Thompson Rivers University’s Instructional Development and Research Group (IDRG) has nominated Bluestream’s XDocs CMS for a Educational Technology User Group (ETUG) technology innovation ward.
Background
The Instructional Development and Research Group (IDRG) has been involved in the XML/SGML domains for several years and has a robust culture of structured document management in both forms. At present, beautifully formatted PDF documents are generated for print and complex, multi-page websites from a common XML document.
Course information is maintained in SGML files that are rendered to multiple use-cases for web, print, and expressions against the requirements of various relational databases.
The work flow model is punctuated by episodes of human intervention to extract XML files from the current repository and execute them against XSL and XSL-FO transformations to produce the final products. It has long been desired to store structured content in a Content Management System (CMS) that supportes on-the-fly generation of both web- and print-based presentation modes against multiple use-cases. However, the functionality of the present XML CMS does not extend itself into these areas.
An XML database was needed to store the ever-growing XML document base that could be extended into a CMS that would fulfill the shortcomings of the present system. Bluestream’s native XML database and their burgeoning XDocs CMS provided the needed functionality while keeping the overall maintenance costs down.
For the past ten months IDRG has been working with Bluestream to identify and describe requirements for an XML content management interface that equaled the above described needs and provided all the extra functionality that was lacking.
