Standard Bank has turned to Avantstar`s HTML Transit to create and publish its policies and procedures on the intranet, allowing the bank to reduce its development costs as well as minimise the time involved in site maintenance.
Standard Bank uses its intranet for, among other things, publishing company policies and procedures with policies and procedures hosting almost 9 000 files of which between 50 to 300 need to be updated each week. Thus, Standard Bank required a product that simplifies upgrades and accepts content submissions in a variety of formats.
Using HTML Transit, Standard Bank specifies standard business documents as the source for its intranet. The software reads the content from these source documents, recreates the content in HTML or XML, and publishes the results to the intranet.
"When the content in the source documents changes, you can update the site with HTML Transit by merely pushing a button. The result is a site that is easy to maintain, contains up-to-date information, displays consistent behaviour and appearance and has reliable links," says Simon Campbell-Young, MD of local Avantstar distributor, CompuTrolley.com.
Having previously had to manually convert content to HTML, this process was not only tedious but created a fundamental content management problem for Standard Bank. The hand-tweaked HTML version, or a Save As HTML version, tended to become a separate source document rather than simply a rendition of the original.
Furthermore, when documents are added using this process, navigation links to next and previous pages and from reference documents such as Tables of Contents must be manually updated. HTML Transit eliminates these problems by automatically picking up on and implementing changes.
Standard Bank started using HTML Transit a few years ago and staff believe that the product has become increasingly user-friendly with each upgrade. The templates are also a bit different and have allowed the bank to redesign the look and feel of the intranet without a lot of man-hours or intense effort.
HTML Transit lets users pair documents with Transit Templates, which re-purpose content for online use. These templates can be customised using the user interface or with XML authoring tools. They provide complete control over font sizes and colours, paragraph formatting, scripts, navigational constructs and buttons, and the inclusion or suppression of content.
It also offers the opportunity to transform and optimise content for on-screen delivery in standard browsers and has the ability to chop information into screen size chunks with a consistent look and feel. Standard Bank is looking at packages such as HTML Central in order to further enhance the automation of its intranet. This product allows for the automatic publication of Web sites, by specifying directories in an organisation, where content can be collected so that designated individuals can all drag and drop documents into these directories. However, that is a long-term prospect and subject to evaluation of the product.
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