Review of Panagon Web Publisher

Introduction

Panagon Web Publisher is an application which can translate large stores of mixed-format documents into easily-readable web formats. If your company maintains a large collection of documents and wants to share them within the company for internal knowledge sharing then Panagon Web Publisher might be the tool for you. I was recently asked to test it out…

What it Can Do

Panagon Web Publisher may be one of the components in a larger solution with the FileNet Panagon Document Mangement System at its core. Although many of the good features come from use in conjunction with this system, it is not essential.

System Overview

The basic Panagon system is simple. You create "Publications" using a Panagon Web Publisher station. These publications contain a set of document templates, formatting rules to be applied to the source documents. You add source documents to the publication, then translate and publish them. The documents are copied from their original format into HTML pages, which are then linked together and indexed. If your documents are updated regularly then you can also run a Panagon Web Publisher server to automatically translate and publish at regular intervals.

Document Formats

So you have a lot of documents, but what formats do they have? Does your company run one standard software suite or a mixture of many? Panagon Web Publisher is set up to handle many formats including:

• Microsoft Office: Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint Presentations
• Lotus SmartSuite: Lotus Word Pro, Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Freelance Graphics
• ASCII Standard Text
• Adobe Framemaker
• Word Perfect
• Interleaf
• Lotus AmiPro
• Windows Write
• Rich Text Format
• Several graphics formats
• HTML & XML files

I tried several of these formats, mainly testing the Microsoft Office suite. Panagon Web Publisher seemed to handle the basics of each documents, and with a little configuration made each of them fairly acceptable as web documents.

There are several locations from which you can add documents, such as the hard disk, local network, FileNet Library and even the web. There are two ways of importing documents:

• Individually select documents from their source location - This allows custom formatting options to be set for each document
• Select a directory which Panagon Web Publisher will scan for documents and which automatically indexes everything that it finds there (based on criteria such as file extensions etc.)

Branding

Although it can handle many document formats, what are the customization options for the look and feel of the output pages? I was a little skeptical of Panagon Web Publisher at first, I doubted that it would have the flexibility of tools like Dreamweaver etc. Panagon Web Publisher does however have quite extensive formatting options. Output pages can be formatted in the following ways:

• Rules for source document elements - There are formatting options set in the templates that give instructions for the various "Styles" encountered. For example you can set "Every occurrence of the 'Heading 1' style should be set to color x, size y and font-face z"
• Graphic gallery sets - Panagon Web Publisher includes graphics at various points in the page to facilitate navigation between documents. There is a default range of graphics that comes with the installation, but you can design your own.
• Included HTML - Panagon allows you to include HTML in various places throughout the documents. This HTML can be coded into the template or stored in an external file for regular, easy updates.

I found the included HTML the most powerful for applying branding to the page. There were several applications of this HTML:

• Title bars - I included an HTML file with the headings for the basic site design, with the company logo, page heading and standard site-wide navigation links
• Navigation bar - Also in the header file I included a small table to act as a navigation bar, which also held the copyright statements.
• Footer - I included a footer at the bottom of every page with an email link and a few navigation options to the main site sections
• "Go to the Top" link - As some of the Word documents were quite lengthy I decided that a link to the top of the page would be useful at regular intervals. Panagon Web Publisher automatically places an anchor at the top which I could link to. I set up a formatting rule to include an HTML file containing a simple image as a link to the top of the document after every "Heading 1" element. After every element of this type my link to the top was inserted.

Additional features allow you to place "tokens" in your included HTML which are translated to specific values, when your documents are published. For example one token includes the relative path to the graphics directory for picture references. Some additional features for extracting document properties are also available when using Panagon Web Publisher in conjunction with the FileNet Panagon Document Management System.

Scheduling

Once you have set up all the formatting rules and imported your documents you can publish your web. All of the documents will be translated, linked and then published. This can be done manually, but you may want to set up a Panagon Web Publisher server which handles this automatically. You connect to the server, point it to the project file that contains your publication and then set the intervals at which you want to publish. The server will then take care of that whilst you work on keeping the information in your source documents current.

One advantage of this is that if you have lots of content authors, a directory item may be added to a publication, so that any documents saved in that folder will be automatically incorporated into the web site. This saves time and effort used in manual translation, and makes it much easier on the content authors (how hard is it to save the document in the correct folder??)

The Limitations

As with any program there are limitations. This may not be the tool to solve all your document access problems. There is still a need for professional web designers/managers to take care of your web site and ensure the operation runs smoothly.

The main problem that I encountered was the formatting of the source documents. People are sloppy, they don't like strict rules, and they certainly won't read the manual to find out how things work. "Styles" in Word are easy to define, Heading 1, Heading 2, Normal etc, but some people pay no attention to these and prefer to set the formatting by hand, increasing the font size here, changing the alignment there. This may mean that Word interprets these styles incorrectly (I found some documents with "header" style in the middle of the page). This means that the formatting will come out incorrectly and the Tables of Contents generated may contain the wrong text. Either you enforce stricter rules, have a better software training program, or employ someone to go through and correct mis-formatted documents.

Conclusion

If it is simple document translation that you are looking for then Panagon Web Publisher might be for you. If you are also looking for a document management system then you could try the FileNet Panagon Library system. I would suggest using it with other applications, perhaps as a sub-section to your main site. It's a good tool but there are other options.

Try: http://www.gohtm.com for simple document translation - They also offer a server-side component that may be more suited to your needs.