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hello everyone welcome to learning did a live 2019 I'm Allen Pringle of scriptorium and I am moderating the first two sessions today this session is data versus CMS by Ulrika parson the founder of parson AG learning did alive is brought to you by scriptorium the content strategy experts since 1997 scriptorium has helped companies manage structure organize and distribute content in an efficient way if you were trying to figure out how the did a model can best support your content or you were setting up a new data tool system please contact us we would love to work with you learning did a dot-com and learning it alive would not be possible without the help from our sponsors we would also like to thank parson Agee for creating the site learning data dot d II want to tell you a little bit about how this webcast is going to work attendees are muted during the webcast even so we still want your input during the session please type your questions and your comments at any time in the questions module and our speaker will answer those questions at the end of the session so if you would take a little time now to locate the questions module in the GoToWebinar interface at the beginning of the question and answer phase please look for a link to a session evaluation survey we very much appreciate your feedback on these sessions and with that I am going to hand things over to arica arooga are you there I'm there good morning good morning okay do you see my screen we sure do it looks great so just okay yeah good morning to you it's 4 p.m. where I live and thank you for the introduction by scriptorium my name is reka parson and i'm the founder of a company named person we are located in Germany in Hamburg and Berlin that's our main offices and we are a technical communication consultants meaning that we do write a lot of technical documentation and just like scriptorium we help clients to switch to xml based authoring and publishing and to content delivery portals or component content management systems ok the question today is whether there is a question like do you choose that our or AC CMS whether that really is a decision that you need to make I put that question because in Europe and especially in Germany you have a strong position of all the component content management systems that are not based on data but use their own structure and document definition so mostly a decision for C CMS is also a decision against data in Germany but I think that the question whether you work with data or C CMS is actually like comparing apples and oranges or as we Germans will put it on comparing apples and pears because if you think of that I asked the Apple that's a nice food that you can chew it's it's a format a semantic information architecture that you can use to write your content and and the orange is a complete system where you have additional functions like workflow translation management terminology checking authoring memory you name it everything you need in addition to your document type definition so there is no decision for against CCMS or data it's just different things that you need to decide along your way and that's exactly what I want to talk about the way of how to get from structured content from unstructured content to structured content and a modern way of authoring technical information and I want to present you a an approach a structured approach for for doing so which is based on defining your requirements evaluating system and then implementing the solution that's why I depicted that as a way because that is a way that you need to go when you want to go to structured authoring there are a lot of challenging challenges that we face today we are in the age of digitization everybody talks about information for our industry for our Theory the smart factories the connected industry and chatbots and AI but what I see at the conferences and when I go to the regional meetings of technical writers is that a lot of them are still caught in unstructured content they are still working with InDesign with word some of them in the software industry are working with markdown languages so they actually have to fight and deal with unstructured content and a very limited technical infrastructure that also implies that they have an insufficient management of variants on the one hand and with all the customers I had talked to they have an increasing number of variants so products get more variant there are different editions of the same product software is delivered via the clouds in which you can activate or deactivate feature features for the software but the documentation partly needs to be generated still in an unstructured way with no reuse and no variant management in the authoring environment also people want to switch from the conventional formats to more advanced output formats like content delivery web helps and stuff like that but they can't because they are still caught in the unstructured world strategically as a strategic consideration we all need to move towards intelligent content or as we call it intelligent information saying that we need to get prepared for delivering information that can be consumed in the form of chunked chunks and which is semantically enriched by metadata so that it can be retrieved on demand for example in augmented reality applications in service applications or in content delivery portals in Germany or in the whole of Europe you ditional II have the problem that you have a high demand for localization because manufacturers and software vendors usually need to translate their products and the documentation into 20-plus languages so these are the challenges that we face and the question is how do we start the process and get into structured authoring or even better find a way to intelligent content and the best way is to start with a requirement not just by a tool but collect your requirements and I would like to provide you with a list of areas that you need to check and see whether which requirements results with from from these areas the first one is that you should take a look at the information products that you need saying is a an information product is something that you need