DOPE Suite product positioning
The document composition market can be broken down into two primary areas.
Forms based, transaction focused
Some of the products that fit into this area are DOC1, Papyrus, Extreme and Pres. Customers tend to be banks and telecoms, or other companies with a requirement for transaction lists and statements.
These products are designed for data driven documents such as statements, invoices and variable forms that include tables, graphics and numeric data and arithmetic calculations. These products were designed or have evolved from a template driven ethos and have tremendous capability in this area.
Customer requirements have driven the addition of text capabilities into this software over their lifecycle. Therefore transactional products can be used for documents but due to the limitations of the software design the documents are basically made up from templates/forms or fragments/sub sets of these templates/forms with variable data and other variables added dynamically.
Text based products
Products that fit into this area are IBM’s ASF, IBM’s DCF and DOPE. These products are designed for policy documents, booklets, personalised letters, schedules, appendices and the like.
They differ fundamentally to their forms based counterparts because they were developed from a publishing background. Their design is focussed on using data to create documents, booklets and personalised correspondence.
These products focus on layout and text management such as hyphenation, multiple columns and column balancing, bulleted or numbered lists, tables of contents, mixed fonts and sizes, embedding static and dynamic graphics, creating dynamic boxes, page n of m, and much more.
In short they create a dynamic page flow. The users of this type of software are authors rather than developers. They create objects for current and future documents, manage version control and date based text delivery.
Differences
Forms based products and text based products can be seen as very similar when considered on the basis of a feature list, and indeed as products they can be interchangeable.
The primary difference is the way the products deliver their capabilities and how easy it is to create and more importantly maintain and develop those applications. Anyone who’s tried doing balanced columns, page n of m and dynamic boxes in a forms based product will know what this means.
Likewise anyone that has done mathematic calculations and statement data listing in a text based product will understand. It’s not that either product can’t deliver either requirement; it’s that life for everyone concerned is far better with more flexiblility if the correct software is chosen for the type of tasks most common to the companies requirements.
If you’ve ever tried to do complex desktop publishing, even simple desktop publishing, in MS Word you will know that’s it’s possible but takes many times more effort than doing it in MS Publisher. Likewise you could use MS Publisher to write a novel but using MS Word would save you enough time to get part way through your second novel.
“Horses for courses” as the saying goes.