In case you missed the presentation at PTC/User 2010 (#ptcuser2010) or Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2010 (#CMSDITANA2010), here’s your chance to see a great presentation by someone deep in the thick of it.

Pushpinder Toor, a Product Manager at PTC, is responsible for the design and development of PTC University’s new Arbortext Training Solution. This solution is a melding of PTC technologies, best practices and industry standards. The resulting solution helps PTC customers build, manage and deliver their own training quickly and efficiently. Pushpinder has been a part of PTC (and previously Arbortext Inc.) for 11 years, in that time she’s worked in a number of roles such as a Course Trainer, Curriculum Developer and Project Manager.

Join us as Pushpinder describes how they leverage their content to provide world-class training materials. Discover how the implementation of a Reusable Content Strategy. Arbortext and Windchill technology can help you build training content that allows for:

• Innovative learning methodology — Role based, tailored to the individual needs, and measurable.
• Global Coverage — When you want it, where you need it, in the language you prefer
• Flexibility — Continuous blended material

Join Single-Sourcing Solutions and PTC for this one hour FREE websession.

We will show you how to develop a solution that can deliver faster, high-quality, standards-compliant training and eLearning.

by Liz Fraley

Top Sessions from PTC/User 2010: Arbortext Ask the Experts and Arbortext Strategy

Every year, the Ask the Experts panel always has the most attendees. This year, the new Arbortext Strategy session rivaled attendance levels, and for good reason.

Although both sessions are hosted by the Arbortext Business Unit, the strategy session provides a lot of information for attendees about where the business is going, as well as what their plans are as a company and as a business unit. The business unit is a new concept for both PTC and for their customers this year, as well. This session really helps us all plan our futures together.

The new General Manager, Bill Berutti, did an excellent job laying out the strategy of the Arbortext Business Unit going forward. Arbortext is focused on helping customers get the right information out to the field. To date, this has been easier said than done. First, it’s hard to be an expert at all things. Second, access to the right information — finding the right page number when you need it — is essential to happy customers and critical to success.

PTC has spent $300M on Arbortext since the acquisition in 2005. There are 170 people in Arbortext R&D and over 1000 support personnel. Greater than 1/2 of the employees in the Arbortext Business Unit are R&D. They are all people with very specialized domain skills.

PTC has been focused on, let’s call it plastic surgery. Smoothing the wrinkles. Reshaping the products so they fit together better and require less work by their customers to implement, use, or otherwise interact with. Different products are no longer simply stitched together: they’re blended. They resonate with each other rather than act as sources of discord or cause friction for customers.

The result, and the resulting strategy, is to provide what is truly an out-of-the-box full solution and not simply a set of tools. They are crossing the lines in the sand that traditional vendors have drawn. They’re coming at this like well-trained, board certified surgeons rather than Dr Frankenstein.  They’re blending the separate products into one smooth, integrated, single-vendor solution.

Caterpillar

The other highlight of the strategy session was getting to hear from Caterpillar for the first time in a very long time. Caterpillar is on the bleeding edge of enterprise content strategy. They have a wide array of products and customers and an extremely complex product. They support a dealer network in, literally, every country in the world. Their products have a long lifecycle, often exceeding 50 years.

Dealers sell parts, perform service, and are the primary customer for Caterpillar’s service manuals. Caterpillar cannot require anything of their dealers because each dealer is it’s own business. (One dealer is older than Caterpillar!)

Caterpillar has:

• 4M machines
• Average product life-span: 19.8 years
• No product is ever end of lifed, support is guaranteed always
• 3M machines are out there in the wild
• 270K Engineering Change Notices annually, affecting 1-100 part numbers
• 30K illustrations
• 53 languages
• 230K unique customers
• 20M hits on their service information website every day
• 5000 published service information/content pieces

Some of their dealers do not have internet, so their solution must be complete, it must be robust, and it must support a disconnected service model. In addition, they’ve found that technician competency is down and they need their information to change with the times.
They want every customer to be able to:

• Find the information
• Understand it
• Trust it

Caterpillar’s technical information impacts every transaction at every dealer every day. They want their customer to have the right part, the right service, every time, any place.  Originally, they were a DIY project that has, over the years, become a spaghetti system. They’re ready to change with the times and there are a lot more options today than there were 15 years ago. Today, they want a true solution. They want to get out of the IT business. They built it themselves when there was no other option. Today, they see a better way and they’re ready to move forward with a true enterprise solution. It’s simpler for everyone.  They see the new Arbortext Service Information System (SIS) as the key to making that move. They’re looking at PTC as a partner, who will help them implement this truly integration solution. A partner that will deliver a strong strategic solution.  And this is how they’re doing it.

