Cases for structured content: Accelerate global delivery and transform user experiences

Ready to see the business advantages of structured content in action? These case studies show how moving to structured content can reduce time-to-market, enable accelerated global content delivery, and deliver personalized outputs that improve user experiences.

Unifying content operations to accelerate global delivery

CompTIA had to manage a growing portfolio of digital content, certification training materials, and training resources with fragmented workflows and multiple content systems. They needed robust, scalable content operations to keep up with market demands and efficiently localize content, particularly in Japan. Their existing content systems did not meet their strict requirements for flexibility, authoring, automation, and extensibility. To solve these issues without pausing ongoing content production, CompTIA partnered with Scriptorium to build a unified ecosystem for structured learning content.

The solution involved adopting a structured content model built on DITA XML, specifically the Learning and Training specialization. Scriptorium provided the content strategy and implementation support. Now, CompTIA has a centralized content repository, can deliver consistent formatting and output across channels, and has reduced time to market for localized content.

Now we’re going to start seeing the true benefits of working in DITA, which is what I’m most excited about. We can maintain our content easily and focus on where things are changing instead of converting, rearranging, or recopying content. I’m excited to see how our efficiencies gain as we move into our refresh cycle.

— Becky Mann, Vice President of Content Development at CompTIA

Learn more in the case study, CompTIA accelerates global content delivery with structured learning content.

LearningDITA: Replatforming for resilience with DITA-to-SCORM

For nine years, the Scriptorium site LearningDITA.com provided training for over 16,000 students who wanted to learn about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML standard. A critical system failure forced Scriptorium to rebuild the site, so we focused our consulting expertise on ourselves to address this replatforming challenge for structured learning content.

Our original configuration relied on DITA XML files as the single source of truth, which were published on a WordPress-based Learning Management System (LMS). The non-negotiable technical requirements were DITA XML as the single source of truth, an automated publishing pipeline, and no manual copy-and-paste during migration.

We selected Moodle, an open-source LMS, for our new LMS. Our team built a DITA-to-SCORM publishing pipeline using the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT). To meet complex requirements for flexible product sales (training, books, and consulting packages), tax tracking, and credit card processing, we built a WordPress store alongside the Moodle LMS with a dedicated plugin to synchronize student account and course completion data. This transformation successfully delivered a solution that supported a robust user experience, aligned with Scriptorium branding, and integrated other business functions.

Learn more in the case study, LearningDITA: replatforming structured learning content.

The power of metadata: Delivering personalized outputs for better UX

A group of friends were playing an old Street Fighter role-playing game. The content, spread across three PDF documents, was nearly unusable. The PDFs had quality issues like scanner bleed and blurry text, lacked searchable text and bookmarks, and were slow to load online. But this was no ordinary group of friends. These pain points motivated Jake Campbell, Technical Consultant at Scriptorium, to convert the content into DITA XML to generate a personalized, filtered PDF.

To build this solution, Jake mapped the source content to standard DITA structures and built a robust metadata model to support content filtering. Jake converted 118 of 189 power topics, excluding those not relevant to the players’ fighting styles. By using tools like the DITA-OT and Oxygen XML Editor, Jake created a process to convert the text, add attributes for filtering, and clean up the content. The result was a new PDF that significantly improved the user experience, featuring bookmarks for easy navigation, clickable links for upgrades, filtering to browse relevant powers, and flagging to highlight powers of interest.

Learn more in the case study, Fighting Words: a punchy conversion case study.

These case studies are examples of how structured content supports organizational growth and optimizes user experiences. With structured content, organizations move beyond manual formatting, accelerate the documentation side of product launches, and focus on delivering consistent, high-quality, personalized experiences for global users. 

Considering a move to structured content? Contact our team today!