Situation:
A global content strategy firm subcontracted my team to perform a proof-of-concept project for a large tech company who made servers called Zen4.
The goal of this project was to demonstrate a single source solution that would allow the tech company to:
- Update content once across all related products and publications.
- Make content searchable online.
- Produce print for those customers who want it.
- Create consistency across the different content creators/approvers who own different parts of the related products.
- Personalize print content for different customers and product versions when possible.
Task:
My involvement in this project was to assist in each step to bring desired deliverables.
Action:
We utilized MadCap Flare to create a single source for Tech Company’s content. This will allow Tech
Company to easily make changes at the source in MadCap Flare and push out updates instantaneously.
Having a single source will ensure that information across all platforms are identical and always up-to-date.
In addition to a side-panel navigation, we made all online content searchable by adding metadata
descriptions and tagging keywords in every topic.
We created two different PDFs: one for Hardware and one for the Software. Having various outputs will
allow customers to choose how they want to consume the content. We created DITA-style templates to use for all topics.
This will ensure consistency across the content, no matter who is working on each topic. Each template includes detailed descriptions for each section.
We can easily personalize the content of the PDFs for different customers and/or product versions when
necessary due to MadCap Flare.
Results:
Our team delivered proof-of-concept for print & for web delivery of Zen4 content.
Skills:
Component Content Management System (Madcap Flare), CSS, Topic-based authoring, Structured Content, and Single-Source publishing