to publish in some way can be an online help it can be the delivery to a portal it can be a PDF that you need to supply or even a print product that you put into the box together with your product your physical product so you need to consider how what which kind of information I need to deliver which information types are required for example do I need instructions for use or also for transport disposal and maintenance and which target groups are will be using that kind of information then you need to consider how far or how well advanced your information architecture is if you decide to switch to structured authoring you need to think about a modular about the modules that you want to create and which degree of modularization you want to achieve in your content because you need to split up your big documents into smaller chunks usually topics but it could also be even smaller chunks like fragments or elements whatever you call them and you need to find a way of analyzing your content in order to identify those modules because they are the prerequisite for reusing content and for publishing modular documentation they're different approaches for creating modules with your content you can do that bottom-up or top-down bottom-up means that you would take a look at all your information products and compare them for example the information products for different variants and then identify the content that is similar between those information products and create modules based on that analysis top-down means that you start with the structure of the information product for example the list of chapters and topics and subchapters and then create modules for the different entries in this table of contents once you have your modules you also have the analysis results for a variance that you can create from the same source and in order to actually produce output for different variants you need metadata that reflect the variant information saying metadata to differ between different product variants metadata to mark content that is suitable for different qualification levels or skill levels like experts or normal users administrators developers or metadata that marks specific content types like troubleshooting which may be relevant for finding service related information for service technicians or Troubleshooters in a call center so that means before you actually start selecting a system the the content architecture the information architecture need to be at least sketched and you need a concept for that ok in the next area you should take a look at it see the output that you want to generate that on generate not only the output that you currently need but also the output that you want to provide in the future strategically like content delivery portal that you want to set up or applications that you want to use to provide information to your people like service technicians or sales personnel that wants to have the product information in the field when they talk to customers so that also is based on a target group analysis and their requirements regarding information consumption another aspect regarding which I Pro to generate and how to deliver content to the consumers is whether you have to serve specific interfaces whether you have to deliver content to other applications to may be customers which then create their own documentation based on your documents and for this you can you will probably need exchange formats either for a specific interface or if you can also use standard exchange formats like I add S which is a exchange format for intelligent information which is currently being developed in Europe so there's also this aspect of exchanging documentation or delivering documentation as a supplier so for from all these aspects you can derive requirements for your structure authoring environment the next aspect that you need to consider is whether you need to integrate your authoring environment with other systems nobody works alone and although we are currently bridging silos more and more in companies they are still dedicated systems for a dedicated purposes which also makes sense because the systems serve their specific purposes and are best suited when they are specialized so there there will never be one tool that fits all so they are probably tools and systems in your company for requirements management for product information for source code versioning and stuff like that and then you have publication systems like a document management system a web portal a website or the marketing stuff that people provide information okay so the info the information systems that you interface with are on the one hand the incoming systems like a requirements management system or product information that comes from as AP or product information management system so you probably need to take a look whether the authoring environment that you want to create has an interface for that you need to specify this as a requirement then you have requirements deriving from [Music] system functions that you want to use within your authoring environment this could be for example and authoring memory or linguistic checkers like Rowling's or a translation memory that you need in order to translate your content to 20-plus European languages and then you need to take a look at the systems that you deliver output to saying an automatic build system if you want your documentation to be built together with the software that your document or if you want to deliver content to a web portal or a service application so data and these are the outgoing interfaces and all these interfaces result in requirements for your authoring environment and there's the question of which kind of data access and data storage you need there are clients other based solutions cloud-based solutions locally installed solutions or just a fire folder in your network everything is possible and the question is how many office you need to connect and which rules you need to comply with regarding data protection data security and server architecture so go and talk to your IT guys and try to find out what fits the architecture the ite structure of your company ok all these areas result in requirements and most of them in in