Create Content

A successful product content strategy starts with a holistic view of how your organization is creating content.

A successful product content strategy starts with a holistic view of how your organization is creating content. Eventually the entire organization should be creating structured XML content, such as DITA and S1000D, unified under one common 'voice' to communicate with customers globally.

How do larger communities of users create and review XML content?

As DITA and S1000D adoption continues to increase, there is a growing need for roles beyond technical writers to contribute and review content in XML to increase the value of that content across your organization and to close the loop between content developers and contributors. However, one of the barriers to DITA and XML adoption is the complexity of the editing experience.

Advanced XML editing tools are required for technical writers, but for subject matter experts, engineers, support personnel, marketing staff, scientists, lawyers and many others, a simpler experience for review and contribution is a necessity. SDL provides such an interface for that experience. SDL Xopus is an easy to use, online XML editor designed to simplify your editing experience and enable collaborative content development.

With a growing community of content creators, how does your organization communicate consistently to its customers?

The old paradigm of ‘controlled authoring’ still rings true, as your organization requires closer control over the content created across distributed teams. However, once your organization widely adopts structured content, such as DITA, and begins looking to publish product content dynamically to the multilingual web, you may be concerned that:

Your customers can’t find the content and documentation they are looking for
The topic paradigm of DITA means that many content developers are creating one ‘document’ and maintaining one common ‘voice’ becomes challenging
Translations costs are increasing and quality is diminishing, which prohibits you from expanding into new languages

Therefore your organization needs to optimize content authoring in a way that encapsulates style guidelines, linguistic accuracy, terminology and branding consistency, SEO keywords, content reuse, and optimization for translation. And SDL can help.

SDL Global Authoring Management System and its plug-in tool, SDL AuthorAssistant, automates all elements of content optimization and controlled authoring , allowing content developers to improve your organization’s content quality and communication consistency. Its unique connection to the translation process and previously written content also enables reuse, consistency and translation savings.