Companies experience their greatest growing pains when expanding business to global markets. It’s an exciting time but can also be a rude awakening as differing local requirements emerge for both product and content.
On the content side, keeping all of these requirements in check can be a daunting task. Proper planning and execution is critical for meeting these requirements and delivery dates, and for keeping your sanity.
“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.
These days, I generally avoid fast food, but it’s hard to pass up good French fries every now and then. Look beyond those yummy fries, and you can learn some valuable lessons that apply to content strategy.
This guest post is by Carlos Evia, Ph.D., the director of Professional and Technical Writing at Virginia Tech.
The DITA Troubleshooting topic is one of the “new” features in version 1.3 of the standard. However, troubleshooting has been around the DITA world for some good eight years now.
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.
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.
Robert Anderson, one of the DITA architects, compared the transition from DITA 1.1 to DITA 1.2 to the difference between having a couple of drinks with friends and a huge party. The DITA 1.2 specification introduced broad changes in the form of new base elements, new architectural structures, and new specializations.
DITA 1.3 isn’t the rowdy gathering that DITA 1.2 was—it’s more a group of friends going out to the new pub downtown while being sure to get some designated drivers. This article describes the most important additions to DITA 1.3.
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for Scriptorium to discuss—and wildly speculate about—the latest trends in content. Here’s what Bill Swallow, Gretyl Kinsey, and I had to say about 2015 content trends.
We hear a lot about the learning curve for structured authoring, but what does that really mean?
