Chapter - 1 : Oracle Documaker Mobile Overview

Documaker Mobile allows businesses to utilize the same content created for paper-style output for responsive, device aware, mobile delivery. Documaker Mobile provides the ability to render output for iOS, Android, laptop, and desktop devices by leveraging existing Documaker capabilities including content, triggers, and data mapping.

Businesses have traditionally delivered complex documents to their customers using print delivery or electronic versions of that same printed output. Consumers are demanding more interactive documents that are searchable, easy to navigate, and responsive to their reading device including smaller mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

With Documaker Mobile you can:

  • Provide mobile context to existing content
  • Reformat print page-styled content into mobile device responsive HTML
  • Reformat print page-styled content into XML that can be transformed with industry standard mobile device responsive style-sheets

Documaker Mobile enables content from Documaker to be formatted as device responsive HTML5 and in other in UTF-8 based text formats such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) or Comma Separated Values (CSV), XHTML, JSON, etc. and enables user defined data schemas to define the output nomenclature.

Oracle Documaker Mobile produces output in a format easily targeted for use on mobile devices. Traditionally Documaker has provided high fidelity output that is device independent. This ensures that regardless of output target (printer or PDF) the recipients will receive the exact content, structure, and layout defined in Documaker. Documaker Mobile does not follow a print page fidelity paradigm as other output targets have in the past. The output from Documaker Mobile diverges from the printed format and varies its presentation depending on the (mobile) device that it is viewed on. This type of output is known as responsive because it responds by restructuring its presentation to support the device on which it is being viewed. The objective is for the Documaker Mobile output to be mobile device responsive by supporting features such as changing presentation styles depending on the size of the viewport of the device on which the presentation is being viewed.

Documaker Mobile output is a merge of the formset content as triggered for a transaction through Documaker with specially prepared files for mobile such as XML snippets, XSL style sheets, CSS style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. Documaker Mobile is responsible for performing the merger of Documaker formset content with a set of mobile definitions to produce mobile targeted results based on rules defined in Documaker Studio.

Documaker Mobile repurposes the hard earned content knowledge embedded in your legacy paper based publishing systems with state-of-the-art support for web based mobile document publishing.

To know more about the operating system and infrastructure software which is needed to run Oracle Documaker Mobile See Oracle Documaker System Requirements guide section “Oracle Documaker Mobile”.

A high level view is presented here.

Image represents Oracle documaker mobile output.
Figure 1.1 - Oracle Documaker Mobile Output

User Roles and Responsibilities

Generating documents relies on someone to draft the content of the output sent to customers. This activity is typically done by users of Documaker Studio, Word, InDesign, or other content tools that allow these users to identify the content, variable information, and intended document recipients. Individuals responsible for developing the document content may also be referred as template designers, business analysts, or various other terms but for purposes of this document, they are called Document Authors. There is an additional role introduced with Documaker Mobile and that is the role of the Mobile Author, who designs, develops, and implements the output intended for a mobile user. The Mobile Author works with the mobile strategy team to identify a content layout for optimal user experience on mobile devices.

Mobile Author

To implement a mobile strategy for document output, the Mobile Author designs and develops output intended for a web or mobile user. This user plays the role of a web user interface developer and should be skilled in the following:

  • Web based technologies and tools such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver, Eclipse Foundation's IDE for Java EE Developers, Notepad++ or other tools for manipulating text based syntax conforming to Web Standards.
  • Ability to implement web pages via HTML/HTML5, CSS/CSS3, JavaScript and other Standards based technologies such as XML and XSLT.
  • Experience in developing Single Page Architecture (SPA) based interactive web pages.
  • An understanding of the company’s existing web standards that can be used to leverage Web assets a company already has in place, including style standards and methodologies for securely distributing content to customers over the Web including knowledge about company Web portals.

The company that implements a mobile strategy with Documaker must also pull in dedicated representatives from their Web group or source these resources from within their group so the output from Documaker can be designed to work with the Web presence already established. If no Web presence is already in place Oracle offers tools such as WebCenter Sites and Portal that provide a complete tool set for creating and managing Web presence.