There is a clear need for technology that best supports the unique challenges some companies face in creating, maintaining, and distributing the voluminous content that supports complex products in the field.

Organizations with this challenge should look beyond single-source publishing to a more rigorous program of reusing their content across the many content products they produce. They should consider encoding their content in XML and adopting content management systems that will most effectively leverage the XML-encoded content for reuse.

The key for this is a content management system that provides the necessary technology to truly support component content management and reuse. Such a system would enable flexible reuse--where components at any point in the content hierarchy can be easily created, updated, managed, combined, recombined, and linked. Only when the underlying system is functional enough will organizations have mechanisms for ongoing, flexible use of their content over its long lifecycle.