functional requirements that you can write down as user stories but you can supplement the requirements also when you analyze the by and the general conditions for your project and one aspect of the general conditions is which resources do you have available and which processes do you have in your company so are we talking about one or two of authors are we talking about full-time office that have a lot of skills in an XML for instance and how many part-time office do we have maybe you have a lot of engineers who actually write the documentation and only one technical writer who who does all the terminology work in the reviews another question is where are all these office located are we talking about Europe Asia and US for instance or do we have one team in one location where a local access would be fine whereas for the other constellation you would need a service solution or a cloud-based solution then you need to define your requirements regarding your processes so are we talking about authoring processes only or do you need a system that also covers reviews and publications if you many companies are already working with a kind of workflow management so if you are for instance working with JIRA or with other workflow management tools or requirements management tools then you probably don't need these functions in your authoring environment because you would plug in into the existence existing systems the same applies to publication processes if you are able to plug into the build processes of the software department you don't probably do not need a publication server in your authoring environment so processes result in functional requirements for your authoring solution another more soft factor is the skills that you have available in your team or in your authoring teams how much do they know about authoring are they willing to deal with XML or what they rather prefer prefer a easy-to-use world-like interface for writing their content so their technical expertise and their technical communication expertise is very important now the point is which resources do you have for development and maintenance of the solution are you willing to outsource everything that is related to customizing the system to an external partner or a vendor or do you want to have development customization and specialization in-house if you don't have the skills in-house are you willing to invest in in training and build up the knowledge required for that part another aspect is of course time and cost if you consider investing into a C CMS or a did a solution they are actually three kinds of cost first is the initial investment their license costs that you need to pay the second is most systems require most vendors require you to sign a support maintenance contract which is usually 15 to 20 percent of the of the license cost of the initial investment and then you have the implementation costs where somebody needs to develop the information information architecture we talked about earlier somebody needs to develop your specialized output formats with your logo and your CI and your layout and somebody needs to develop interfaces between your systems those interfaces that you require to connect to ingoing or outgoing systems and it gets more expensive if you are in a hurry if you don't have too much time or if you have the requirement of customization and you have to consider that this takes time there is no CCMS project that is it doesn't take at least a year to to be implemented and to be rolled out another aspect is the technical infrastructure that you already have in your company there are companies that allow for example Linux systems others Microsoft partners and only or Adobe partners so there may be restrictions from that side that even if those systems do not fully yeah provide a full coverage of your requirements may even may move up the list and become the favorite system because they fit the infrastructure that you're already have in your company the management needs to decide whether they want to make a solution or buy a solution and whether they want to get into a get dependent on the vendor of a CMS for example the scope of a project is one of the most important things from from my experience as a project manager because there's always the danger of scope creep as we call it so that more and more requirements move into your project so if we do that we could also do that oh yeah that would be fine too we could kill two birds with one stone but that that is dangerous because it makes your project longer it makes your project more expensive and that's why you should focus on the realistic requirements on the biggest pains and on things that you can achieve in a short time so fast gains then you could also focus on what the team can do by itself and you must be careful not to overload your team with a scope too large and of course there's the budget issue if you consider buying a CCMS or investing into the resolution there's probably a budget that you need to adhere to and trying to assess and estimate this budget is one of the most difficult parts in such a project okay so the general conditions for a let's say content management project also result in funding requirements and functional requirements but also in non-functional requirements and what we usually do is when we do that phase of the project the requirements analysis phase is that we write down their their most important requirements in the form of user stories say as a technical author I would like reviewers to be able to review and comment a text that I sent them but they shall not be able to edit the extra content because I as an author want to decide which changes to take into the content which changes to accept so it's always to form as a role I want this because this motivation is very important because it gives you the actual reason why people want to have a feature and this may result in decisions that another feature covers this requirement although this is not what they actually want it and this is very important so if you have a list of requirements they don't need to be detailed into every aspect they just need to cover all the areas that I showed you and to give a general picture of the functions that