The road to single-sourcing: a case study

MetaSolv Software, Inc. is a software company that creates software for telecommunications companies. With the current downturn in the US telecommunications industry, the company has begun selling outside the USA, creating the need for translations into multiple languages as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Additionally, because the company has grown quickly from a startup into a mid-sized software firm, many processes are undefined and oftentimes, redundant. To solve these problems, the Documentation department at MetaSolv began moving toward single-sourcing and content management. Single-sourcing is a method of structuring and storing information for reuse. Units of information are stored in a database repository (called a content management system) and can be assembled into multiple documents of different output types. By using a content management system, one author writes content that can be reused by all other authors to assemble their documents. This method saves time and money because information is not duplicated and documents are more consistent. The paper describes the path MetaSolv Software is taking toward a complete single-sourcing environment