Competitive
Editing Word documents
Does YAWC Online support images?
Yes. You can place images anywhere on your web page, simply using Microsoft Word to either insert or link an image to a document. Most web-based CMSs have very restricted support for images.
Does YAWC Online support tables?
Yes. You can place tables anywhere on your web page, simply using the table tools in Microsoft Word. Complex tables, with spanned row and column cells, and any cell alignment, are supported. Most web-based CMSs have very restricted support for tables, and very awkward user interfaces for creating and editing them.
YAWC Online service
Is YAWC Online a Content Management System?
No, YAWC Online is a Content Maintenance System, but lacks many features that are standard in a typical CMS. However, YAWC Online can be combined with a hosted CMS service to give you the best of both worlds – easy content editing in Word, and the site management features of a CMS.
Why would I rent YAWC Online when I can buy YAWC Pro?
YAWC Pro is better value if one person manages a website and works on a single PC. However, in most scenarios this is not the case.
- Maintenance of different areas of a website is delegated to different people.
- You don't want to or can't install, configure and manage custom software installations on all PCs belonging to people who maintain parts of your site.
- You need to maintain the site from any PC in any location.
Word authoring interface
- Instead of custom styles, YAWC uses standard Word styles as much as possible (e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2). This means that using Word outline mode, inserting a Table of Contents, and using the Document Map feature, all work properly.
- Self-assessment interactions are contained in Word tables, instead of courseGenies use of dialog boxes and XML markup. This makes editing, printing and maintaining the assessments much easier, and allows richer markup to be used within them.
- The YAWC Word template contains a variety of ways to apply markup, including menus, keyboard shortcuts, and toolbar icons, making it very easy to use.
- There are no special XML characters to be escaped (e.g. & and <) in text, as in courseGenie, and we can convert complex tables with both merged rows and columns.
- We have developed VBA macros to convert courseGenie material into YAWC format, to lower migration costs.
Word to HTML conversion
- YAWC Online runs runs on a fast central server, and uses a commercial Word to XML converter, which is fast and very reliable.
- YAWC Online supports conversion of Word documents created on Word 97, Word 98 for the Macintosh, and also simple Powerpoint slides.
- YAWC Online has a number of built-in checks on the converted content, including accessibility, HTML validation, broken links, and metadata content.
- As a client-server architecture, the overall cost of deployment and support for institutions is lower, as no local software needs to be installed, configured or maintained on individual PCs (just a Word template).
- As a central server, YAWC Online can be easily integrated with existing IT infrastructure such as CMSs and LMSs, so it can act as an invisible back-end, allowing authors to upload Word documents to a CMS and have the CMS send them for conversion.
- It supports previews and publishing via FTP, so an author can immediately see how content looks, and have it published directly by YAWC in a single simple step, rather than downloading the files, and uploading them to the target webserver or CMS.
Final output
- It generates accessible HTML (for example HTML forms use labels).
- It supports a variety of output formats including converting equations into MathML, DocBook, and other XML DTDs.
- It is easy to customise output to suit particular needs, as it uses XHTML templates and XSLT as the programming languages.
How is YAWC different from Frontpage or Dreamweaver
Users
- With YAWC Online users don’t need to be trained in Frontpage (FP) or Dreamweaver (DW).
- Users don’t need to know HTML to use YAWC
Administrators
- You can control the format of web content process
- You can manage the uploading process
- There are less formatting errors with YAWC
- You don’t have to allow users have ftp access to your website, making it more secure.
Managers
- Low training costs
- Low licensing costs