the solution shall provide and you can take those user stories and prioritize them and assigning priorities to them like must have could have I should have or I won't have this feature and then you can go into the selection process for the authoring solution or for the CCMS and if you do that you are spoiled for choice there's so many solutions on the market if you visit the TC World Conference and in Stuttgart you have several hundred booths or if two halls for with those off with CCMS vendors and small solution vendors and everything that you want and don't need you can find there and it's difficult to decide which system is best especially if you have not defined your requirements well in advance so basically there are two categories of solutions CAD tools for unstructured authoring and tools for structured authoring and I apologize for efore the day as much text on the next slides but this is due to the fact that we want would like to deliver you the slides as well and you don't have to read it just listen of course you know the unstructured solutions and I put in lockdown languages here as well and wiki's are also unstructured and first some of our customers unstructured solution is nice because main focus lies on getting quick results or their main focus lies on getting such a matter experts to deliver to provide content and to provide information and for those people may be good not to invest into a structured authoring solution but to to get like a mark town or Mactan environment or wiki to deliver information fast to to their customers if you decide for an unstructured offering solution you need to be aware that you probably can't handle variants with that and idea that your possibilities for content modules and content reuse are limited then there are structured authoring solutions of course and this is actually where the question starts whether you should go for it did I only solution with no C CMS or whether you go for AC CMS with data or whether you go for a CMS without data all the systems that are available on the market market separate between content and layout most of them already separate between content layout and metadata as well and you can use content modules in in the structured offering solutions reuse content and publish variants from the same source the tools differ in the costs that you need to pay in the price that you need to pay they differ regarding their extensibility or a specialization potential in their publication publication targets and ways of publishing content and they differ regarding the interfaces that they provide to other systems so that is why you need your list of requirements because only then you can actually evaluate whether your system is good for you or not so there is not actually perfect system you just need to find a system that covers your solution your requirements now your current requirements and your requirements your strategic requirements for the future okay a component deciding for a component management system is usually best if you are looking for a tool that covers also work flow functions review functions translation management so or metadata management so if you need these kind of functions plus a client-server architecture or a cloud solution then a component content management system is a good choice especially as there are a lot of C CMS's in the market that also supported our have data as their content format if you go for a see CMS you also go into a vendor lock-in although there's a difference between system supporting data and systems working within own with a special document type definition if you go for data CCMS your vendor login is less strict because you can could move out your content because it start in Internet in the data format and go to another system there is also nice when you go for when you want to have a delivery content delivery portal that is not provided by the same vendor by the same manufacturer so what we see increasingly now also with with IRS where you have a standardized exchange format is that people start choosing a CCMS from one vendor and a content delivery portal from another vendor because they have a defined way of transporting content from one system to the other there are only solution without irsie CMS is is a good possibility when you want to of course if you want to use a standard and if you want to use the data open toolkit for general output formats data makes you as I said tool independent and there's a big community where you can get advice where you can hire experts and where you can find information on how to do stuff with data that also means that you need a special expertise if you work with data only without a CMS that gives you all the usability and convenience functions that means you need to either hire an expert or you build up you need to build up the knowledge yourself and even if data is free of charge and open source you still have to invest some money in order to set up your information architecture in order to buy a convenient editor for data and in order to customize the output format saying that you need a customized web map or a content delivery format that looks like your company's CI ok I Ellen we didn't discuss this before but I actually wanted to present some scenarios and if people want to participate they can because I what I did is that I prepared three scenarios typical customer scenarios that we encountered in our work and I would like to ask the people whether they have an idea how these guys could solve their what would be the best solution for the the scenarios it did a solution or a component content management system or something else sure we can have people type in their responses in the questions panel and I will do my best to collate those and share that information with you yeah let's just try it if not I will play the audience the participant ok first scenario we are talking about a company that does a first-class hairdryers just probably called a curler or something in American English creature curling iron perhaps yep so this is what they do they don't have any singer so saying so far so their problem is that the content in layout tends to become inconsistent and they do have a problem because people