GUIguide™ is a rich, coherent model for capturing, managing, and delivering design knowledge within an organization. Features like anywhere authoring, role-based security, sophisticated content management and search utilities allow organizations to be efficient and accurate.
Design Repository
GUIguide™ works to solve this problem by placing design knowledge in a central, web-based location through a set of core systems, all of which are delivered and managed through the GUIguide™ web top user interface. These core systems include: Content Management for designing and presenting the design knowledge, Workflow and Process Automation for applying traditional publishing “due diligence” processes to the creation of design knowledge content, while still allowing anyone to be a potential content author, Role-Based Security for securing the production, review, and management of design knowledge throughout your enterprise and Syndication for extending your design knowledge content to Internet business partners, Classic System Solutions, and remote teams.
Content Management
At the core of any large scale, web knowledge base is a system for managing the content and information assets. GUIguide™ provides this through it’s structured storage mechanism for the knowledge base content, overall approach to the design and layout of the knowledge base, utilities for indexing and searching the content, method for profiling the knowledge base content and the users, and intelligent and flexible content delivery environment.
GUIguide™ Knowledge Database
GUIguide™ uses an XML and relational database storage model. This enables developers to transparently store all types of content in a structured storage mechanism. The GUIguide™ standard database model allows you to easily integrate new content in the engine storage infrastructure.
Anywhere Authoring
A major goal of GUIguide™ is to allow users of the product to easily add new knowledge base content or to suggest changes to the existing content. In addition, users with the proper authority can easily manage the diverse types of content and information assets, allowing for an active knowledge base continually fed with new ideas.
Search and Indexing
An essential component of any large scale, content management is the strategic use of metadata or “site categories”. Metadata is used to tag, or mark knowledge content, with information that identifies the types of content currently in use. Site categories provide the foundation for a range of other capabilities, including higher level, end user browsing and searching tools, user interest profiling, and rich reporting on the most popular classes of knowledge base content.
GUIguide™ includes the following predefined site categories:
Solutions - Design pattern solutions targeted at specific platforms and users
Guidelines - Over 1200 industry and company-defined best practices, with visual examples.
Case Studies - Case-based content using real world scenarios. Case studies can be linked to specific guidelines and resources.
Checklists - Created for areas of concern or for auditing purposes. Checklist items can be linked to specific guidelines.
Resources – A flexible repository of resources available to developers and users, such as graphics, tables, and actual code style templates.
Booklist - Defined by category and includes ratings and links to an internal company book site or external book site, such as amazon.com.
Glossary - Provides definitions for commonly used terms for each knowledge domain with visual examples.
Content Delivery
As a final content management feature, GUIguide™ provides a set of tools that defines how content is delivered. GUIguide™ is built with flexible HTML templates for displaying content. This allows for easy customization of the final delivery mechanism to best suit your deployment platform. Additionally, GUIguide™ automatically detects the browser being used and presents the knowledge base content, so that it is optimized for that browser.
Workflow and Process Automation
The GUIguide™ workflow process empowers you to easily create, manage, and deploy knowledge and design content. GUIguide™ provides a structured, yet flexible workflow process, which allows any user to author content. The process supports multiple, simultaneous users and assures content is quickly managed and published with a high degree of accuracy.
Role-Based Security
As the web becomes the central platform for delivering knowledge to your workforce, the role of security and access control becomes central to how you deliver scalable, high quality knowledge assets to the enterprise. GUIguide™’s security features provide a rich and extensible set of role-based security services without requiring the use of cookies or local data stores.
User Authentication
Whether it is an Intranet site or where access to certain knowledge areas is from the public Internet, authentication may be needed to identify users and map security profiles to existing company policies. GUIguide™ provides the flexibility to require a secure login for all users or just users who need to change or manage knowledge base content.
Personalization
GUIguide™’s personalization services allow you to tailor content and searches to the individual, thus creating a more personal and productive work environment. This personalization allows each GUIguide™ user to create a “My Page” for the knowledge base that provides the user with links to favorite content or parts of the knowledge base.
Reporting
GUIguide™’s reporting center serves as the content manager’s view into their knowledge base. Accessible via the GUIguide™ Administrator, the reporting center provides a common environment for viewing standard reports and creating custom reports. Common reports include the site activity, content status, and content printing by a variety of filters. The report center also provides in-context editing, so that the content manager can quickly report and manage any content areas with ease.
Syndication
GUIguide™ employs a sophisticated XML-based syndication model that enables site-to-site relationships for delivering and sharing knowledge. As companies see the benefit of sharing their design knowledge with vendors and business partners, the GUIguide™ syndication services form a backbone of rich content and enterprise application integration efforts.
Continuous content updates
Just as your current web system has standard users or site members, in the age of syndication; your web system has “site affiliates”. Classic System Solutions views each company who purchases GUIguide™ with subscription services as a site affiliate. Site affiliates are your Internet-based business partners. They can be the vendors providing software for your organization, consultants on contract for specific projects, or subsidiaries in other countries with whom you share applications and the need for consistency among your IT platforms. You can assign each site affiliate a unique username and password, which then allows either an individual or a remote program to request or submit content to and from your design knowledge base.
Open and Flexible Knowledge Distribution
The GUIguide™ knowledge base provides an extremely open and flexible means for distributing design knowledge and guidelines within your organization and among your business partners. Its rich, open architecture and set of core systems provide an outstanding foundation to distribute “best practices” throughout your organization. Because GUIguide™ is built on the Allaire Cold Fusion platform; GUIguide™ is automatically open to integration and extensibility with most existing code or back-end applications within your corporate Intranet.