Patent ID: 8806357

Claim:
A template authoring system comprising: a computer system executing an application business component view that provides an interface to a user to select templates, wherein the templates are business configuration objects stored on a storage device that include variants, variant content, and schemas identifying information in a database corresponding to placeholder variables in the variant content to create customized documents, and wherein the templates are organized as nodes organized in accordance with a multi-node hierarchical deep schema; the computer system executing a dialog that provides a wrapper for each template to be edited by launching a server page; and the computer system executing a host using controls to provide authoring abstractions for selected authoring applications to edit the templates while abstracting the underlying multi-node hierarchical deep schema to a flat schema and converting the flat schema to a markup language map such that the template appears as multiple documents it will produce when customized using information in the database, wherein abstracting the deep schema to the flat schema includes collapsing a plurality of nodes of the multi-node hierarchical deep schema by inserting the nodes at a higher level of the hierarchical deep schema.