SIS is the same strategic picture that Bill Berutti painted–come to life. It’s also the end result of the same lessons-learned that everyone was talking about at CMS/DITA NA. More than ever before, content has enterprise-level impact. It’s a strategic initiative that impacts the entire business. The companies that take the discussion out of the techpubs groups are the ones who will be successful in the long run. They’ll be the ones beating their competitors to market and winning again and again once they’re there. Their content will be consistent across all parts of the enterprise. Content already drives business and has the potential to make customers wildly successful (or not).

Where do you want to be?

by Liz Fraley

Every year, PTC/User improves for Arbortext users. This was the first year we had to turn presenters away. It was also the first year we didn’t have to extend the submission deadline because there were so many great presentation submitted. For me, PTC/User is like Summer Camp. The same folks come frequently enough (every year or every other year) that you start to recognize them and look forward to finding what they’ve done personally and professionally in the last year. You grow your expertise through collaboration and personal relationships. You give back.  This year was no exception. Despite the recession, Arbortext attendee numbers were up overall (AGAIN).

My favorite two sessions were the User-to-User panel and the Formatter Shootout. Each was well attended. The Shootout grew much bigger than expected. Originally, the presentation had three technology representatives: FOSI, XSL-FO, and APP (3B2). At the last minute, we added Zarella Rendon, representing Styler. It’s always interesting to see how the other side approaches the same problem. (15% of Arbortext attendees were APP/3B2 users.)

At PTC/User, the PTC product managers attend each session. It gives them a good insight as well to hear what customers are really doing. The Shootout and the User-to-User panel were fertile ground for them to see how different customers have adopted the different technologies to what end results.

All Software is designed with particular usage in mind and, invariably, all software gets used in ways the original designers never expected. As a programmer who’s written lots of scripts that “were never meant for production”, I know first-hand how they always, always end up in production. User sessions are great forums for learning new tricks and new possibilities. And we all learned about situations where we might benefit by adopting one another’s technology. Luckily, as Arbortext customers, we have all FOUR technologies right at our fingertips!

Take a look at some of the pictures from this year’s event in our Flickr stream.

Content is quickly becoming a strategic asset. As enterprises rush towards Web 3.0 and social networking, the amount of time required to produce and coordinate content across all those outlets is growing dramatically every day.  Experts say that it takes approximately 32 hours per month–per site. That’s nearly a week’s time per social networking target.

Are you one of the lucky ones who has an integrated platform to coordinate cross-functional teams so you can reuse content? Do you have a bunch of teams that coordinate with each other? Are you gaining visibility at the executive level or simply working overtime? Maybe you’re all on your own.

Maintaining an effective social media presence leverages customers, prospects, colleagues and contacts, and puts you in touch with fast-changing tides of industry trends, but it also steals productive hours from you and your workforce to maintain properly

Is your organization thinking about the content it produces strategically?

Go ahead and let us know in the poll below, and then vent away in the comments.

by Eric Flynn

From attending the recent PTC User Conference, it appears we are in the midst of a paradigm shift and it will be every bit as significant as the move from desktop publishing to structured content management.  This shift will be from book publishing to dynamic content delivery.  Think about where we have come in the last decade: we use electronic tools to create, publish and maintain our publications, but we still interact with these publications in exactly the same way as their printed counterparts: page-by-page, through an index or glossary or a rudimentary keyword search.

Also, the creative process is the same: anticipate what the customer is going to need and put it in a book.  This pattern of “predictive publishing” breaks down in the face of highly customizable products, since it is impractical to cover every option or configuration that might occur in a single manual.  Also, this publishing model breaks down for products that present a complicated set of features to the user; it is difficult and time-consuming to sift through a large amount of documentation to find help with the task at hand.

PTC’s answer to this problem is the next phase in electronic publishing: Service Information Systems.  Take for example the problem of navigation.  For years, we have hassled with paper maps or Thomas Guides, trying to flip pages and drive to our destination.  This rather haphazard and indeed hazardous process has now been supplanted by GPS-driven navigation systems.  The two key properties of such systems is that they are contextual and interactive.  That is, they are specialized to the task to be performed and they provide an interface that is appropriate to the context.

So, how do you leverage the new generation of tools that are forth-coming from PTC?  First, it almost goes without saying that you will need to be doing structured content management.  Second, if you have not done so already, adopt a Content Management System.  Service Information Systems will be driven from their content databases, so this step is vital.  Finally, be sure that your rendering tools can produce content viewable in ProductView, as this will be the first supported platform for viewing dynamic content.  Stay tuned!

by Dave Lorenzoni

While at the PTC/User World event this year, I had the opportunity to attend a few sessions. There were 4 in particular that I wanted to talk about:  Arbortext Roadmap and Strategy, Product Information Delivery System, Virtual Parts Catalog, and PTC University use of Arbortext. You can see my notes for each one and what I felt was of particular interest. The slides for all of the sessions are now available for you to download. To get them, please visit the PTC/User portal at http://portal.ptcuser.org and login. From there, go to the file library by clicking on FILES in the navigation menu, or by using this direct URL: http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/do/sc/catid=55

Session:   Arbortext Roadmap and Strategy

Featured Speaker(s):  Mike Sundquist – PTC, Leslie Paulson Caterpillar

The first half of the session was a review of PTC’s Arbortext products and where they stand today, along with a list of future enhancements.

