Waterfall content development? You’re doing it wrong.
Product development, content development, and localization processes are too often viewed as a waterfall process.
This is not at all accurate.
Author: Sarah O'Keefe
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.
Localization strategy and the customer journey
This premium post is a recap of a presentation delivered by Sarah O’Keefe at Localization World Berlin on June 4, 2015. It describes how and why to align localization strategy to the customer journey.
The new buzzword in marketing is the customer journey. What does this mean for localization?
Renovate or rebuild? Construction as a content strategy model
Does your house have good bones? Ugly paint, terrible carpet, and dated appliances are all fixable. But if a room is too small, a door is in the wrong place, or the rooms don’t match your requirements (need a downstairs master bedroom?), then you have a serious problem.
Content can also have good bones. Or not.
Uber, disruption, and content strategy
I used Uber and lived to tell the tale. And I found a lesson for content strategy in my rides to and from the airport in San Francisco.
Buyer’s guide to CCMS evaluation and selection
“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.
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.
The talent deficit in content strategy
Content strategy is taking hold across numerous organizations. Bad content is riskier and riskier because of the transparency and accountability in today’s social media–driven world.
But now, we have a new problem: a talent deficit in content strategy.
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?
Beneath the page: learning to see structure
We hear a lot about the learning curve for structured authoring, but what does that really mean?
