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ConVEx 2025

Join the Scriptorium team in sunny San Jose for ConVEx 2025! See our team speak in these sessions:

So much waste, so little strategy: The reality of enterprise customer content

In her keynote session, Sarah O’Keefe will share the current state of software for enterprise customer content, the challenges of integration across incompatible systems, and share her vision of the unified content future. 

Fighting words: DITA and the battle for better content

In his game-themed session, Jake Campbell will guide you through how DITA makes your content more flexible, how to use out-of-the-box DITA structures to streamline production and customize output, map content to DITA, and build robust, relevant metadata.

And last but not least, don’t forget to stop by our booth for Scriptorium swag, free copies of the latest edition of our book, amazing chocolate, and more!

Christine Cuellar
November 8, 2024
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Content pitfalls Content silos Industry insights Podcasts

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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Industry insights Structured content Webinar

The future of AI: structured content is key (webinar)

In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, industry experts Sarah O’Keefe and Carrie Hane explore the intersection of structured content and artificial intelligence. Discover how structured content improves the reliability and performance of AI systems by increasing accuracy, reducing hallucinations, and supporting efficient content management.

In this webinar, attendees will learn:

  • AI’s capabilities and limitations
  • How structured content enhances AI abilities in content management, personalization, and distribution
  • Best practices for integrating AI and structured content

Sarah O'Keefe
October 14, 2024
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Change management DITA Podcasts Replatforming Structured content

Survive the descent: planning your content ops exit strategy

Whether you’re surviving a content operations project or a journey through treacherous caverns, it’s crucial to plan your way out before you begin. In episode 176 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Christine Cuellar unpack the parallels between navigating horror-filled caves and building a content ops exit strategy.

Alan Pringle: When you’re choosing tools, if you end up something that is super proprietary, has its own file formats, and so on, that means it’s probably gonna be harder to extract your content from that system. A good example of this is those of you with Samsung Android phones. You have got this proprietary layer where it may even insert things into your source code that is very particular to that product line. So look at how proprietary your tool or toolchain is and how hard it’s going to be to export. That should be an early question you ask during even the RFP process. How do people get out of your system? I realize that sounds absolutely bat-you-know-what to be telling people to be thinking about something like that when you’re just getting rolling–

Christine Cuellar: Appropriate for a cave analogy, right?

Alan Pringle: Yes, true. But you should be, you absolutely should be.

Christine Cuellar
October 7, 2024
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Business case/ROI Change management Podcasts Structured content

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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CCMS CMS Content debt Content pitfalls DITA Localization Podcasts Replatforming Structured content Translation

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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Business case/ROI Structured content

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 debt Content pitfalls DITA Localization Structured content

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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