PTC is going to focus on what they call the Product Information Delivery System to deliver modules that the customer can use as a starting point.  This is good because it will help clients implement and address their business problems quickly with (hopefully) less resistance to change.  They also intend to help the customer focus on providing templates (stylesheets) that will help the customer deliver content as needed rather than in the traditional “book format”–or “pre-publish everything”–paradigm.

To do this they will continue to rely more on DITA as the content structure model.

The initial customer with whom they are working to develop this model is Caterpillar.  Caterpillar has been an Arbortext customer for over 10 years.

In the second half of the session, Leslie Paulson, Manager of Technical communications within Caterpillar’s Technical Information Solutions group, discussed the success to date that they have attained with Arbortext and moving forward with the Product Information Delivery System.

Because Caterpillar does not sell directly to the end user, their model has to support a variety of users.  In Caterpillar’s business model, they rely on external companies to sell and service their products.  Here are some of the metrics:

• 230,000 users.  These are the Caterpillar Dealers and service providers that both Caterpillar and their customers rely on to sell and service their products.
• Currently supporting 53 languages
• Current content library, 42 million words.  Each needs to be translated into the 53 languages they currently support.
• Last year they published 5,142 service information piece published to support over 8000 possible product configurations (think engine types, size, etc).
• 20+M hits per day from people looking for service information

With that kind of volume you can see the need to deliver exactly what the client needs when they need it because searching through thousands of pages of documentation just doesn’t work, especially when some clients may not have the highest speed network.

Session:  Product Information Delivery System

Presented by:  Tom Sears – PTC Product manager

Overall theme?  PTC is going to be building and delivering (at no extra charge) sample applications to help customers deliver service information.  They will build on the Service Manual application and deliver additional applications or templates for output that covers:

• Service and Repair
• Parts Catalogs
• User Guides

In addition, the focus will be on using DITA as a way to structure the content and to allow clients to produce information “on-Demand” as well as just books.  Users will receive only the content they need rather than being required to search through hundreds or even thousands of pages.  Of course when a user does request printed output, standard things like Tables of Contents and Indexes will be automatically included.

This is a great way for XML to make its way into more organizations.  Prior to this announcement an XML project for documentation always seemed to take on the “science” project approach because the user had to make a decision that was based on the paper-output paradigm versus going with a dynamic-output paradigm.  For example, we always print books, even though their customers never read the books and would prefer to get output based on their situation.  It resulted in longer implementations and often would lead to a project not attaining ROI within the original objectives.  This way, the customer can quickly attain a win and build from there.  Often times customers will learn that they don’t even need the “old” requirements and will be able to streamline their operation and deliverables while still meeting their clients’ needs.

Session:  Virtual Parts Catalog

Toro – Gary Smith

Gary presented a fairly technical overview of how Toro has integrated their existing BOM data with their documentation in order to dynamically build Virtual Parts Catalogs based on the customer selection.

They initially implemented Arbortext in 2004 and have attained the following metrics:

• 1251 manuals per year a 70% increase while reducing Technical communications staff (through retirement and reassignment) by 25%
• 35 part/assembly drawings per day per illustrator (IsoDraw)
• 227% increase in productivity
• 45% reduction in translation costs
  • Translation turnaround time reduced from at least 2 weeks to 4 days.

Toro has attained many of the benefits that the new Service Information System from PTC will provide because of a very smart team and management with a vision.

They have also implemented a reuse configuration that allows them to more efficiently reuse content for different products without having to manually insert the correct graphics file.  I have to admit I do not understand how they do this but as you can see by the reduction in translation costs the savings are significant.

Session:  PTC University use of Arbortext

In this session PTC described how their training and education department is using Arbortext to help build new training material.

PTC instruction designers now use the DITA data model with Arbortext to create DITA Topics that are dynamically assembled based on the course or customer need.  This new system has over 40 course hours of material and supports over 400 trainers.

PTC decided to use DITA as the foundation for their Reusable Content Strategy. Their objective was to make the content pieces simple, but standalone so that they can be configured based on the module and user-level knowledge (i.e., advanced, intermediate, beginner) and then delivered to outputs based on need (for example, teacher guides, student workbooks, and presentation materials).  Rather than be bound by the need to use Powerpoint as a delivery method, they now create the “slides” as PDF files.

