Worked on some really cool changes for the content management system we develop. This is going to be extremely useful and clever.
OK, since you asked so nicely I feel I have to tell you.
I've come up with a way to group documents and their associated stylesheets, scripts, etc, stored in the system into "processes". These processes can be handled exactly in the same way as the documents they describe, they can be version handled and traced and manipulated, which allows us to reproduce not only old versions of the documents (which we already do, btw, and do well), but also anything done with them.
I know, you must be as thrilled as I am.
What does this mean for the financial auditors? A better "paper" trail or does it make it easier to juggle the books?
A paper trail we already have, in other words document versioning, that is, locating and handling an old version. What this adds is a process trail.
The "documents" actually consist of reusable modules of various sizes and versions. The system is designed for technical information, say, service information for cars or planes or drilling platforms, where you need to reuse as much as possible of previous material, instead of rewriting or copying and pasting text.
They say printed documentation for a Boeing 747 would weigh more than the plane itself, so there is no way to write (or copy and paste) all that information from scratch. You want to reuse as much as possible from the older planes and only write new stuff when needed.
So... The documents we handle in our system can be automatically converted to almost any media or format, from paper to web to smartphones, etc. They are converted to those formats using various scripts and stylesheets, but given a published document in, say, PDF, you haven't been able to determine exactly how it came to be a PDF with that specific layout because there was no way to know what processes were used to arrive there.
Until now.
I know, it doesn't necessarily make sense when described like this. But trust me, it's very cool.