Content creature feature
You don’t need a scary movie or a haunted house to see ghoulish creatures—sometimes, they are lurking in your content processes. Learn how to fend off these monsters in posts from the Scriptorium crypt.
The challenges of replatforming content (podcast)
In episode 130 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the challenges of replatforming content from one system to another.
Links are always a problem, especially cross-document links. Reusable content tends to be handled differently in different systems, or almost the same, but not quite, which is almost worse.
—Sarah O’Keefe
Prerequisites for efficient content operations (podcast)
In episode 129 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the prerequisites for efficient content operations and the pitfalls from not following them.
Mayhem, chaos, cost overruns, work, rework, delays. I mean, these things, they’re expensive. And they’re not just expensive, they’re soul sucking for everybody involved in the project. And it doesn’t have to be that way if this thing is planned and executed at the right level.
—Sarah O’Keefe
Replatforming with localization in mind
A wise woman recently said, “replatforming structured content is annoying and expensive.” This is doubly so when it comes to localization.
Replatforming nearly always involves content change—the new system may store content differently or require a different format or structure. Although the changes may affect your existing localization process, some of these changes may be for the better.
Replatforming your structured content into a new CCMS (podcast)
In episode 128 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe talks with guest Chip Gettinger of RWS about why companies are replatforming structured content by moving it into a new component content management system (CCMS).
I find there’s some business change that’s happened to spark this replatforming. One is mergers and acquisitions, where two companies get together, there are two CCMSs, and one basically is chosen.
—Chip Gettinger, RWS
Even a digital content factory is not built in a day
Setting up an efficient factory requires planning. Where do you put the building? How will you bring in raw materials? How does work flow along the assembly line and how can you optimize the work? Given that my expertise in actual factory operations is limited to Factorio, it’s probably best to set that analogy aside and refocus on a digital equivalent—the systems that make up your content operations.
The challenges of structured learning content (podcast)
In episode 127 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Alan Pringle talk about the challenges of aligning learning content with structured content workflows.
We’ve seen a little bit of a trend where we think about learning content and structure almost as mortal enemies, and we see some degree of resistance to wanting to use structured content for learning and training materials. And we want to dig into a little bit of why that might be.
—Gretyl Kinsey
Industry 4.0 (podcast)
In episode 126 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Stefan Gentz of Adobe discuss Industry 4.0.
Replatforming structured content
Scriptorium is doing a lot of replatforming projects. We have customers with existing structured content—custom XML, DocBook, and DITA—who need to move their content operations from their existing CCMS to a new system.
These transitions, even DITA to DITA, require a solid business justification. Replatforming structured content is annoying and expensive. Most often, the organization’s needs have changed, and the current platform is no longer a good fit.
Note: This post focuses on transitions into DITA. There are surely DITA to not-DITA projects out there, but they are not in our current portfolio.
Structured content: the foundation for digital transformation (podcast)
In episode 125 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Amy Williams of DCL talk about digital transformation projects and how structured content provides the foundation for those efforts.
If, as a company, you start to think and plan and build processes with the digital innovation, you really start to future-proof for yourself, because you’re going to become more agile, more flexible.
– Amy Williams