The solution utilizes PTC’s Windchill/Arbortext Content Manager (ACM) for content management, Arbortext Editor to author content, Styler to create multiple-output stylesheets, and Publishing Engine to dynamically generate the output based on the instructors input.

Since implementation of Arbortext for the Wildfire 5.0 release, PTC has realized the following metrics:

• 30% reduction per course kit (instructor guides, student workbooks, presentation materials)
• 20% reduction in curriculum localization cost
• 20% reduction in development time
• 30% reduction in WBT production time
• 40% reduction in configured training guides

What I liked most about this solution was that it’s not traditional documentation and shows the flexibility of the Arbortext suite of products as well as the use of the content management system by a non-centralized user group.

For the last decade I have made a regular habit to speak at or at least attend the CMS conference. I think I only missed one year. It gives me an interesting perspective because I can see trends over time, changes in presentation themes, popularity of topics, and the changing interests of the attendees.

For the first year, DITA seemed more of an assumption than an experimental technology. More companies are in year 3-5 of their implementation. In years past, the message has always been: Why choose DITA? What’s the value proposition? This year, the message was lessons learned. The biggest lesson learned was that you can’t treat a DITA implementation like a line item. The projects that were successful were those that had properly socialized the impact of the project to all parts of their organization.

For example, Catherine Lyman (NetApp) said she’d done a fantastic job socializing the impact and the value of their DITA implementation all the way up the chain. Her CEO really understood exactly the value behind their effort and exactly what benefits this shift was bringing to NetApp’s business.  However, she hadn’t socialized to lateral departments and every time she brought the project to a new group, she had to start from square one and begin the buy-in discussions over again. It slowed down adoption across the company and, as a result, caused a delay in the ROI she had projected. Her advice? Go to business and engineering groups early and be clear on the corporate drivers. Also, sell to the whole organization the benefits for their departments. Put customer-facing improvements first!

Successful projects place a high emphasis on collaboration and socialization. It was a story we heard over and over at the conference this year. Intel was starting over again — going back to square one — because they weren’t getting the system they needed to really serve their business goals. They hadn’t originally defined their requirements well enough to really evaluate the vendors. They focused on tools first. As a result, they have worked out a set of vendor questions to envy. They included these questions in their slides for the attendees of CMS/DITA NA 2010.

HP talked about the importance of collaboration within your team and with other groups in the enterprise because reuse is a cultural issue. You need to build trust and structure so that you can measure and track effectiveness.

Actuate said that they were also back at the drawing board. They had overused FrameMaker’s tools to the point it wouldn’t compile correctly and they’d get spurious content. They recommend moving to a robust, enterprise-level, dynamic publishing system with a DITA-aware editor built to do it from the ground up.

Rebekka Andersen, a professor from UC Davis, presented her research into why CMS adoptions fail. She followed a company from the early stages through their CMS evaluations and participated in the discussions every step of the way. In this case, the team not only decided against the vendor’s tool but also against CMS in general, but the reason why was not what anyone could have predicted. Her conclusion? The prevailing tool-focused approach to implementation. Don’t let tool define you: it should be the other way around. Her advice? Understand that technology can’t solve the problem or save the day. Your focus should not be on the tools. Tools should be <10% of project implementation; 50% of any implementation is change management and 40% is process management.

There was one presentation on using Sharepoint as a CCMS. If you just see the slides, it comes across as a success story, but the reaction of the audience (and the talk track behind the slides) made it clear that it really wasn’t. Not from any perspective except for the highly-paid consultants doing all the Sharepoint development ($$$$).

Me? I told success stories this year of companies who were 10+ years into their Arbortext/XML authoring implementations. You can find the slides and abstract here: Where Are They Now. After my presentation, Charlotte Robidoux (HP) said that she was glad someone was telling success stories. The conference was full of lessons learned and pain, and it was good to see that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

To put it in the words of some of the longest-running Arbortext customers that I interviewed for my presentation:

• “This is all doable because we went to XML and Arbortext in 2004″
• “This is ‘bottled gold’ because it gives us a HUGE advantage over our competition”

Overall, it was a great conference. The returns really are there if you frame your project as something that has enterprise-level impact (which it does).