have to copy the technical data from the Product data management system and whenever changes in the Product data management system those changes are not automatically transferred to the product brochures and the data sheets it's a small company only they have 20 to 75 employees and only two offers and only one of them is a skilled technical writers writer and they want to generate PDF because and and print because they need to put the product information in the box with the hairdryer but they do have video tutorials on the website and the information products are like brochures data sheets warranty information which is translated into 10 languages and they do have some variants for their hair dryers which differ in in little aspects say like 10 to 20 percent of the features are different but 80 to 90 percent of the features are similar that the authoring team has little technical expertise they know how to deal with layout and they know how to make videos and that they are not very ya good with software and IT systems in general so what do you think what would be a good solution for them AC CMS or a small authoring solution or it did our only solution yeah please go ahead and type in your answer into the questions module if you would I'll give people a little bit longer okay this is interesting on Rica we are getting answers kind of all over the board here I am seeing let's see out of about six responses so far four are saying of CCMS but I am seeing two saying a more simple solution such as frame-maker for example interesting yeah thanks for your response that's actually what I think is well a most simpler solution would be better suited in this case if a maker even an InDesign solution that has an interface to the product data management system because there we are not talking about intelligent information here or a small C CMS would be also good but nothing they actually don't need a clients of a solution or a cloud system not resulting from their requirements oh yeah I agree with the two people actually so let's go for the next okay so here we have a startup company a software startup that does applications for public transport very European thing and no but this is it so this is an app that lets you find public transport stops nearby and tells you when the next bus or subway leaves and where you can get from from your current location so they they are startup with 30 employees only they don't have any technical writer and they don't have any documentation but they've got the first client and their first customer demands documentation as well because usually in Europe the public transports and the end is in public and so it's a public company it's belongs to the state or the district right now they they want to deliver mobile app with the app with small tutorials for developers and a user manual for the users they restrict you to German right now but of course they want to conquer the European market and publish everything in several languages as they are software engineers they have an expertise and tools for version control toss tracking ticketing and they know XML because their configuration is done in XML and they have an automatic build so what are you votes what they should do to organize their documentation we even had one answer before you finish talking said people are paying attention this is also interesting got about maybe a dozen answers so far okay let's see I am saying for example did it without a CMS perhaps lightweight data and some kind of version control system like yet some people are saying a small solution there's another markup and get some people are saying ditto just the data open toolkit did it without C CMS did only small non CE CMS solution get plus an editor and then someone actually called out the oxygen XML editor so there's a little more agreement on those answers yep I I do agree I would say that as a customer for data oxygen closed it did open tool kit or I even marked on yeah I agree so let's move on to the next thank you for your answers the next one is from the machinery industry they do washing machine components and they their current documentation process is very manually they have to do the DTP themselves and they have a decentralized team because an international company which subsidiaries in different countries and what they want to achieve with this with the solution is that they want to centralize the documentation because they now right now they work with a spread team and the people will still be spread but they want to work in one system right now they work with fam maker but they could think of another editor they open for that right now the administered Administration is via a fire storage on a server but not all people have access so that's is getting difficult there they need PDF and HTML in the end they also need intelligent information because they want to create a content delivery portal where and they want to deliver their information in a format that the machine washing machine manufacturers can integrate their documentation more easily and now they have of course twenty plus languages and they do have money because they are bestseller and they are willing to invest money so what would be the best solution and the answers once again came in before you stopped it's a clear case actually yes okay universally I am seeing over and over again did a plus C CMS did a plus C CMS did a plus C CMS that is almost reversal at this point yeah I agree in Germany the answer would not necessarily be Dada but it would be C CMS a lot of C CMS on the German market that do not support data and which would cover this use case and the acceptance in the in the German market is so like nine percent of all the people who use structured authoring XML authoring use data and the rest use another DTD or schema so that why that's why it's probably not a data science CMS if you follow these statistics but of course I would vote for it is C CMS okay that was actually my presentation that's good 45 minutes yeah we do have a few questions and let me share those worth with you the first one is do you need to have a custom structure set up before you start looking at C CMS's you mean a custom DTD or document type definition exactly