Expressroom Document Assistant

The Expressroom Option to Use Standard Business Software to Publish Content to Your Web Site

Document Assistant is an optional module for Expressroom that allows standard business software, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Adobe Photoshop, to publish Web content. By allowing Web authors to use familiar software tools to generate content, Document Assistant eliminates the need for users to learn new Web publishing software, dramatically speeding content production times and simplifying the process of creating and updating content.

Document Assistant was designed to address a familiar business challenge facing Web administrators: how to reduce the technical complexity and lower the costs of managing complex, fast-changing sites.

In today’s business environment, Web content is generated by a variety of contributors -- executives and managers, writers and photographers, graphic artists and designers, programmers and applications developers. All of them are familiar, and are usually experts, with the software they use to generate the materials.

But here’s the “gotcha” – they are not all Web pros. Getting their respective products to their organization’s Web site usually means one of two bad choices – training the content providers on the array of packages used to format Web content, or turning the content over to a Webmaster or other IT staff to handle the software coding needed to convert the original material into a Web-friendly format, and one that is designed specifically for the target Web site.

Either option involves significant time and expense. Training content providers on software that is, at best, peripheral to their core expertise is an organizational waste of time. And leaving the necessary formatting and coding chores to the IT staff to prepare site-specific content inevitably leads to a “Webmaster” bottleneck, particularly for those organizations that need to update Web content on a near-constant basis.

Expressroom Document Assistant Bridges the Gap Between Business Software and Web Content

The Document Assistant module for Expressroom offers a new way for those producing Web materials to remain in their familiar software environments and still flow content to their organization’s site.

Document Assistant takes the files produced by standard business applications, such as Microsoft Office® programs, including Word and Excel, and other popular business applications such as WordPerfect®, StarOffice® and Photoshop®, into content tailored for a specific Web site. This new capability dramatically speeds the process of getting content to a Web site and significantly opens up the process of preparing site content to users who aren’t Web specialists.

There is virtually no learning curve with Document Assistant - users remain in the software environment they are familiar with, while Document Assistant takes care of all the back-end conversions to make the content Web-ready.

How does Document Assistant work?