Live PTC Arbortext Educational Webcast: PTC University Delivers Faster, High Quality Training and eLearning

I volunteered to work for the social media committee of the CA Chapter of ASAP. While we were talking, I thought about how I’d live-tweeted the CMS DITA NA conference this year. Before the tweets disappear from the ether, I’ve gathered gathered them up and organized them for your ease and reading pleasure. (In reverse order of presentation…)

Creating and fostering high-value customer relationships

Shawn Benham and Janet Ikemiya, IBM

#cmsdita2010 S.Benham: Use projects to better understand the products/solutions customers are using & the key biz goals they have

#cmsdita2010 J.Ikemiya: f2f–user groups, conferences, classes customers attend, all good places to find customer feedback participants

#cmsdita2010 J.Ikemiya: 3 ways to get feedback participants: use contacts who have estab. rel’ships w/ customers; face2face meetings; email

#cmsdita2010 J.Ikemiya: let everyone know you are looking to estab 1+ rel’ships w/ customers–they can keep an eye out for good candidates

#cmsdita2010 J.Ikemiya/S.Benham/IBM: define & formalize your customer feedback program

Localization – Product Information without Borders

Pushpinder Toor, PTC

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: komatsu case study is on target with Aberdeen study. ///DM us! We can share those details, and intro you to komatsu too

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: Ingersoll-Rand/Club Car reduced delivery lifecycle 80% – huge impact for customers. “only wait a week not a quarter”

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: keep content all in one place. Automated, associated.

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: want to reduce localization? Animations for tasks; illustrations replacing content.

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: want to reduce localization costs? A picture is worth 1000 words! Take out 1000 words!

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: reuse eliminates redundant translation and authoring tasks

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: DTP can be up to 40% of localization cost (Aberdeen)

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: monolithic documents also require a DTP formatting pass. (more expense!)

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: monolithic documents require complete translation (expensive!) Wed Apr 21 11:15:29

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: localization = translation of words + adapting to a culture, local look and feel

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: more drivers for localization? Cost of translation (38%); increasing vol of docs (30%); regulatory reqs (24%)

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: #1 pressure leading to localization? Products launched in increasing number of markets or regions (44%)

The Path To Efficient DITA Translation

Elliot Nedas

#cmsdita2010 E.Nedas: to drive down translation vendor cost? Reduce your costs by reducing your vendor’s overhead by automating

#cmsdita2010 E.Nedas: cost breakdown of translation vendors: 50% overhead/costs; 35% translator; 15% vendor profit.

Digital Alchemy: Turning Unstructured Content Into Gold (or at least something useful)

Don Bridges

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: fix these before conversion: multiple procedures in a single task topic, multiple levels of steps…

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: fix these before conversion: notes in tables; procedure in a table; page references…

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: <1k pages ? Convert by copy/paste. >2.5k ? Are you kidding?

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: book-sourced conversion is good when 80% of output topics don’t need reauthoring (or not right away)

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: topic-sourced conversion is best, but comes at a cost–look at all the incarnations up front– it maximizes reuse

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: it is cheaper to convert than to reauthor

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: few writers have the clairvoyance to author content thinking it will be converted in the future

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: reuse – people are reluctant to do it; they think it’s hard

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: reuse is what affects the quality; consistency is saying the same thing the same way every time=>Reuse!

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: main DITA ROI drivers: multiple output reqs; similar product lines; translation reqs

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: DITA reuse is “single source authoring”

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: Cost in this economy? Pfft. Cost is always an issue.

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: DITA really does improve quality b/c of consistency.

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: your yeild (legacy data conversion) depends on consistency of input data; how big a paradigm shift; yr flexibility

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: there is no one right level if reusable size

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: #1 requested conversion ? Quark to XML

#cmsdita2010 D.Bridges: your customer will tell you which legacy documents to covert. Always the ones most used; longest life; & most value

Reviewing & Approving  DITA Content aka Quality Control at the Lego Factory

S.Frederiksen

#cmsdita2010 S.Frederiksen: qa maps for missing  pieces, too many pieces, and structure

#cmsdita2010 S.Frederiksen: qa topics as the stand  alone items they are, even if you view them in context.

#cmsdita2010 S.Frederiksen: if you copy/paste content  from legacy: you are going to XML, not DITA.

#cmsdita2010 S.Frederiksen: never write, create, or  edit topics inside a large document: it will ruin  reusability

#cmsdita2010 Technical track was frequently vendor  showcase. Always disappointing when a learning opp turns out to be a dog-and-pony show.

#cmsdita2010 I am always amazed when demos show  features of XML publishing as if it’s a product/tool  feature: Look content update automatic!

Product Demo: Acrolinx

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: stats from Acrolinx customers: editing time down 3-4x; word count down 4-15%; translation costs down 30%.

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: includes reporting on whole repository & readiness-shape of content

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: add intelligence to avoid long,complex copy edits down stream. Editors start with analyzed files.

