools. A company can choose from tools within these categories to cover its own unstructured knowledge space depending upon the type of legacy applications involved.
Web-Based Productivity: Authoring tools (or office productivity tools) are applications that allow for viewing, creating, and modifying general office documents (e.g., presentations and spreadsheets). Traditionally, this the realm of desktop applications such as the Microsoft Office suite. However, those suffer from various drawbacks including cost, difficulty in sharing and collaborating, platform dependency, and a lack of underlying metadata or structure. By contrast, a whole new breed of Web-based office tools available at much lower cost offers improved collaboration with the same security.
Most browser-based tools are platform independent replicas of legacy office tools on the Web. However, some can provide a first step in transitioning from legacy desktop applications to Web-based tools:
Google Docs (http://docs.google.com), available as an online service from Google, provides a simple interface for creating and editing documents. Its collaboration and sharing options are noteworthy. Searching documents is also easy, using Google's search engine to make finding documents fast.
Zoho (www.zoho.com), like Google, is an online service that provides various productivity and collaboration applications. It is one of the most comprehensive Web-based office suites available.
OpenGoo (www.opengoo.com) is open-source software that provides collaboration, communication, and productivity tools all bundled in the same package. Unlike Zoho and Google, it can be installed on a corporate intranet.
Enterprise 2.0 Tools: In the next step, companies can try to leverage “enterprise 2.0” tools for better collaboration and knowledge management. The following types of tools can help. Table 1 summarizes key differences between legacy office tools and Web office tools (2).
Table 1: Comparing legacy with Web-based office toolsWikis and blogs provide an easy way to capture work-related knowledge and promote easy collaboration and knowledge sharing within an organization. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) best illustrates the power of collaborative writing.
Wikis enable quick content creation in which all team members can simultaneously work on the same document. This ensures that everybody has the latest information and can work together. Once a document is complete, different people within an organization can give feedback on it for an easy discussion in creating a knowledge-base. An added benefit is easy accessibility. A wiki/blog website can be accessed through any browser without the need for complex software installation. Wiki tools worth exploring are Screwturn (www.screwturn.eu) and XWiki (www.xwiki.org). The Cynapse (www.cynapse.com) integrated package is an evolved platform for collaboration that includes wikis, blogs, and document management.
Social bookmarking enables users to save relevant bookmarks with their own keywords and descriptions, making them available for rest of their organization to search. This builds an internal repository of useful websites for employees. Instead of using an external search engine to find relevant results from all over the web, employees can go directly to an internal bookmarking site and access the most relevant information saved by their colleagues. This saves time otherwise spent searching. It proves useful for intranet sites as well because employees can link to important graphs and reports generated from database queries. Other employees interested in the same information can find those reports on the social bookmarking site. Table 2 lists some of these tools/sites, and Table 3 lists potential applications of “enterprise 2.0” tools in the biopharmaceutical knowledge space.
Table 2: Social bookmarking toolsXML–Based Authoring Tools: Extensible mark-up language (XML) is an open standard managed by World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org) that enables generation of richly structured documents and defining content as a set of various components rather than one monolithic document (3). The components can be defined once and linked to other documents for reuse for easy creation of documents that otherwise can involve cutting and pasting the same content over and over.
For example, CGXP documents (SOPs, batch production records, and reports) typically include certain sections (e.g., headers, footers, precautions, and process descriptions) that are common across many documents. Those sections are traditionally repeated every time a new document is created by cutting and pasting from earlier documents. Whenever one is changed, all documents must be rewritten to incorporate the change(s). Not only does this involve much time and human effort, but it is also prone to errors. All this can be managed in a more efficient way by creating documents in XML with repeatable sections written only once and linked to all documents. A change is made only once, and all linked documents are updated automatically. So XML-based authoring makes content creation easier and facilitates version control.
Some level of in-house knowledge about XML can enable an organization to leverage upon this technology's potential benefits. Table 4 lists some tools that can help you move toward XML-based document management. XML-based document authoring can help companies migrate toward XML-based common technical documents (CTDs) for electronic submissions mandated now by many regulatory agencies.
Table 4: XML-based authoring tools
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