How easy is Document Assistant to use?
In a word, "very." With Expressroom’s Document Assistant, your authors and editors can continue to work in a third-party application they already know and use (like Microsoft Word), so they need not learn how to use yet another content-entry product. Our staff will help your organization to get Document Assistant configured and set up, and we’ll train your administrators and developers how best to maintain and extend your products as you require.
What do you mean when you say, “Document Assistant is a server-side solution”?
Document Assistant runs with the Expressroom server or as a Web service. This means that there is nothing for you to install on your desktop in order to use Document Assistant. There is no special application, no extensions to Microsoft Office, no libraries to install. This is good news for everyone. It’s one less thing to install on every desktop and it doesn’t interfere with other applications. Also, when a new file format needs to be supported, it’s added on the server and instantly available for everyone to take advantage of.
What about this “WebDrive” application that I was told to install?
One of the ways you can work with Expressroom and Document Assistant is via a WebDAV interface. WebDAV is a standard that computers use to access storage on other machines. WebDrive is an optional application that allows users to access WebDAV servers as if they were local drives on Windows machines. If you’re using Windows XP or Vista, you can also use Microsoft’s Web Folder interface.
What file formats does Document Assistant support?
Document Assistant supports well over 100 different file formats. However, most people are most interested in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Document Assistant supports all recent versions of these files, since the Word 97 era.
How does Document Assistant work?
This is covered in the For Developers section.
How do I configure Document Assistant?
Document Assistant is a complex system that transforms source files to site-specific XML. While the Document Assistant documentation explains how the transformations and elements are used and configured, System Administrators should coordinate with Industrial Medium when making changes to their configuration.
What about just using the "Save to Web" features of some content applications?
With Document Assistant, you can enter your content into your favorite third-party application, like Microsoft Word, just as you are used to doing. Document Assistant will take care of the rest of the operations to convert your content to a viable Web page, as soon as you hand it over to Expressroom.
Far more powerful than the "Save as Web Page" feature found in most Microsoft Office applications, Document Assistant eliminates the need for additional manual tweaking of the output code with which many Webmasters are all too familiar. Even the "Convert to XML" feature found in the latest versions of Microsoft Office and other programs does not finish the task of preparing content for Web publication. In contrast, Document Assistant performs all the format translations needed for a specific Web site.
Do I have to cut-and-paste my content into Expressroom Document Assistant?
Document Assistant eliminates the time-consuming "cut-and-paste" method of entering Web content into a content management system. Your people can continue to use the content-entry applications they already know, drop their documents into Expressroom, and let Document Assistant make the necessary transformations to them to render the information in pages on your Web site.