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.
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.
If you’ve taken the courses at LearningDITA.com and you’re interested in starting a DITA project, check out episode 163 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast where Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the steps you can take to get funding.
“Showing up with cookies never hurts, but what is your executive’s motivation from a business point of view? What are they trying to accomplish in their goals for this next quarter or month or year, and so on? You need to show them, assuming that you can, that moving to structured content, moving to DITA, and changing tools is going to help achieve those business goals.”
— Sarah O’Keefe
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
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
In episode 153 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech discuss the upcoming book ContentOps Edited Collection: Content operations from start to scale. This is a free collection of insights from leading industry experts that will be available in October of 2023.
“This is going to be a free book. We are not going to become rich and famous with this book because we decided that we wanted to make the content in the book accessible for everybody who is interested in learning about content operations. It’s going to be published as an open-access book by Virginia Tech Publishing.”
— Dr. Carlos Evia
Our team taught and learned so much during TechLearn 2023. Here are some insights from our test kitchen demonstration, the L&D healthcare series, and more!
(Warning: Images of delicious New Orleans food will make you envious.)
In episode 151 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and podcast guest, Jack Molisani discuss how content careers have changed through the pandemic, layoffs, quiet quitting, and AI, and what you should do to stay ahead of the curve.
“Rather than applying for a job […] you want companies to come to you and say, ‘Hey, will you come work for us?’ The only way they’re going to do that is if you write articles, if you’re speaking at conferences, and if you position yourself as an expert in your field.”
— Jack Molisani
Content is a fierce beast to wrangle. I’ve experienced this after years of managing marketing content. Writing engaging, high-quality, accurate content — whether it’s from scratch or using AI as a starting place — is hard. Pile on revisions, production schedules, publishing tools, industry changes, and more, and you create a massive, wild creature.
Conference season is coming up! Our team is ready to connect with you at a variety of in-person and online events.
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
March 2025 update: We have moved LearningDITA to a new platform. The Introduction to DITA course is still free, and you can sign up for courses at store.scriptorium.com.
In episode 141 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar discuss the story behind LearningDITA, the free DITA training created by the Scriptorium team.
What we are trying to do with this site is give people a resource where they can go and, at their own pace, learn about what DITA is and how it can apply to their content and their content processes. It’s a way to take some of the technical mystique out of it, to bring it down and help you learn what it is and how it works.
– Alan Pringle
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.
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.
Content modeling may be the least understood part of structured content—which is saying something. Content modeling is the process of mapping your information’s implicit organization onto an explicit definition.
A common requirement for many digital transformation projects is converting Word-based content into DITA XML.
Consider these factors to ensure a successful conversion effort:
In episode 123 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Gretyl Kinsey wrap up our series on content ops stakeholders and continue their discussion about content authors.
“When you are trying to get executive buy-in on something as a content creator, don’t focus on the tools and the nitty gritty of the tech. That is not the way to get the attention of executives. ”
– Alan Pringle
We’ve had the pleasure of implementing DITA in many companies both large and small. Unfortunately, writers almost always have some trepidation about the move. At the same time, there’s a lot for writers to get excited about!
Here are some common remarks from writers—along with responses to encourage a positive outlook about the change.
If you were an early adopter of structured content, there’s a good chance that you have a custom XML content model. This article describes the process Scriptorium uses to make a shift from custom XML into DITA.
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
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.
Good news: The technical problem of integrating marketing and technical content has been solved.
Bad news: The hard work is just starting.
The design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective need to co-exist and co-create.
