Challenges: Some Ugly Truths
The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition.
Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper.
A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition.
And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5]
But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
Gary Edwards on 01 Apr 12Interesting chart describes the massive transition of small and medium sized businesses to the Cloud. Cloud based eMail and messaging leads the way. Top two reasons for the great transition? Cost reduction and productivity improvement. Unfortunately this article fails to describe what this great transition to the Cloud means to legacy productivity systems - most of which are provided and provisioned by Microsoft. What happens to desktop and workgroup based business systems when the local data and transaction processing server systems are moved to the Cloud? How are desktop and workgroup systems re written or migrated? Another factor missing from this article is any discussion of what happens to productivity when communications, content and collaborative computing are interoperably entwined throughout the application layer? We know that the legacy Windows productivity platform seriously lacked communications capabilities. This fact greatly reduced expected productivity gains. excerpt: Microsoft commissioned the study of 3,000 small and medium sized businesses in 13 countries. The survey was conducted by Wayland, Mass.-based research firm Edge Strategies. The most commonly used cloud services are email, instant messaging, voice communications, and backup. Edge also looked at SMB cloud plans over the next three years and the same cloud services also are in the IT plans of those embracing the cloud. From this data, it certainly could be argued that SMBs seem to be quick to embrace the cloud in order to enhance communication. It makes sense: in small business, communication is key to ensure rapid growth. The biggest motivators for migration to the cloud among SMBs is to save money (54 percent), followed by increases in productivity. Decision makers also mentioned flexibility as a fairly common response. Of those already using the cloud, 59 percent reported productivity increases as a result. SMB cloud adoption begins to acclerate, study finds http:/
