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Tag: CCMS

Case study Content operations

Replatforming an early DITA implementation

Bill Swallow, Director of Operations at Scriptorium, and Emilie Herman, Director of Publishing at the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), shared lessons learned from a DITA implementation project. 

What did we want to accomplish with our project? One was to develop a single source of truth for our content, a single system to host all of it. Secondly, we wanted to modernize our information architecture and our content models and document all of it clearly. Lastly, we wanted to futureproof our content operations and go to a digital-first workflow.

— Emilie Herman

Bill Swallow
May 6, 2024
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Content operations Learning content Podcast Podcast transcript

How reuse eliminates redundant learning content with Chris Hill (podcast)

In episode 164 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Chris Hill of DCL talk about where you can find redundancy in your learning content, what causes it, and how a single source reuse strategy can eliminate duplication.

You really start to run into trouble when you need to make version two, and you discover a problem with version one. If I’m making some marketing materials, maybe I need to use some information from the engineering team or from the manuals for whatever product I’m marketing. I might just copy that information over and put it into my marketing materials. Then, when we go to produce our training for that particular product, we might say, “Okay, I need that stuff. I’m gonna copy that from wherever I can find it,” which might be from marketing or engineering depending on where I look and who I know better or which repository is easier for me to get to. The problem here is that if anybody has made any edits along the way, they have to ensure that those edits are propagated through all these departments. And that doesn’t always happen. 

— Chris Hill

Alan Pringle
April 8, 2024
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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Our demands for enterprise content operations software (podcast)

In episode 161 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle share their ideal world for enterprise content operations software, including specific requests for how content management software needs to evolve.

SO: “When I envision this in the ideal universe, it seems that the most efficient way to solve this from a technical point of view would be to take the DITA standard, extend it out so that it is underlying these various systems, and then build up on top of that. I don’t really care. What I do care about is that I need, and our clients need, the ability to move technical content into learning content in an efficient way. And right now that is harder than it should be.”

AP: “Oh, entirely. And I would even argue it should go the other way, because there is stuff possibly on the training side that the people in the product content side need. So both sides need that ability.”

SO: Right, so give us seamless content sharing, please. Pretty please.”

Sarah O'Keefe
January 29, 2024
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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript Structured content

Tips for moving from unstructured to structured content with Dipo Ajose-Coker

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

Bill Swallow
January 8, 2024
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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript Structured content

Challenges of moving from unstructured to structured content with Dipo Ajose-Coker

In episode 158 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Dipo Ajose-Coker discuss the challenges of moving from unstructured to structured content.

“I think we could make broad categories of challenges as tools, technology, people, and methodologies, and I think we’ll just dive into these because they’re not necessarily independent—some of them flow one into the other. One of the most complex and challenging parts is implementation. Changing over to a new tool also involves changing processes and training the staff. Basically, some documentation teams struggle with that initial learning curve.”

— Dipo Ajose-Coker

Bill Swallow
December 18, 2023
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