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Multi-Channel Communications: The Content Publishing Workflow Challenge

Introduction
With 50% of business content requiring multi-channel delivery, organizations are beginning to centralize their content strategies and infrastructures, utilize new delivery channels, and standardize their content workflows.

InfoTrends new study, Multi-Channel Communications: The Content Publishing Workflow Challenge, provides vendors and users with the information necessary to communicate more consistently and efficiently through multiple touch points.

How People are Sending Content

According to the study, respondents were asked to indicate how much of their multi-channel content was being delivered through various channels. E-mail, print, internally-facing sites, and externally-facing sites (in respective order) were used most often.

Figure 1: Roughly what percentage of your multi-channel
content is delivered through the following channels?

Throughout history, print media has been the number one channel for delivering content so e-mail's rise to the top is very significant. Printed media, while still important, will likely remain static due to higher comparative advantage of investing in other channels. Internally-facing content such as employee-related communications, which ranked high in terms of "needs", will likely surpass the printed media channel within a couple of years.

Notably, however, the percentage of documents delivered by internally-facing Web sites is quite size-specific—while the largest corporations indicated that a whopping 60% of content uses this channel the smallest organizations indicated a mean of only 31%. Not surprisingly, a similar but slighter trend was seen for the external Web site channel. Meanwhile, the print and e-mail channels were fairly consistent across company size.

Standards

With a range of options and technologies available, it is important to assess how organizations are approaching product and solution evaluation and selection. Standards have played and continue to play a critical role in content-based solutions. To understand which standards are being incorporated into solutions, respondents were asked to identify which standards will be used in their multi-channel communication solutions.

Figure 2: Which of the following standards are you using in
your multi-channel communication solutions?

It is no surprise that PDF was cited by so many respondents. We continuously see how pervasive PDF is from study to study. More encouraging is an almost equal representation by XML. As seen throughout this study, the use of XML for multi-channel communication purposes continues to rise. This is further emphasized by industry-specific schemas and XQuery cited by more than 10% of the respondents. While we do not have historical comparisons for these figures, our anecdotal evidence indicates growth.

The use of Flash by more than one-third of the respondents points to a growing need for compelling, interactive electronic channels that engage end-users. With its explosive deployment on mobile devices and through Web-based social networking sites such as MySpace, Flash will continue its cross-device, cross-platform diffusion through the digital marketplace, and providers of the richest content will take notice (if they have not already).

The preceding is an excerpt from InfoTrends’ report entitled “Multi-Channel Communications: The Content Publishing Workflow Challenge.” The complete document is available immediately.To learn more about the report or to make a purchase, visit our online store or contact Alison Hipp at +1 , ext. 126 or .

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