In this episode of our Let’s talk ContentOps! webinar series, Pam Noreault, Principal Information Architect at Ellucian, and Sarah O’Keefe, CEO of Scriptorium, discuss the dynamics of authoring teams whose tools are controlled by IT or third-party SaaS ecosystems.
For your customers to effectively use your products and services, it’s critical that your enabling content is fully integrated across content types.
Bill Swallow, Director of Operations at Scriptorium, and Emilie Herman, Director of Publishing at the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), shared lessons learned from a DITA implementation project.
What did we want to accomplish with our project? One was to develop a single source of truth for our content, a single system to host all of it. Secondly, we wanted to modernize our information architecture and our content models and document all of it clearly. Lastly, we wanted to futureproof our content operations and go to a digital-first workflow.
— Emilie Herman
At the 2024 ConVEx conference, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe was part of a panel of content experts including Dawn Stevens, Val Swisher, and Rob Hanna. The panelists discussed the pros, cons, and cautions of using AI in content creation.
In episode 164 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Chris Hill of DCL talk about where you can find redundancy in your learning content, what causes it, and how a single source reuse strategy can eliminate duplication.
You really start to run into trouble when you need to make version two, and you discover a problem with version one. If I’m making some marketing materials, maybe I need to use some information from the engineering team or from the manuals for whatever product I’m marketing. I might just copy that information over and put it into my marketing materials. Then, when we go to produce our training for that particular product, we might say, “Okay, I need that stuff. I’m gonna copy that from wherever I can find it,” which might be from marketing or engineering depending on where I look and who I know better or which repository is easier for me to get to. The problem here is that if anybody has made any edits along the way, they have to ensure that those edits are propagated through all these departments. And that doesn’t always happen.
— Chris Hill
When a DITA-based workflow is the best choice to support business requirements for your content, you may face the daunting task of convincing leadership to move forward with this enterprise-wide change. Sarah O’Keefe shared practical tips for overcoming common objections to DITA during her session at the AEM Guides user conference.
At the Training 2024 conference, we confronted the horror of modernizing content—and offered real-world advice to make the process less scary.
In episode 162 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the benefits of single sourcing as part of your content strategy through the example of two things they love: coffee and beer.
“We know companies that have moved away from a do-it-yourself approach because they had maybe two or three different people putting in half to almost full-time work on the publishing system and not on other facets of the company’s core business or the writing. They were simply there to keep everything working. It just blows my mind that on a scale where you have hundreds of writers contributing content, you are saying, Okay, you three people are going to be solely responsible for keeping this thing up and running so that they can produce their content, rather than having a system that’s designed to keep itself up and running.”
— Bill Swallow
What if your training content could be seamlessly tailored to a learner’s environment no matter where or how they interact with it?
In episode 161 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share their ideal world for enterprise content operations software, including specific requests for how content management software needs to evolve.
SO: “When I envision this in the ideal universe, it seems that the most efficient way to solve this from a technical point of view would be to take the DITA standard, extend it out so that it is underlying these various systems, and then build up on top of that. I don’t really care. What I do care about is that I need, and our clients need, the ability to move technical content into learning content in an efficient way. And right now that is harder than it should be.”
AP: “Oh, entirely. And I would even argue it should go the other way, because there is stuff possibly on the training side that the people in the product content side need. So both sides need that ability.”
SO: Right, so give us seamless content sharing, please. Pretty please.”
In episode 159 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Dipo Ajose-Coker share tips for moving from unstructured to structured content.
“I mentioned it before: invest in training. It’s very important that your team knows first of all not just the tool, but also the concepts behind the tool. The concept of structured content creation, leaving ownership behind, and all of those things that we’ve referred to earlier on. You’ve got to invest in that kind of training. It’s not just a one-off, you want to keep it going. Let them attend conferences or webinars, and things like that, because those are all instructive, and those are all things that will give good practice.”
— Dipo Ajose-Coker
We predicted three content operations trends that will impact businesses in 2024. The resources in this post will help you prepare for these trends, the changing landscape of AI, and more.
In episode 158 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Dipo Ajose-Coker discuss the challenges of moving from unstructured to structured content.
“I think we could make broad categories of challenges as tools, technology, people, and methodologies, and I think we’ll just dive into these because they’re not necessarily independent—some of them flow one into the other. One of the most complex and challenging parts is implementation. Changing over to a new tool also involves changing processes and training the staff. Basically, some documentation teams struggle with that initial learning curve.”
— Dipo Ajose-Coker
In episode 155 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar dig into pain points that Scriptorium has helped organizations resolve since 1997.
“The amount of time content creators spend on formatting and for little payoff, it’s just… the numbers don’t add up. Especially in the 21st century now that we have so many automated ways to publish things to multiple channels, if you are futzing and tinkering with formatting trying to deliver to multiple channels, I can say with a great degree of certainty, you are absolutely doing it wrong.”
— Alan Pringle
Once again, it’s that time of year—the time when we use food analogies to explain critical concepts about content strategy, operations, and more!
(Who are we kidding. It’s always time for that.)
To provide the best customer experience, you need customized content that goes beyond what “traditional” publishing can do. Content as a Service (CaaS) offers a solution for complex content delivery requirements.
In episode 150 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest, Patrick Bosek of Heretto talk about choosing a content model, factors to consider, and when you should think about customization.
“There’s a valid use case for almost every approach that’s out there. There’s no way around that. I think what it really starts to come down to is making sure that you’re matching the 18+ months [ahead] to the decision you’re making now.”
— Patrick Bosek
Updated as of June 2025.
We are now in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Everyone is talking about AI and its impact. Scriptorium is focusing on AI’s effect on content operations, and the impact of ChatGPT and other generative AI engines means rethinking the entire content lifecycle.
If you didn’t see our team in action at ConVEx this year, here are the highlights from our sessions.
In episode 142 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Christine Cuellar discuss balancing the implementation of a content management system (CMS), and component content management system (CCMS). This is part one of a two-part podcast.
“When you have two types of content produced by your organization and different groups in charge of that, and maybe they’re in two different systems, that it’s really important to get those groups working together so that they can understand that those priorities don’t need to be competing, they just need to be balanced.”
— Gretyl Kinsey
Whether you’re looking into a component content management system (CCMS) for the first time or maximizing the value of what you already have, this collection of insights will help you choose what’s right for your organization.
If you’re reading this post, you’ve been hearing about — or have at least heard of — a component content management system, or CCMS.
You’re probably dealing with increasing amounts of customer-facing content and localization requirements, and you’re wondering if a CCMS could help. Almost all of our projects involve CCMSs and scaling content operations to address these challenges.
When you start looking at your content lifecycle and the content systems needed to support it, you’re going to end up with a decision between buying a suite of products from a single supplier or piecing together your environment with individual components.
That made me think about baking a cake. Perhaps this merits further explanation.
In episode 137 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Larry Swanson talk about the fragmentation of content over the past 30 years, from the delivery of books to UX writing.
“What are the changes that this fragmentation has introduced from a business or an economic point of view? One is the notion that we’re all publishers now. This is where the whole field of content marketing comes from — this notion that it’s a better way to promote yourself if you demonstrate expertise around what you’re doing.”