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: linguistic matching engine to catch phrases that would otherwise trigger translation cycles

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: can catch ambiguity– do you mean “to the left” or “on the left” (tightening screws)

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: can tell difference between “check” verb and “check” noun

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: get color coded report–domain-specific spell check; style issues (future tense issues–100 rules OOB

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: plug-in to word, frame, Arbortext, xmetal

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: natural language processor that acts like a copy editor. Drive down litigation risk

#cmsdita2010 R.Eason: Acrolinx is an info quality tool that adds a quality control layer at the time of content creation

Product Demo: PTC

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: working on way to publish to SCORM as just another output format from Arbortext.

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: questions are objects that are pulled into maps. Question/response structure.

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: all PTC University courses are done in DITA (specialization b/c dita spec module was in development)

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: audio file, student materials, graphics in thumb/big (one copy, LMS manages)

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: publish course as WBT from single source. PTC courses done this way today

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: check-in/check-out OOB in Arbortext Editor

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: can check out top level only or also all dependent files. Easy to move around while still following rules

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: structure tab gives view into modules “in use”; can drill down, w/o duplicate copies in repository

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: can publish very small guide of exercises and still publish PDF of full student guide w/o printing 300pgs

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: same single source can produce the slide set (not pptx, PDF!) get benefit of slides always in sync w/student materials

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: published renditions can go to desktop or directly to CMS so available to everyone

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: composition launcher builds all output formats in one-click

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: can build taxonomy as a course developer and that’s all pulled in

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: PTC LMS includes multimedia in their delivered training content

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: Arbortext Editor DITA resource mgr allows browse right into content repository and manage multi-map content

#cmsdita2010 P.Toor: case study Arbortext DITA + windchill to deliver PTC University training

We wanted a CMS. We were given SharePoint: Turning disappointment into opportunity

Joe Gelb, Suite Solutions and John Allwein, Emerson Process Management

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: to do review and discover validation problems the easiest way to do this in our system is to publish (ouch)

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: there are still a lit of features we want…But that’s for future (including building custom integration for TM vendor)

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: cost of sw doesn’t change as we grow, (but cost of maintaining custom code isn’t cheap)

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: we are looking toward integrating with PLM systems and CRM in the future

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: to associate TechPubs Docs to other Docs in enterprise, we built app&ui to do this (a manual process) got triggers!

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: pub ui will require development to change going forward. Good for corp branding guidelines, but …

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: built custom publishing queue and UI to get DITA publishing in sharepoint

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: wanted to be able to create translation pkgs on demand–needed to build it on top of Sharepoint too

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: built reporting dashboard on top of sharepoint to be able to have bird’s eye view of where everything is (big list)

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: sharepoint can’t manage translation component management or workflow. We had to build all of that capability too.

#cmsdita2010 Best paper on “when to branch and when not to” is by Perforce.

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: also had to build branching capability into sharepoint to get capability to have configurable maps (minor revisions)

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: built hooks to initiate publishing tasks

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: sharepoint thinks of files as URLs; had to build whole mechanism around that capability just to get link information

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: we are also scraping info out of the files to put metadata into sharepoint.

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: custom software dev for expansions to basic check-in/check-out to what we needed

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: custom code begets custom error msgs that require audience help to resolve

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: oob except for developing component management info layer & adding custom touch points to all tools, so play together

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: had to build in capability to get “where used” & this was a BIG challenge to getting SharePoint to work as CCMS

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: to get uncompromised, high-end DITA authoring & publishing, had to build the CCM infrastructure

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: sharepoint is not good at: supporting XML Docs, managing components & relationships to each other, aggregating into pub

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: sharepoint good at collab, basic ver. control on document level, metadata, Dev platform for customization

#cmsdita2010 J.Gelb: to use Sharepoint we had to build a CCMS layer to get the whole thing working

#cmsdita2010 J.Allwein: SharePoint sitting on top of MarkLogic server is front end to answering user questions.

How effective use of metadata and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) can be an answer to your DITA nightmares

Frank Shipley

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: use RDF to model links in resources so you can track & manage relationships between them

#cmsdita2010 Next up– lunch then “We wanted a CMS. We were given Sharepoint. Turning disappointment into opportunity”

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: stats about content–what’s used/reused where, impact, &c is all in that RDF link graph

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: profiling links using RDF triples in DITA: extract link metadata & build RDF link graph–can’t break documents

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: using XML catalogs to resolve resources and do term management

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: if you want to reuse topics, ID must be unique across organization. Best practice: ID generated/match file name

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: became long product demo, and a cool one, but not what I expected

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: faceted search (ecommerce) — filtered search + navigation: “my size”,”color”–provides guide to what exists

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: why classify? So you can find them!

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: why identify resources? So you can reference them for use & reuse

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: how to name (identify) & how to organize (classify) all those resources

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: before DITA, hundreds of files; after DITA, thousands with lots of dependencies

#cmsdita2010 F.Shipley: RDF can be an answer to your DITA nightmares

Planning for the Content Management Technology Diffusion Process

Rebekka Andersen

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: model of engagement and a focus on shared artifact that are developed collaboratively

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: understand that technology is but 1 component of this complex organizational change & communication that is CMS

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: focus on tools should be <10% of project impl. 50% is change management 40% is process management

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: Lead people not projects.

