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Author: Sarah O'Keefe

Content strategy Webinar

Webcast: Risky business: the challenge of content silos

In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how content silos make it difficult to deliver a consistent, excellent customer experience. After all the hard work that goes into landing a customer, too many organizations destroy the customer’s initial goodwill with mediocre installation instructions and terrible customer support.

Do you have a unified customer experience? Do you know what your various content creators are producing? Join us for this thought-provoking webcast.

Sarah O'Keefe
June 25, 2015
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Opinion

DITA training call for participation

One of the major challenges in implementing DITA projects is training. Although we (and others) offer fabulous live, instructor-led training, there is also a need for asynchronous learning–where can a student go to learn DITA independently? To address this need, Scriptorium is starting an open-source effort to develop training content for DITA.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 1, 2015
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Analysis Content strategy

Buyer’s guide to CCMS evaluation and selection (premium)

“What CCMS should we buy?”

It’s a common question with no easy answer. This article provides a roadmap for CCMS evaluation and selection.

First, a few definitions. A CCMS (component content management system) is different from a CMS (content management system). You need a CCMS to manage chunks of information, such as reusable warnings, topics, or other small bits of information that are then assembled into larger documents. A CMS is for managing the results, like white papers, user manuals, and other documents.

Sarah O'Keefe
March 2, 2015
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DITA White papers

Conditional content in DITA

This post provides an overview of techniques you can use to handle conditional content in DITA. The need for complex conditions is a common reason organizations choose DITA as their content model. As conditional requirements get more complex, the basic Show/Hide functionality offered in many desktop publishing tools is no longer sufficient.

Conditional processing is especially interesting–or maybe problematic—when you combine it with reuse requirements. You identify a piece of content that could be reused except for one small bit that needs to be different in the two reuse scenarios.

Sarah O'Keefe
February 9, 2015
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Opinion

XML overview for executives

Over the past year or two, our typical XML customer has changed. Until recently, most XML publishing efforts were driven by marketing communications, technical publications, or IT, usually by a technical expert. But today’s customer is much more likely to be an executive who understands the potential business benefits of XML publishing but not the technical details. This article provides an XML overview for executives. What do you need to know before you decide to lead your organization into an XML world?

Sarah O'Keefe
January 20, 2015
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