Content Reuse—Great Expectations
New products, new documentation set required, no budget for new writers. You can reuse, can’t you? Does this sound familiar? This is a tale of how to repurpose writers and reorganize content to deliver quality reused content for more projects with existing writing resources. Using an XML CCMS (SDL Knowledge Center), realigning product-based writers to be technology-owning writers, and restructuring our deliverables to match our corporate taxonomy model, we are delivering leaner and better focused content across a number of product lines. We are adding value to all of our deliverables by restructuring towards task-based content and introducing numerous configuration examples. While building a structure and organization for content reuse and restructuring our resources, we had to manage the expectations of upper management, the Engineering teams and Product Managers, and the writers themselves. Great expectations indeed!
What can attendees expect to learn?
This presentation is a use-case study on the successful implementation of a content reuse strategy. Attendees will learn to manage expectations such as content reuse automatically reduces the amount of work the writers must do. The first lesson is to define how to approach delivering and measuring content reuse across platforms or products. Attendees will learn how we reconfigured writer resources to allow a focus on content reuse while still delivering content for our regular platform releases. Creating added value for the customer while reducing the total amount of content is a key component of our content reuse strategy, but we did encounter resistance. Attendees will learn how to counter expectations from upper management, engineers, and writers, and provide metrics that measure and demonstrate the success of content reuse.
Meet the Presenter
Lelia joined Brocade in 2013 with previous experience of content migration to DITA XML databases. Assisting with content conversion from FrameMaker to SDL Knowledge Center and providing CCMS technical training and support are part of her duties as a member of the Brocade CCMS core team. Fascinated by reuse possibilities and metrics, Lelia is leading a content reuse program that leverages the Brocade corporate taxonomy to realign writers and content by software technology across multiple platforms. Lelia trains writers to single-source content and collects metrics from the CMS to track progress and report to upper management.