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: think about your larger organization before you start going through this process.

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: need metrics–business plan, test plans, weekly project management plans, document the unwritten rules

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: don’t just play with a system–have daily goals, defined things to evaluate & a plan to get the info you need.

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: watch for one-way communication channels. Need collaboration and cooperation organizationally for success

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson pres tells me we’re on right track. We are highly collaborative and integrated as a company->also how we work w/cust

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: address culture of org separately from how technology addresses or supports the org

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: technology can’t solve the problem or save the day. You still need to do the work and understand yr org/culture/&c

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: be clear with self & vendor so you’re operating on the same assumptions. Articulate your plans and document them

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: it all comes down to perceptions of value of the technology

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: how innovation is communicated (channels,over time) among members of social system (Evertt Rogers)

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: used “Diffusion of Innovation Theory” (map stages of process) & “Activity Theory” (map context of activity)

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: calling knowledge transfer the “diffusion process”

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: I wonder how she didn’t find us? We transfer knowledge to customers (anyone who will listen) constantly.

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: prevailing tool-focused approach to implementation. Don’t let tool define you: should be the other way around

#cmsdita2010 R.Anderson: a lot more info now than 5 yrs ago, but implementations are plagued with problems

Where Are They Now?

Liz Fraley, Single-Sourcing Solutions

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: Ingersoll-Rand Club Car “Translation savings expected to be 92K 1st year and 500K in the first 3″ Cycle-time down 80%

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: Canadian Telecom, ‘companies see what we’ve done [started in 1999] and they’re very, very envious’

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: Canadian Telecom, “This is all doable b/c we went to XML and Arbortext and Documentum in 2004″

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: sometimes the business changes, and you don’t have the opportunity to get where you really want to go

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: The most successful businesses for the next century will…have been based on a combination of competence & passion

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: Understand what specific product or service you offer, and then do it as well and expertly as possible.

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: Will your content stand up like Robinson Crusoe has? 18th century novel w/100s of new formats,versions,tech since

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: Canadian Telecom hasn’t really touched stylesheets in 5 years. 1 staff supporting 250 writers. “Runs like a Cadillac”

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: LifeSciences company says XML publishing is “bottled gold” remains unnamed b/c HUGE advantage over their competition

#cmsdita2010 L.Fraley: Medtronic brought their translation down 10X because they went to XML publishing. Join the conversation! Getting ready for 2nd day of

Advanced Feature-Based Profiling

Gershon L Joseph, Cisco

#cmsdita2010 G.Joseph: rule of thumb–if 50% of a topic is conditional, it’s time to break it out and focus on the differences.

#cmsdita2010 G.Joseph: profiling on release leaves history in content no one cares about; also, requires you to re-analyze w/every release

#cmsdita2010 G.Joseph: customer-specific docs become a different slicing & dicing of features.

#cmsdita2010 G.Joseph: treating inclusion/exclusion of features and bugs like a bill of materials for doc production.

#cmsdita2010 G.Joseph: user community was confused by assumption to include all unless specifically excluded. Went to reverse model.

#cmsdita2010 G.Joseph: profile each sentence, the smallest segment generally used by translation memories.

#cmsdita2010 G.Joseph: profiling using DITA kwd tag + feature-id attribute; can then use suppress-feature-id to drop content. Many examples

#cmsdita2010 Gershon Joseph “Advanced Feature-Based Publishing”: cms can help work around including/excluding content

If Only We Had Known: Snares and Pitfalls of Managing in a DITA Environment

Catherine Lyman and Martha Morgan, NetApp

#cmsdita2010 M.Morgan: our HW writers made the shift best. They were all organized together and could work together.

#cmsdita2010 M.Morgan: identify where you would have content redundancies if you didn’t have a single source.

#cmsdita2010 M.Morgan: people are hesitant to go to others and ask for changes to “someone else’s” content.

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: DITA as Lingua Franca–you write in DITA and we’ll take care of it; we’ll write in DITA and you take care of it.

#cmsdita2010 M.Morgan/C.Lyman: starting now you have an advantage — mature tools, people to lean on. Call any of them, they’ll talk to you

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: benchmark now. Reward team members who help expose those #s. Look at pressure points. Typical assignment reqs, #words

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: don’t over-estimate time to DITA productivity – to writers, to business leaders. Ultimately pubs is a cost center.

#cmsdita2010 M.Morgan: big corp libraries get harder & expensive to maintain. Don’t overvalue consistency & simplicity over ROI.

