Technical Documentation
An organization that produces enough content to benefit from a component content management system (CCMS) is likely to have a significant amount of identical information between products or product lines. Managing the content at the component level, as well as providing the ability to publish to multiple outputs, known as multi-channel publishing, makes good business sense.
Using a CCMS for Technical Documentation
Creating technical documentation—the output could be as varied as Help files, a linear document, or Web files—usually consists of topics that get repeated in multiple places. A CCMS lets you re-use that content without any cut-and-paste. The content is created and saved in topics, and those topics are attached to one or more TOCs. Whenever a topic is updated, all the TOCs draw the updated content from the topic.
Sharing common content
Tracking your content this way makes sense, particularly when managing subtle differences between products, translating content, or re-using content between training or customer support.
Known as single-sourced content, multi-channel publishing, or even object-oriented documentation, this method of creating, controlling, manipulating, and generating content has been shown to be an effective way of managing content.
Top Business Benefits of Content Re-Use
| (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Taking single-sourced documentation to a new level
The Company
WorkdayThe Situation
A corporation that provides on-demand enterprise business services wanted to provide accurate, focused documentation to accompany their SaaS product suite. Their documentation needed to be delivered online, alongside their product.
The Challenge
Each of their clients has a unique set of services, so the documentation delivered to each client must reflect the flavor of the product purchased. The personalization of content is set into motion by a client’s login. Because of the complexity of the software and the accompanying documentation, the corporation wanted to do the configuration in-house.
The Solution
The corporation delivers DITA documentation online, taking advantage of the topic-based DITA content architecture to combine and generate on-the-fly documentation. By using the conditional processing ability of XDocs, each client sees a custom version of the documentation.