9 critical reasons why your business needs to change its documentation processes

First, ask yourself...

● Are your writers still creating content with thirty year-old legacy tools like MS

Word and Adobe Framemaker?

● Can you search across all the collective intelligence of your company from

one central source?

● Do your documentation processes align with your agile/development processes?

Then consider...

● Would you ask your developers and product managers to build using Commodore computers (same era as Word/Frame)?

● How much time are your people spending simply looking for existing information, in your enterprise?

● Has documentation creation ever held up shipping a product?

These are simple questions but they go to a big point: Things have changed.

We’re not in Kansas anymore...

● Information and documentation are marketing and sales tools● Buyers look for them online, on their mobile devices and desktops● Modern documentation is fluid and often requires regular updating across

multiple media● Large amounts of content can be reused across multiple versions, product

lines, and across markets: legal notices, warnings, images, boilerplate in general

Legacy desktop tools cannot manage modern content requirements.

Nine Things That You Can Do With A Modern Tool:

1. Write2. Manage3. Organize4. Search5. Reuse6. Publish7. Translate8. Connect9. Scale

Let’s take a quick look...

1. Write content in a familiar text-editing environment

Asking people to learn an entirely new interface, for familiar activities, makes no sense. We recognize that acceptance of a new technology is based on seeing a path from the familiar to the new. MSWord-like authoring views are important. We don’t ask authors to learn code.

Let’s take a quick look...

2. Manage workflow: authoring, editing, reviewing, and publishing, from a central source

Legacy workflows for documentation involve writing, sharing via email, copy and paste, and sneakernet. Reviewing with this model creates multiple versions in multiple places, opening up multiple opportunities for errors and omissions. Publishing to multiple channels requires constant reformatting.

Centralizing these processes in one database (single source of the truth) turns content into components that can be managed like data. That opens up a realm of new capabilities...

Let’s take a quick look...

3. Organize content with taxonomy and metadata

The foundation of modern content management is based on classifying your content with metadata (information about information) and taxonomy (applying broader classes like product line, market segment, intended user, etc.).

Once classified, each piece of content, in that central database, becomes searchable across your enterprise.

Let’s take a quick look...

4. Search through large content sets in milliseconds, with metadata-enabled filters

We’re not in Google anymore. Metadata-enabled search powers the ability to find content, down to the sentence level, across millions of documents, in multiple languages.

Metadata applied by the system enables high velocity (milliseconds), filtered search (think: Amazon left hand search filters column).

No more finding reusable information by asking people for it.

Let’s take a quick look...

5. Reuse content across various documents, departments, and formats

Once you can find content, you can repurpose it with reuse. This means no more duplication of efforts, higher leverage of your people’s knowledge and more accurate documentation.

It goes further: Individual snippets of content like product names or specifications can be tagged in the system. If they change, one change is updated in every instance of that snippet, across all your documentation.

Let’s take a quick look...

6. Publish to multiple media channels (PDF, web, mobile, knowledge base, etc.) without constant reformatting

Your internal and external consumers of your content are no longer content with reading PDFs or manuals. They are looking for content that can be delivered wherever they are, on the device of their choice. It should be searchable and personalized.

Omni or multi-channel publishing of your content, properly formatted for each medium, is automated. Authors don’t format, the system does.

Let’s take a quick look...

7. Translate and localize far more efficiently, avoiding duplication of efforts

When your content is created as components in a database, translation becomes far more efficient. Translation managers know which content, at any given moment, requires translation, eliminating costly re-translations of complex documents containing only incremental changes.

The system communicates with existing translation tools and workflows. Translation can be aligned with development for faster time to market.

Let’s take a quick look...

8. Connect. Assure interoperability of content files with other systems, with standards-compliant XML file format and APIs

Legacy tools create content in legacy, proprietary formats requiring conversion to work with modern systems. Standards-compliant XML files are readable by a wide range of complementary software applications. No more ‘lock-in’ of your information.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) connect your content with other enterprise systems.

Let’s take a quick look...

9. Scale to hundreds of thousands of docs, millions of topics

Based on architecture (DITA), developed by IBM and now open-sourced, created to manage 70 million docs in up to 40 languages.

You won’t outgrow the system.

It’s deceptively simple...

easyDITA is the next generation foundation for documentation creation, management, and distribution.

With easyDITA, your intellectual assets become liberated from siloed, proprietary file formats. This opens up an entirely new set of possibilities for taking full advantage of the collective intelligence of your company or organization– and sharing it with the world.

www.easydita.com

Thank you and we hope you change the world