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Content strategy

Content scalability: Removing friction from your content lifecycle

First published in Intercom (October 2020) by the Society for Technical Communication.

Scalable content requires you to assess your content lifecycle, identify points of friction, and remove them.

Company growth magnifies the challenges of information enablement. When you grow, you add products, product variants, markets, and languages—and each of those factors adds complexity. Process inefficiencies in your content lifecycle are multiplied for every new language or customer segment.

As a result, content scalability—increasing content throughput without increasing resources—becomes critical. Consider a simple localization example: when you translate, you have a few manual workarounds that require 1 hour of work per 100 pages of translated content. So if you translate 100 pages of content into 8 languages, you have 8 hours of workarounds. But as your content load grows, you are shipping 1,000 pages of content per month and translating into 20 languages. Suddenly, you are facing 200 hours of manual workarounds per month—the equivalent of one full-time person per year.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 10, 2021
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Content strategy

Improving structured content for authors

Structured content authoring tools behave differently than traditional tools like Microsoft Word, which causes difficulty or reluctance among authors to use them. Structured content imposes strict rules around content purpose (semantics) and placement. These tools diverge from the traditional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) look and feel, which can be jarring for many authors. Fortunately, many structured authoring tools can be modified to feel less imposing.

Bill Swallow
April 19, 2021
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White papers

DITA to PowerPoint: Exploring the challenges

We’ve worked on a few DITA-to-PowerPoint projects. In some cases, the project sounded like a natural fit. In other cases, the fit was less than compelling. Even in projects that seemed to have a natural fit, we encountered bumps in the road with the DITA content, the design of the slide masters, or both.

There are many good reasons to create a DITA-to-PowerPoint conversion. It’s an attractive idea to use the same material for slides and student materials (such as handouts). A DITA-to-PowerPoint conversion also allows you to create slides by reusing content from your existing topics. 

Simon Bate
April 12, 2021
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Content operations

Content operations (content ops)

Content operations (content ops or ContentOps ) refers to the system your organization uses to develop, deploy, and deliver customer-facing information. Rahel Bailie refers to it as the way that your organization operationalizes your content strategy.

Over at easyDITA, there’s a more aspirational definition, which includes the purpose of good content ops:

Content Operations — ContentOps — is the infrastructure that maximizes your content creators’ efforts and guards against procedural errors by automating as much of the content development process as possible. 

Sarah O'Keefe
March 29, 2021
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Podcast Podcast transcript

How to align your content strategy with your company’s needs (podcast)

In episode 92 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Alan Pringle share how you get started with a content strategy project and what you can do if you really don’t have a solid grasp on your needs.

“It’s about opening yourself up to getting feedback from someone who’s done this stuff before, and may come up with some solutions that you didn’t necessarily consider in your own thinking.”

–Alan Pringle

ScriptoriumTech
March 22, 2021
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Content strategy DITA

Developing a strategy for learning content

Learning content is any material used for educational purposes, including e-learning courses, training guides, instructor guides, instructional videos, and more. This might represent the bulk of the content you produce, or it might be just one part of your overall content set. Either way, it’s important to develop a plan for creating, updating, and delivering learning content as efficiently as possible. Here are some tips for addressing learning content as part of your content strategy.

Gretyl Kinsey
March 15, 2021
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Podcast Podcast transcript

Using text strings and microcontent (podcast, part 2)

In episode 91 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate continue their discussion about using text strings and microcontent. This is part two of a two-part podcast.

“Make sure that their voice is heard. All groups that are using your strings need to have some input or have a way of communicating their needs to the organizations controlling those strings.”

– Simon Bate

Simon Bate
March 8, 2021
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Podcast Podcast transcript

Using text strings and microcontent (podcast, part 1)

In episode 90 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate talk about using text strings and microcontent. This is part one of a two-part podcast.

“They’re starting to get the idea of taxonomy and how important it is for all parts of their business to communicate using the exact same language. If this can be captured and put in one place, then those strings can be available to everybody.”

– Simon Bate

Simon Bate
March 1, 2021
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