Is Zoomin being discontinued?
For a few months, I’ve been hearing rumors that Zoomin would be discontinued after its purchase by Salesforce.
Tool or trap? Find the problem, then the platform
Tempted to jump straight to a new tool to solve your content problems? In this episode, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share real-world stories that show how premature solutioning without proper analysis can lead to costly misalignment, poor adoption, and missed opportunities for company-wide operational improvement.
Bill Swallow: On paper, it looked like a perfect solution. But everyone, including the people who greenlit the project, hated it. Absolutely hated it. Why? It was difficult to use, very slow, and very buggy. Sometimes it would crash and leave processes running, so you couldn’t relaunch it. There was no easy way to use it. So everyone bypassed using it at every opportunity.
Alan Pringle: It sounds to me like there was a bit of a fixation. This product checked all the boxes without actually doing any in-depth analysis of what was needed, much less actually thinking about what users needed and how that product could fill those needs.
See Scriptorium at these summer events!
We have several great events lined up for the summer of 2025. Here’s where you can see Scriptorium in action.
DITAWORLD 2025
Online event, June 3rd—5th
June 4th panel discussion: Empathy is not a prompt
Risks and Chances of Technical Content Services in an AI-first World
In an era where AI is reshaping how we create, deliver, and consume technical content, what remains uniquely human? Join moderator Stefan Gentz and industry experts Sarah O’Keefe, Bernard Aschwanden, and Markus Wiedenmaier as they explore the evolving role of empathy, ethics, and human judgment in content services.
This session will dive into the promises—and pitfalls—of AI-driven automation in tech comm. From content accuracy and bias to transparency, user trust, and the subtle nuances of tone and intent, we’ll examine what AI gets right, where it falls short, and how content professionals can shape a future that’s both efficient and empathetic.
Whether you’re embracing AI tools or cautiously navigating their rise, this panel will offer grounded insights and bold questions to help you lead with clarity in an AI-first world.
Register for DITAWORLD 2025 to hear Sarah speak in this live panel discussion!
Our top four topics for 2024
Did you miss a podcast, blog post, or webinar? We get it–there’s too much content and not enough time, but we’ve got you covered. Here’s a collection of our biggest topics from this year.
See Scriptorium in action at these upcoming events!
Whether you want to connect in person or online, you can see Scriptorium at these upcoming conferences and webinars.
The business value of DITA specialization
It’s hard to believe that the DITA standard needs additional tags. I tried counting them, but gave up at 150, when I had only reached the letter G. (Be my guest: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/langRef/quick-reference/all-elements-a-to-z.html)
Your tech expertise + our CCMS knowledge = replatforming success
Is your team skilled in navigating your current CCMS, but unfamiliar with the system you plan to adopt? During a recent replatforming project, we worked with a team of in-house experts to build out a new CCMS. The combination of their domain expertise and our replatforming experience was a big success. The client is now self-sufficient and thriving in their new CCMS environment.
tcworld 2024
Stuttgart
November 5th-7th
Join us at the largest technical communication conference in the world! Here’s where you can see the Scriptorium team in action.
So much waste, so little strategy: The reality of enterprise customer content
Speaker: Sarah O’Keefe
From the program: For your customers to effectively use your products and services, it’s critical that technical, learning, and support content are fully integrated across content types. This “enabling” content helps your customers get their work done. Inside your organization, you almost certainly have three (or more!) organizations that are producing this content. Most likely, they each use a content authoring system that is optimized for their specific use case. And those content authoring systems work in isolation.
This is unacceptable.
We need to build out unified content operations so that we can single-source content components in a repository. Content objects such as instructions, definitions, and assessments can then be assembled from this single source of truth. Additionally, we must create shared infrastructure to deliver a unified customer experience; for example, enterprise taxonomy, localization, and design systems.
Unfortunately, we currently don’t have a solution for unified content. Instead, we must combine incompatible software systems. This presentation is a call to action to start working on an enterprise content operations approach.
Modernizing your content management system: The challenges of replatforming
Speaker: Bill Swallow
From the program: Many technical communication organizations have established processes inside a content management system (CMS) and a single source of truth for their content. But over time, business needs change, and the CMS chosen a decade ago may no longer be a good fit for the organization. At some point, it becomes necessary to change systems and replatform the content onto a new CMS.
Changing systems is a costly proposition, and one that needs to be assessed well. The more customization work that was done to meet your original requirements and the more content you have in the current system, the more complicated and expensive a replatforming transition will be.
In this session, you’ll learn about the business justification, the risks, and the benefits of a replatforming project.
