Acrolinx.com
November 1, 2022

Ready – steady – go(vernance)!

How to govern your content processes for maximum efficiency and impact

These days, just about every team is under pressure to try and do more with less. Technical communication teams at large enterprises are no exception. Technical content closely connects to business goals, like reducing the number of calls to customer support through the quality and clarity of their manuals. Or lowering the risk of wrong product usage through clear and consistent tone and terminology. […]

Jean-Marc Robillard
October 15, 2022

About Us

Founded in 1998, IXIASOFT is a trusted global leader in the Component Content Management System (CCMS) industry, providing software and services to some of the biggest names in their respective industries, including Abbott, ARM, DocuSign, Komatsu, Mastercard, SAP®, and Toyota. We also provide 24/7 support from our Global offices across North America, Europe, and Japan. For nearly 25 years we have been pioneers in the tech comm industry, and our commitment to universal standards for everyone is the reason we continue to be involved with OASIS, ever since the first version of DITA.

Our guiding principles include respect, loyalty, attentiveness, and transparency in all our interactions with clients, partners, and colleagues. Our mission is to help customers succeed in their technical documentation goals. […]

Kaleidoscope.at/en/
October 1, 2022

(Multilingual) Content Quality Is No Coincidence!

The current trend of content marketing has had a huge impact on technical content creation. Not only has the ease with which end users can find your content become more important, but companies are increasingly discovering that technical content is just as important a pillar of the overall content strategy as pre-sales “smarketing” content. You therefore need to ensure that customers and prospects are satisfied with the quality of your content. In this article we describe a proven approach for strategic content quality with a special focus on multilingual challenges. […]

Alin Belu, Syncro Soft
Oxygen XML Editor

September 15, 2022

Hello everyone, Great news! The preliminary agenda for DITA-OT Day 2022 is now available and you can check it by accessing https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2022/dita-ot_day.html#agenda-(preliminary)

Also, you can still make your proposals to become one of the DITA-OT Day 2022 speakers. The deadline for receiving your submissions has been moved to October 1st. […]

Dana Aubin, Comtech Services
September 1, 2022

CIDM members shared their experiences and questions about user-generated content at last month’s roundtable. Our definition of user-generated content included community portals, discussion forums, YouTube videos, social media posts, tweets, articles, blogs, podcasts, and other content created by the users of a product or service and shared online. During our discussion, this definition expanded to include both customer-generated and developer-generated content.

In our last trends survey in 2020, less than 3 percent of those surveyed responded that their companies allowed users to contribute content directly to the website or portal. Around 7 percent allowed users to add curated content. However, 66 percent of companies didn’t allow customers to contribute content. When we looked back at the surveys from 2017 through 2019, results have only changed a percent or two. […]

Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Owner, Eberlein Consulting LLC
August 15, 2022

The DITA Technical Committee (TC) is looking for new voting members. This is an excellent opportunity to get involved with the DITA TC community.

In order to become a DITA TC voting member, you need to meet the following qualifications:

• Have an OASIS membership. You can acquire an OASIS membership if you work for a company that already is an OASIS member, if you can coax your company to join OASIS, or if you can join OASIS as an individual. (A list of companies that are OASIS members is found here.)
• Commit to regularly attend DITA TC meetings, which are held every Tuesday at 11 AM-noon ET, and participate in the work of the TC. This requires a commitment of at least 4-6 hours per month.

[…]

Mary Dickens, Connectbase
August 1, 2022

Documentation teams are often faced with writing for multiple engineering teams, releases, and products compared to development teams which often have a singular area of focus on a product. It can be challenging to organize and bring together a team with members having different areas of responsibility or who are siloed from one another. Using Agile can help as it is a method designed to respond to change and handle constantly changing environments such as juggling multiple engineering teams with rolling releases. While it is more commonly associated with engineering and development teams it can be used by non-engineering teams as well. […]

Vaijayanti Nerkar, BMC Software
August 1, 2022

In recent years, rich media has grown to be a popular method of delivering end-user information. In this article, we describe what rich media consists of; discuss what influences decisions for choosing rich media, and analyze whether more rich media results in better end-user satisfaction.  […]

Anita Chaudhari and Vidya Vasudevan, VMware
July 15, 2022

As technical writers, we don different hats at different stages of producing technical content. We interact with people who perform various roles and have varying degrees of technical capabilities. Our audiences are of different genders, are from different geographical locations, different religions, cultures, and ethnicities, and might have different disabilities.

As writers, we do audience analysis, plan, design, and document our content accordingly. So where are the gaps? What we might be overlooking are the biases that creep in. […]

Anu Singh, Fiserv
July 1, 2022

Ever wondered what is the hidden cost associated with searching website content?
Frustrated users. High bounce-off rate. Cumbersome content navigation and the forever wait time for the useful content. Yes, all of these, and all these experiences can come together as a package for various website users leaving them as irate customers.

User experience with the personalized content makes a compelling case for generating content recommendations dynamically based on a user’s historic behavior and preferences. These experiences also reinforce the need for creating and curating relevant content as the content personalization does not build a longer relationship with users if your content is not relevant to them or requires efforts for searching the content your users need when they need it. For example, in a real-time situation, try imagining the frustration of an IT administrator receiving instructions or navigating through information created for using a teller machine to conduct a transaction when they need instructions for configuring a software. […]