Benefits overview

• comprehensive database content is to be published for use on paper or on electronic media,
• paper and electronic data usage are to co-exist in parallel,
• publications are dynamic, multi-lingual, contain personalized or frequently changing parts,
• where new sophisticated electronic applications involve nicely formatted database content.

Productivity
Summerizing the many substantial benefits offered by ElePub it must be stated that ElePub:

• dramatically boosts your productivity by a factor of
  • 10 to about 50 compared with using conventional DTP software
  • 2 to about 10 (!!!) compared with database traditional publishing applications
• truely revolutionizes the creation of multi-lingual and/or personalized publications
• enables brand new applications for electronically distributing and using nicely formatted database content over and on the Internet and/or via CD-ROM.

Special benefits
As a rule of thump one can say that the more your publications and applications are any of this:

• database-oriented, i. e. rely on on the contents of one or several of your databases, and
• dynamic or frequently changing
• multi-lingual
• personalized
• multi-page
• published in a short copy deadline
• involve electronic applications using formatted data
• and asking for permanent update and frequent communication with a central database

...the greater ElePub's benefits will be for you and the more ElePub will increase your productivity!

New applications
In fact, some of unique features of ElePub are preconditions for enabling new applications based on and involving the use of nicely formatted database contents. Click here for further details.

Targeted industries and users
While database publishing is important to most industries, the types of source data, of publications and required output formats, and the desired degree of personalization and customization will undoubtedly vary depending on industry-specific needs, customs and standards.

Although ElePub Object Publishing will substantially increase productivity in almost any situation where desk-top or database publishing are in use or could be applied there are still some industries who will profit even more from switching to the next generation of publishing technology. This are:

• manufacturing
• distribution and wholesale
• graphics services
• printing and publishing
• B2B electronic business in general

The following web pages below this main menu discuss in more detail the various benefits for the many publication types and application types, for which ElePub is well suitable.

Manufacturing companies typically also face significant technical product documentation challenges for both customer and internal information exchange.

Today's situation is that the information needed for catalog production and technical documentation is generally contained in several different commercial and technical databases, which are rarely automatically interconnected. Much worse, some of the needed content is still stored in unstructured files of DTP (desk-top-publishing) software, which are absolutely inaccessible for automatic electronic processes.

Important assets, such as graphics and word processing files associated with products, are often housed in different databases and on several file servers. A central content management system is the rare exception. And finally some of the needed data and document sources is part of, or must interface with, an Enterprise Resource Planning, order processing and/or stock control system.

Distribution and wholesale
The publishing requirements of distribution and wholesale companies are comparatively easy to describe: take those of a typical manufacturing company, subtract the technical documentation part and multiply the result by the given number of suppliers and you will have publishing needs of a wholesale and distribution company!

In theory this are the requirements, in praxis they can impossibly be met. As a result, distribution companies have little choice but rely on their supplier's publications. This significantly decreases their ability to maintain a distinction from their competition.

ElePub and EleStore offer a first time ever opportunity for dealers to create their own specific publications at a fraction of the previous costs. They can even use their supplier's existing catalogs in DTP formats and thereby dramatically ease the creation of their own catalogs.

Graphics service companies
What larger manufacturers mostly do in their internal graphics and advertising department is the primary business task of graphics service companies and free-lancers. Most of them are rather small or medium size and face a tough competition and constantly increasing requirements for publications covering several media if not even for multiple applications using the same content.

Therefore, everything previously said about manufacturers is true even more for graphics service companies. They must make a living from what the bigger guys do as an internal service. The more demanding is the need for highest efficiency and productivity and for a versatile re-usage both of the customer's content but even more so of your previous design and formatting work.

Special ElePub and EleStore versions for graphics service companies offer a new and unique opportunity to not only offer your customers brand new services but to permanently tie your customers to your services at the same time.

This enables new forms of business relations eliminating the need to fight for every new contract! And it enables you to fulfill your customer's requirements for "new media" publications and applications because you can profit from a family of products, which come along with ElePub, such as Elecat, the electronic paper product catalog system, or from our Internet related products, for which ElePub can act as server.

Printing and publishing industry
In the printing and publishing industry you have basically the same requirements as graphics service companies because their activities are very often also a major part of yours. But additionally publishing companies have some more very special requirements where ElePub and EleStore will be very helpful for you.

One area is multilingualism where ElePub will boost your productivity. Please refer to the next chapter for further details and to the other parts of our other publications where this subject is covered in many places.

Re-using existing DTP documents is another area for ElePub and EleStore.

ElePub is capable of:

• reading QuarkXpress documents (soon also InDesign and Framemaker)
• store them entirely in ElePub objects
• automatically extract content into EleStore
• make the content available for translation in special safe EleStore versions
• eliminating any need for translators to work in a DTP software with the risk of changing the layout
• re-unite unchanged format and changed content
• and finally create new QuarkXpress documents with unchanged format.

FrameMaker and InDesign will be supported soon in the same way.

Of course, wherever needed the format could also be changed but often the goal is to exactly maintain a given layout and to only have the content translated or changed. This is a great solution for translating non-fiction books such as cookbooks or travel guides, simply all books which are strongly dominated by non-text layout and pictures.

New media for the printing and publishing industry
"New media" is another area where ElePub and EleStore will help you. Although print output has always been essential and will be for a long time to come, data-driven publishing has become an important new challenge for the printing and publishing industry. With increasing importance of just-in-time delivery of publications ("print-on-demand") and an ever increasing number of required media and output formats, it has become a necessity to separate the content from the structure and format of source documents.

Supporting multi languages in general
The world is multi-lingual and there is no danger that this might ever change! Unfortunately, most of the publishing tools were developed in the only major one-language environment of this world, where the decisive people rarely think of the necessity for multilingualism and where most people subliminally expect the whole world to use American English.

As a consequence multilingualism is not at all supported by any of today's tools. Basically this means: if you really want it in another language then do everything all over again from scratch. But that's not the way things are in every other part of the world!

ElePub and EleStore were planned and developed from the very beginning to fully support multi-lingual contents and publications. We think that this is only natural and logical and not because of their European heritage.

Therefore, wherever publications are to be produced in more than just one language ElePub will truly revolutionize your procedures and cut your efforts down to some few percent of what was previously needed. For details please refer to the various places in this whitepaper and in the other documentation about our products where multilingualism is covered. You can't miss it!