no not necessarily no because you probably have the general requirement that you need structured authoring and you probably have an idea of which information types you need like tasks reference troubleshooting and eLearning and on that level you need a structure definition but you don't need to go into the XML details and defining all the elements or all the attributes that you need you can stay on that more abstract level and then go and talk to the vendors and see whether they provide these types of content out of curiosity what schemas are used in the German market other than data these are custom schemes I know one or two semesters will work with doc Bach I know and big systems like schema st4 or occupy they work they just have their own DT DS which are heavily influenced by the machinery industry and which cover the requirements of machinery of the machinery industry very well much better than did on in most cases probably because otherwise they would have wouldn't have reached such a high acceptance that's my person of you which doesn't need to be truthful we also just dropped in a link to the session evaluation survey so please look in the questions panel and you'll see that there attendees and we appreciate your input on that some other questions with NSC CMS is it possible to support multiple DT DS no that's different that's difficult what you can do is establish import routes for other content that that follows another DTD so I know C CMS which supported an import for example but this will always be an import/export not but because in the end in the system you need to stick to one document type definition I've had a comment about frame-maker being categorized as unstructured authoring but that they been before you show your slide with it being structured so but I did want to call that out and mention that to you yeah frame-maker unstructured for me is unstructured authoring family a structured is structured offering yeah it's basically tool tools and one at one time many years ago and I won't say how long ago it was two separate tools where they have folded both of those into one product now okay it still you have to toggle it unstructured or structured so it can be either it can be more desktop publishing or it can be structured on a custom DTD or the did a DTD so you're right you're absolutely right let's see what else we have here can you give me an overview of what the data open toolkit does the data open toolkit is a set of scripts that for different purposes the main purpose is to generate output formats like PDF HTML 5 web help HTML help or yeah simple HTML and they are open source and freely available so what you get when you run your data content so that it open toolkit it's a basic output what you need to do when you work with the data open took it is that you need to adapt the scripts to your corporate layout and maybe also if you specialized it out to your specialized data elements so in order to have in nicely layout it out put in some way and in order to be able to handle the XML elements that you may have added to the data for your document type definition so if you work with it that I took it it's great because you have a good basis to start from but you need somebody who is able to handle those scripts so you need a like a programmer or a technical communicator with programming skills and especially the PDF output via xsl-fo is a very special knowledge in my experience and I don't know what you think not many people have it is a very ill set and it can be very hard to find people to fill that type of work yeah luckily there's this new development towards PDF generation via CSS yes so if that actually actually fully hits the market that will be easier to find people who are capable of doing that and I think you were being very kind about being a good starting point that is what it is but be prepared for the default output to be frankly very ugly because it is not ready to be shipped out to customers at least not in my opinion no it's good for review copies but nothing more that's about it you're right any advice for limiting and stopping increasing scope during a project yeah if you have if you define your requirements then you need to be very strict or not adding user stories to your to your backlog so that that is one way and you need a project manager with a certain amount of experience who discovers that and who is good at communication and telling okay yeah that is a valid requirement that you have and would be nice to have that but let's add that to a second set of requirements that I managed for for the next project phase for example so splitting up your project into several phases and for the first page face limit the scope or strictly it's a good approach because then you make sure that the people can bring in their requirements and are happy because this is what they want they want their work to be become more easy easier and you don't lose their requirements but you prevent a scope creep so for each new requirement that you get you need to define this is that still within our my original project scope or do I need to add that to my second Exodus with user stories the person you asked about they did I mean the data open toolkit says thank you and wanted it and understands now that it's more of a way to get output and not necessarily something that an author would deal with and that is correct it is more of a way to get the output and your C CMS may point to the open toolkit to output you know your delivery formats but you as an author probably would not be touching that did a toolkit yourself to change the formatting and things like that yeah true Oh following up on that what was not ready to ship to customers we were talking about the output the default output from the data open toolkit it is very basic it will have none of your corporate branding so it is a very good foundation for starting but it will need modification to first of all look attractive and follow better more modern design rules and it will need some changes to reflect your corporate logos colors etc any other questions Lola Rica this has been great thank you so much for your time today thank you and thank you for the to the audience for the participation