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: are writers of questionable skill or subversive inclination talking? Fix that 1st Mon Apr 19 13:51:38

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: go to business and engineering groups early (1-2 yrs) and be clear on corp drivers. Put customer-facing improv 1st!

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: sell to whole org. Answer the question for them: “I see how this can benefit us generally, but what’s in it for me?”

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: need to sell value prop to other BUs, whole organization, not just your management.

#cmsdita2010 M.Morgan: the biggest challenge isn’t DITA tagging (conspicuous!=biggest). Invest in classes in Structured Writing (any sort)

#cmsdita2010 M.Morgan: good DITA is more than valid DITA. It’s smart, standards-compliant DITA tagging

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: 16k topics 1.4k publications at NetApp. Huge content reuse, flexibility, consistency. DITA is totally worth it

#cmsdita2010 C.Lyman: what we did wrong “if only we had known: the snares and pitfalls of managing in a DITA environment”

Collaborative Writing: Changing the culture of a documentation group

Nola Hague and Tom Bondur, Actuate

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: working in an agile/scrum situation takes all the professional and inter-personal skills you can muster

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: many writers feel insecure abt having their work exposed, dissected, & rewritten by a team in an open setting

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: scrum sessions informed by his exp. teaching freshman composition.

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: Docs req constant restructuring/rewriting to keep content relevant/focused /flowing. It’s hard! Need to spt writers

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: you really need to understand it &scrub your Docs. Consultants can’t solve those issues. You have to do it eventually

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: we collaborate all the time so nothing is a surprise.

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: demeanor and tact v.important here. Need to do this in a sensitive way and pay attn to group

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: editing scrum — conference room + remote folks. Mgr moderating and revise the content right there, driving/guiding

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: our content is changing. No more books–we are delivering content to match how it’s being consumed.

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: needed to move to a robust,enterprise dynamic publishing system with a DITA-aware editor built to do it from the ground up

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: we overused Frame’s tools to the point it wouldn’t compile correctly & we’d get spurious content.

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: traditional release cycles are a thing of the past..publishing is rapid iterations now

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: we are doing this with teams around the world (his copresenter is presenting from Brazil!)

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: we have to keep our Docs ready to go–shipment ready every day. Automated/public process to ensure it.

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: our scrum editing sessions are particularly good to work with legacy content.

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: vigorous editing sessions — it’s a scrum session including anyone required to get it done (Eng, Pubs, anyone)

#cmsdita2010 T.Bondur: the definition of a writing group is currently shifting dramatically and we need to be aware of that to avoid a mess

Improving Content Collaboration Using Content Management

Presented by: Charlotte Robidoux, HP, and Suzanne Mescan, Vasont

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: collaborative review saves time for reviewers too.

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: Reuse + successful CMS is not linear

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: Define reuse. Reuse is a cultural issue: build trust, structure, measure,& track

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: cultural shift to watch for: Can’t get to reused content if you don’t put your content in the system (cms)

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: Understand your own processes, your own work habits, so you know what you want you CMS to support.

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: mentioned she was just discussing review phase tools with our own Liz Fraley

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: collaboration in the review phase, where you need it most: automated synthesis of review feedback is key

#cmsdita2010 C.Robidoux: Use the right collaborative technology for the right purpose. Sometimes the phone is better than chat

Misc Tweets

#cmsdita2010 Conference wrapping up; tutorials this afternoon. Like summer camp, see you all next year!

Tell us where you are you now and win some schwag!

Over the last year, Single-Sourcing Solutions has spent time interviewing long-term Arbortext customers to find out where they are now. We wanted to know whether our customers were realizing the full potential of their solutions. We wanted to know what data they’d collected, what lessons they’d learned, and what they’d implemented over time.

Liz Fraley’s talk at the Content Management Strategies this year is a summary of their stories.

Now we want to hear from you.

For the next two months, we’re going to run a contest. We want to know: Where are you in your dynamic publishing project? The winner gets one of these snazzy Arbortext Golf Shirts!

How do you enter?

Write up a short description of your story and put it in the comments.

All stories must include:

1. When did you start? / When did you start thinking about moving to XML Publishing?
2. Why did you do it? / Why are you thinking about it?
3. If you’ve started, what tools are you using?  (Editor, Rendering Engine/Processors, CMS)
4. What output formats do you go to today? (html, chm, epub, print, eclipse help, etc..)
5. Optional Bonus: Are you using any special technology to get there? (xsl, xquery, FOSI, etc..)

The winner will be chosen by vote of all Single-Sourcing Solutions staff members. As long as you tell a good story, you’ve got a chance to win!

You don’t have to be deep into your project. And you don’t need to be an Arbortext customer to submit an entry. However, you will be winning an Arbortext shirt!

All entries must be in by June 30, 2010.