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Content operations

Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Every click counts: Uncovering the business value of your product content

Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience.

Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business.

Sarah O'Keefe
August 11, 2025
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Content operations Webinar

The Sky is Falling—But Your Content is Fine, featuring Jack Molisani

Every few years, a new publishing trend sends leadership into a frenzy:

  • “We need micro content for smartwatches!”
  • “Everything must go into chatbots!
  • “Get ready for VR and the Metaverse!”
  • “AI will replace our content team!”

Sound familiar?

In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Jack Molisani explored how structured content will futureproof your content operations no matter what tech trends come along. Learn how to prepare content once and publish everywhere, from toasters to chatbots to jumbotrons and beyond.

Sarah O'Keefe
July 28, 2025
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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Deliver content dynamically with a content delivery platform

Struggling to get the right content to the right people, exactly when and where they need it? In this podcast, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe and Fluid Topics CEO Fabrice Lacroix explore dynamic content delivery—pushing content beyond static PDFs into flexible platforms that power search, personalization, and multi-channel distribution.

When we deliver the content, whether it’s through the APIs or the portal that you’ve built that is served by the platform, we render the content in a way that we can dynamically remove or hide parts of the content that would not apply to the context, the profile of the user. That’s the magic of a CDP. It’s delivering that content dynamically.

— Fabrice Lacroix

Sarah O'Keefe
May 19, 2025
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Content operations Learning content Podcast Podcast transcript

LearningDITA: DITA-based structured learning content in action

Are you considering a structured approach to creating your learning content? We built LearningDITA.com as an example of what DITA and structured learning content can do! In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Allison Beatty unpack the architecture of LearningDITA to provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives.

Because we used DITA XML for the content instead of the actual authoring in Moodle, we actually saved a lot of pain for ourselves. With Moodle, the name of the game is low-code/no-code. They want you to manually build out these courses, but we wanted to automate that for obvious reasons. SCORM allowed us to do that by having a transform that would take our DITA XML, put it in SCORM, and then we just upload the SCORM package to Moodle and don’t have to do all the painful things of, you know, “Let’s put a heading two here with this little piece of content.” And the key thing is that allowed us to reuse content.

— Allison Beatty

Sarah O'Keefe
April 21, 2025
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Content operations Learning content Podcast Podcast transcript

The benefits of structured content for learning & development content

In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content.

Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it.

— Bill Swallow

Christine Cuellar
April 7, 2025
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Content operations DITA Webinar

Discovering the Basics of DITA with LearningDITA (webinar)

In this webinar, Sarah O’Keefe shares the basics of DITA—what it is, why it’s crucial for creating structured content, and how it revolutionizes consistency and efficiency in documentation. By exploring core elements such as topics, maps, and metadata, along with DITA specializations like task, concept, and reference topics, you’ll learn why organizations around the globe use DITA to craft modular, reusable content and put it to work.

You’ll be introduced to a self-paced, online DITA training resource called LearningDITA. Lessons include exercises, links to additional resources and videos, and quizzes to test your knowledge.

What DITA offers is a mechanism for extensibility that doesn’t break the standard. If you’re going to try to build out a system that is futureproof, as best we can without knowing the future, then we need flexibility. We need the ability to change things as we go, to extend, to add new output types, to add new semantics, to add new metadata, to add new systems into the equation.

— Sarah O’Keefe

Sarah O'Keefe
March 24, 2025
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Content operations Webinar

Transforming The Future: ContentOps In The Age Of AI (webinar)

In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler himself, talks about the future of content operations in the age of artificial intelligence. You may know Scott from his work as a consultant, conference presenter, and talk show host, but in this session, we turn the spotlight back on Scott and ask him what HE thinks about the future of content ops.

Viewers will learn how AI is reshaping content operations, including:

  • Creating seamless system connectivity
  • Transforming content creation, management, and delivery
  • Changing how platforms for professional content creators work

Sarah O'Keefe
March 17, 2025
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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Creating content ops RFPs: Strategies for success

In episode 179 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share the inside scoop on how to write an effective request for a proposal (RFP) for content operations. They’ll discuss how RFPs are constructed and evaluated, strategies for aligning your proposal with organizational goals, how to get buy-in from procurement and legal teams, and more.

When it comes time to write the RFP, rely on your procurement team, your legal team, and so on. They have that expertise. They know that process. It’s a matter of pairing what you know about your requirements and what you need with their processes to get the better result.

— Alan Pringle

Alan Pringle
December 9, 2024
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Content operations Content strategy Industry insights Webinar

Bridging technical and marketing content (webinar)

In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe interviewed special guest Alyssa Fox, Senior VP of Marketing at The CapStreet Group. Discover critical enterprise content strategy insights that Alyssa has gathered throughout her journey from technical writer to marketing executive.

