© Sharon Burton - the April 11 2012 presentation to SDSTC.

1. Content Management
What, when, and why?
Sharon Burton
Sharon@sharonburton.com
Twitter: sharonburton

2. 8 Steps to Amazing Webinars
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3. What is Content Management?
And why do we care?

4. Question
 Do you think your job is a technical writer?
 Long gone are the days where we just wrote
content all day until we were ready to ship

5. Content management is…
 Content is a business asset
 Words
 Videos
 Graphics
 All this cost time (money) to create and publish
 In your company, content:
 Describes how the company works
 Explains the products
 Trains staff
 More

6. Content management is…
 The process of understanding that content is a
business asset and
 Managing it like any other asset in the business
 Other assets:
 Computers
 Furniture
 Money
 Staff
 Products
 Source code

7. Content management is…
 Critical to the business
 We need to think about our content
development efforts in this context
 Big questions:
 What are we doing that adds value to the
company?
 How do we preserve our content efforts?
 How do we secure our content?
 How do we decrease the cost of content
development and maximize our efforts?

8. Why do we want Content
Management?
What are the benefits?

9. It all sounds good, but
 How do you manage all these pieces of content?
 What if we…
 want to move files?
 find out where content is being used?
 want to know if this has been written before?
 manage versions?
 many other issues
 That’s the Management part

10. The Management part
 Find and reuse content
 Security
 Standardization
 Collaboration
 Workflow

11. Find and reuse content
 You can’t reuse what you can’t find
 Opportunistic reuse
 People remember this content from before
 Maybe they can find it
 Big time sink
 Systematic reuse
 The system knows this content has been written
previously
 Prompts the writer for reuse
 Tracks reuse and reports it

12. Security
 People should only be able to change what they
know about
 Restrict access to content
 Who changed what?
 When?
 Why?
 Obsolete content
 Needs to be managed as well

13. Standardization
 Standard content can be reused most effectively
 Templates enforce standardization of content
 Both in
 Terminology
 Structure of information
 In other words, the corporate voice is enforced
 Content can be reused seamlessly

14. Collaboration
 Allows people to develop the content in pieces
 Assemble later
 Faster content development
 Meeting deadlines
 Leverage your staff more effectively

15. Workflow
 Improve your workflow
 Content is not sent for review 30 times
 Content is sent to localization when it’s done
 Manage who changed what
 Where is the content used?
 What content is obsolete?
 So much more

16. When do we need to think
about Content Management?
After all, we’ve been doing it this way for decades…

17. At the start of a project
 From the first planning, you need to think
 What can I do to reduce the cost of this project?
 Cost = time
 What can I reuse that already exists?
 How can I develop content to make my content
most reusable?
 How can I make my content available to others ro
use?
 Who else might be developing content that I can
use?

18. Yeah, but…
 Our products are totally silo-ed
 I don’t like the way Joe writes
 Who has time for this? I have deadlines!
 We’ll never translate our content
 We’re opening a new market? Spanish, you say?
 This is a stupid new “thing” that will be gone in
a year
 Just like the 10 other “new things” in the last 10
years
 We have buckets of existing content and I have
no idea how to start

19. Now. The answer is now.
Start now. It’s time.

20. How do we start with Content
Management?
Is this going to hurt?

21. Look at your tools
 You really can’t do this with Word
 You can but you really won’t like it
 But it’s not enough
 FrameMaker is better
 Structured Frame is even better
 But it’s not enough
 You can do this with Flare
 But it’s not enough
 A Content Management system is really good
 Author-It natively has CM
 3rd party Content Management tools may be
appropriate for you

22. Content Inventory
 What content do we have?
 Down to all headings
 Where is that content?
 Where are the source files for as far back as you
need to go?
 How is that content structured?
 Is it task oriented? Narrative? Mixture?
 Where are the graphics and videos?
 Who is it for?
 Who is the audience for each piece of content?
 What is the point of each piece of info?

23. Develop your information types
 DITA has several information types
 Concept
 Task
 Reference
 These may meet your needs
 It’s a place to start
 Even if you’ll not be moving to DITA
 Perhaps especially if you’re not

24. It would be pretty to think
 Your legacy content is going to fit neatly in these
categories
 It won’t take any time to figure this out
 We can do this as we need to
 It’s easy

25. The reality is
 Your legacy content is not going to fit neatly
 It’s at least not well written/structured/organized
 You don’t know where much of it is
 You can’t jump on your horse and ride off in all
directions
 You need to analyze what you have before you can
decide what you have
 One manual will not give you the real picture
 Especially if you have used a lot of contractors, legacy
content has been around a long time, and so on
 This can be very hard
 People want their content to be the exception
 It’s special content, not like other content and needs
special attention

26. So what to do?
 Consider making several passes
 For this version, we’ll do an inventory
 Next version, we’ll move to a CCM and rewrite to
follow Structured Authoring
 Version after that, we identify the information types
 And so on
 This reduces project impact
 If you have a very experienced writer
 Let her/him start the content analysis/inventory
 They know the content well
 Pilot project
 They can set the guidelines and train the others

27. New Content
 Much better position
 You can do it right from the beginning
 You may encounter resistance from other writers
 It’s not possible
 It’s stupid
 I don’t like the writing guidelines
 I’m going to agree and then do what I want
 And so much more

28. Standards for content
 You need
 Writing standards
 Style guide
 Corporate style guide
 Structure guide
 Graphics guide
 And you need to implement these
 Style guide – MS has one that’s fine
 Corporate style guide – How do you talk about your
stuff?
 Structure authoring guide – How are topics structured?
 Graphics guide – How and when do we use graphics?

29. Implementing
 People are not going to like having these thrust on
them
 You may or may not care
 Tech writers seem to like fighting about these for years
 May want committees or may just impose
 Training is critical
 Brown bags are great
 Making everyone follow these guidelines makes the
content more consistent
 And now you can leverage the content
reusability/cost savings that Content Management
provides

30. Further reading
 DITA 101, 2nd edition.
 Ann Rockley
 Information Development: Managing Your
Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People
 Joann T. Hackos
 Single Sourcing: Building Modular
Documentation
 Kurt Ament
 Managing Enterprise Content, 2nd edition.
 Ann Rockley

31. Questions?
This was a brief overview of a large topic
Sharon Burton
Sharon@sharonburton.com
Twitter: sharonburton