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.
Having trouble with your technical content process? Need a strategy that can help you improve and scale? Before you make a change, talk to the other content-producing groups in your company—marketing, training, sales, support—to develop a content strategy that works across the entire organization.
We moved into a new office at the end of October. The new space is bigger and nicer than the old space, but nonetheless, the moving process was painful. As a child, I moved several times and changed schools every two or three years. I then landed in North Carolina for college and stayed put. It occurs to me that a new content strategy introduces much of the same pain as relocation.
Content: You’re doing it wrong. That’s easy for me to say—we rarely hear from people who are happy with their content. But are you ready for a major transformation effort? Our approach is to assess the overall content lifecycle, meet with all the stakeholders, identify needs, develop a strategy, and then execute the strategy. If you want a more incremental approach, consider these inexpensive first steps.
Implementing a content strategy can involve overcoming many challenges. Some of these challenges can be quite scary and hazardous to your strategy. In fact, overcoming these challenges is a lot like battling the undead.
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say “XML and content”? If large technical documents and back-end databases pop into your mind, you’re in good company. But many content-heavy groups can benefit from adopting XML. Marketing is one of these groups.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses the future of content strategy.
The purpose of content strategy is to support your organization’s business goals. Content strategists need to understand how content across the organization—marketing, technical, and more—contributes to the overall business success.
Are you thinking about engaging a content strategy consultant? Here are some thoughts on successful content strategy consulting relationships.
An effective content strategy requires participation (preferably enthusiastic) from a diverse array of people. When you are communicating with executives, IT specialists, marketing writers, translation coordinators, and more, recognize that each participant (including you) begins with a certain set of expectations and biases.
Content strategy requires you to connect information with business results. The key to getting a content strategy approved? Return on investment (ROI). Once you show that your content strategy is beneficial to the business, you are on your way.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how content initiatives are putting new demands on technical communication—improving customer experience, building interactive documents, including advanced visualizations, integrated translations, and more.
In this webcast recording, Bill Swallow takes a look at intelligent content’s role in global markets, and how the entire content cycle directly affects a business’s bottom line (revenue).
A CMS can be a powerful addition to your content authoring and delivery workflow or your worst enemy in translation. Or both.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow of Scriptorium Publishing discuss what’s new in technical communication. Alan Pringle moderates.
Whether you’re using relative font sizes for those with low vision, or keyboard functionality for those with motor issues, creating more accessible tech comm content for people with disabilities also makes it easier to navigate and follow for people without disabilities.
Does your company have a strategy for making content available through mobile devices? Are you currently or do you plan to be part of the rapidly growing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement? Do you have a content management system that makes your content accessible for a variety of purposes on the many mobile devices that are currently on the market today?
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how to get started with content strategy for technical communication.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses various strategic initiatives that require coordination between marcom and techcomm and addresses how to begin to thaw out the relationship.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe discusses content strategy and the role of DITA in content strategy.
In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe, Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler), Race Bannon (Oracle), and Paul Perrotta (Juniper Networks) discuss the state of the technical communication industry.
In this webcast, guest presenter Chip Gettinger of SDL discusses key success factors for component content management systems.
Our trends webcast has become an annual event, and it’s our most popular webcast! Each year, we take our best shot at trends for the upcoming year with a mixture of serious and not-quite-serious predictions. In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Bill Swallow, aka techcommdood, share their perspectives on trends for 2013.
This webcast recording is a preview of our new Content Strategy 101 book, which will be released in September. Here, Sarah O’Keefe discusses why content strategy is important and how you can use it to transform your technical content from “necessary evil” to a business asset.