In this webinar, viewers learn:

  • The broader picture of enterprise content operations
  • Strategies for integrating technical and marketing content
  • Best practices for using technical content as a marketing asset

Sarah O'Keefe
November 18, 2024
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Content operations Industry insights Podcast Podcast transcript

Do enterprise content operations exist?

Is it really possible to configure enterprise content—technical, support, learning & training, marketing, and more—to create a seamless experience for your end users? In episode 177 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the reality of enterprise content operations: do they truly exist in the current content landscape? What obstacles hold the industry back? How can organizations move forward?

Sarah: You’ve got to get your terminology and your taxonomy in alignment. Most of the industry I am confident in saying have gone with option D, which is give up. “We have silos. Our silos are great. We’re going to be in our silos, and I don’t like those people over in learning content anyway. I don’t like those people in techcomm anyway. They’re weird. They’re focused on the wrong things,” says everybody, and so they’re just not doing it. I think that does a great disservice to the end users, but that’s the reality of where most people are right now.

Bill: Right, because the end user is left holding the bag trying to find information using terminology from one set of content and not finding it in another and just having a completely different experience.

Sarah O'Keefe
October 21, 2024
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Content operations Industry insights Podcast Podcast transcript

Enterprise content operations in action at NetApp (podcast)

Are you looking for real-world examples of enterprise content operations in action? Join Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Adam Newton, Senior Director of Globalization, Product Documentation, & Business Process Automation at NetApp for episode 175 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast. Hear insights from NetApp’s journey to enterprise-level publishing, lessons learned from leading-edge GenAI tool development, and more.

We have writers in our authoring environment who are not writers by nature or bias. They’re subject matter experts. And they’re in our system and generating content. That was about joining us in our environment, reap the benefits of multi-language output, reap the benefits of fast updates, reap the benefits of being able to deliver a web-like experience as opposed to a PDF. But what I think we’ve found now is that this is a data project. This generative AI assistant has changed my thinking about what my team does. Yes, on one level, we have a team of writers devoted to producing the docs. But in another way, you can look at it and say, well, we’re a data engine.

— Adam Newton

Sarah O'Keefe
September 23, 2024
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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Position enterprise content operations for success (podcast)

In episode 174 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the mindset shifts that are needed to elevate your organization’s content operations to the enterprise level.

If you’re in a desktop tool and everything’s working and you’re happy and you’re delivering what you’re supposed to deliver and basically it ain’t broken, then don’t fix it. You are done. What we’re talking about here is, okay, for those of you that are not in a good place, you need to level up. You need to move into structured content. You need to have a content ops organization that’s going to support that. What’s your next step to deliver at the enterprise level?

— Sarah O’Keefe

Alan Pringle
September 16, 2024
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Content operations Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Conquering content localization: strategies for success (podcast)

Translation troubles? This podcast is for you! In episode 173 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Mike McDermott, Director of Language Services at MadTranslations, share strategies for overcoming common content localization challenges and unlocking new market opportunities.

Mike McDermott: It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.

Bill Swallow: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re saying as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.

Mike McDermott: Exactly. That’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator. You don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation.

Bill Swallow
September 9, 2024
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Content operations Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Cutting technical debt with replatforming (podcast)

When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.

Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?

— Sarah O’Keefe

Sarah O'Keefe
August 19, 2024
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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Renovation revelations: Managing technical debt (podcast)

Just like discovering faulty wiring during a home renovation, technical debt in content operations leads to unexpected complications and costs. In episode 171 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the concept of technical debt, strategies for navigating it, and more.

In many cases, you can get away with the easy button, the quick-and-dirty approach when you have a relatively smaller volume of content. Then as you expand, bad, bad things happen, right? It just balloons to a point where you can’t keep up.

— Sarah O’Keefe

Alan Pringle
August 12, 2024
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Content operations

Collaborate with a content strategist to transform content operations

Does any of this sound familiar? 

  • Content production is taking too long, delaying product launches, business expansion, and growth into global markets. Every minute of delay costs your company—big time. 
  • Short-term fixes have evolved into long-term problems, creating technical debt, process inefficiencies, and more. 
  • Your content team is running on “emergency mode.” 

It’s time for a new way of managing content. Here’s how a content strategist can help you create successful content operations.

Christine Cuellar
August 5, 2024
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Content operations Content strategy Localization

Technical debt in content operations

Technical debt, hereafter called “content debt,” is “the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time,” Wikipedia, “Technical debt.”. Like financial debt, content debt isn’t always a bad thing. You can use a loan to buy a house right away (at least in the U.S.) and then pay off the debt over time while living in the house. Content debt allows you to create something quickly instead of doing it exactly right and taking much longer. 

Too much content debt, though, will hamstring your work. The trick is to find the Goldilocks solution.

Sarah O'Keefe
July 29, 2024
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