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 and maximizing 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—with output as varied as Help files, linear documents, 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 as topics and re-use fragments, and those topics and fragments are attached to one or more TOCs (or DITA maps). 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, when translating content, or when re-using content between divisions training or customer support.

Known as single-sourced content, multi-channel publishing, and sometimes 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
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