CIDM invites its members to take advantage of the wealth of industry-related information you’ll find in the Best Practices newsletter. This quarterly publication is written by publications managers for publication managers.
Everyone can access the Director’s Columns written by Dawn Stevens but you must be logged into the site as a CIDM member to view the bulk of articles. Login
Accept no substitute? (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
AI is Your New Audience
Lance Cummings, University of North Carolina Wilmington
Love Your Curmudgeon
Amber Swope, DITA Strategies
Leveraging Gen AI for your DITA Business Case
Dr. Amanda Patterson, Comtech Services
The more things change… (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Houston, we have a problem.
Michael Iantosca, Avalara Inc.
Connecting DITA to iiRDS to get Intelligent Content
Harald Stadlbauer, NINEFEB and Helmut Nagy, Semantic Web
Adding API Docs to Your Technical Writing Arsenal
Dave Wilks, Keyavi
Winter 2023, Volume 25, Issue 4
Riley the Writer, a Jolly Happy Soul? (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
From Short-Order Cooks to Top Chefs
Melanie Davis, Reltio
There Are No Snakes in the CMS!
Lindsay Lightbody, Agilent
How to Boost Content Discovery Experiences – Best Practices
Anu Singh, Fiserv
Fall 2023, Volume 25, Issue 3
A Moving Experience (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Planes, Trains, and Transformations
Tracey Langenbach, FIS
Events, Data, and Information: We Have a Problem
Chris Despopoulos
Allowing Variations in DITA Output Formatting
Brianna Stevens-Russell, Comtech Services
Summer 2023, Volume 25, Issue 2
Building Inspiration (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Adventures in CCMS migration!
Sarah Rowe and Bobbi Werner, Baxter
Best Practices for Inclusive Language Use
Scott Abel, Content Strategy Evangelist, Heretto
Overcoming Roadblocks on the Journey to a Structured Standard
TJ Dhaliwal, Stilo
Spring 2023, Volume 25, Issue 1
Out of Africa (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Review of a constant: the value of engagement
James Hill, Rocket Software and Severin Forman, ServiceNow
Structured Content Reviews by SMEs – Challenges and solutions
Dipo Ajose-Coker, Componize
CIDM Localization Member Benchmark Survey 2022
Dana Aubin, Comtech Services
December 2022, Volume 24, Issue 4
The 12 Days of Christmas (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
From Information Wars to Knowledge Wars
Michael Iantosca, Avalara, Inc
Reveal Your Value by Building Cross-Functional Partnerships
Miriana Nedeva, VMware
Outsourcing: Working with another company’s content
Jennifer O Neill, Carrier
September 2022, Volume 24, Issue 3
Kathy’s Next Adventure (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Hindsight: A Content Transformation Journey
Tracey Langenbach, FIS
Inclusive Terminology and its Adoption in the Workplace.
Kripa Venkat, Texas Instruments
Navigating a Changing Landscape – from Documentation to Information Experience
Neeraj Bhatia, and Michelle Bacigalupi, Guidewire
June 2022, Volume 24, Issue 2
A Seat at the Table (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Time to Upgrade: Making Websites Accessible to All
Sowmya Jayakirthi and Usha Rani Gunapu, VMware
DITA as code – a modern approach to the classic standard
Michal Skowron and Pawel Kowaluk, Guidewire
Writing for Localization 101
Dana Aubin, Comtech Services
Lessons from Daddy (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Creating Cohesive Writing Teams
Tricia Kinman and Rich Gebhardt, Mastercard
The Content Scientist
Michael Iantosca, Avalara Inc.
Not THAT Self-Service
Lawrence Orin, Bringg
December 2021, Volume 23, Issue 4
The Night Before Release (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Kotter’s Dual Operating System of Successful Change
Matt Abe, Graco, Inc.
Hiring and Training: What’s happening in the CIDM community
Kathy Madison and Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Editing for Quality – from the Readers’ Point of View
Yoel Strimling, CEVA, Inc.
September 2021, Volume 23, Issue 3
The Little Things We Do (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
VMware Workspace ONE UEM documentation is Killing It with Long-form Content
Shwetha Madhan, VMware
Mother May I: Asking for resources
Kathy Madison, Comtech Services
Affordances: Unravelling the DNA of your Content Strategy
Vishal Palliyathu and Swetha K.S, Cisco
10 Steps to Achieving Change
Helene Segura, The Time Management Fixer, MA Ed, CPO
June 2021, Volume 23, Issue 2
Confessions of a Workaholic (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Performing an Effective Competitive Benchmark for Content
Sheshadri PR Rao, Dell Technologies
Setting Expectations and Boundaries
Kim Schwarzkopf, Independent
Managing Change at All Levels
Patrick Waychoff, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (retired)
March 2021, Volume 23, Issue 1
Why I Opt-in (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Confronting Unacceptable Behavior
Bonnie Fontaine, Independent
Content Quality Survey
Dawn Stevens and Kathy Madison, Comtech Services
Gaining Respect for You and Your Team
Dana Aubin, Comtech Services
Writing and Editing for DITA
Jean Tennile, NextGen Healthcare, Inc.
September 2020, Volume 22, Issue 4
How The SME Stole Content Clarity (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Process Maturity: A recipe for navigating difficult times
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
The Cloud: What It Means for Content Ops
Sarah Leritz-Higgins, Siemens Industry Software
UX Principles for Content Creation
Philomena Dolla and Punam Saxena, VMware
September 2020, Volume 22, Issue 3
Engage (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Are We Living in a Post-DITA World?
Christopher Gales, Splunk
Essentially Agile: 5 Lessons Learned in Designing Work Around Sprints
Ted Wolff, Danfoss Power Solutions
Information Developers: Our Work Matters
Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler
The Way We Were (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Optimizing Content Delivery through Digital Transformation
Megan Gilhooly, Zoomin Software
Traceability, Responsibility, and Ethics in a Hybrid Society
Ray Gallon, The Transformation Society
2020 Trends Survey Results
Kathy Madison, Comtech Services
March 2020, Volume 22, Issue 1
Journey to the Unknown (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Farewell to Style Errors: Using Schematron and Vale
Scott Hudson, Jeppesen
Improving Customer Experience Through Content Quality
Jonathan Young, Waters Corporation
Wearing the Technical Usability Test Hat at VMware
Bonnie Kern, VMware
December 2019, Volume 21, Issue 4
Bah Humbug!? A Christmas Carol (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Becoming a Data-Driven Documentation Team
Lawrence Orin, Zoomin
Growing the UXUA Blended Family
Janette Lynch, Veracode
Taxonomy Trends:2019 CIDM Member Survey Results
Dawn Stevens, Kathy Madison and Sabine Ocker, Comtech Services
September 2019, Volume 21, Issue 3
The Sorting Hat (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Bringing Order to Chaos: Schematron and Constraints
Gary White & Gabrielle Scott, NantHealth, LLC
Combining Teams, Tools, and Workflows after a Corporate Merger
Larry Kunz, Extreme Networks
You Own Nothing: Content as Community Property
Marcia Garnett, Poly (Formerly Polycom and Plantronics)
June 2019, Volume 21, Issue 2
Not Getting Chopped: Measuring Mystery Ingredients for Success (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
A Better PDF plugin: Using the topic2fo.xsl File Instead of custom.xsl
Leigh White, IXIASOFT
The Semantic Poverty of Content
Michael J. Iantosca, IBM
Writing from the Outside In: Don’t Let Internal Focus Sabotage Customer Success
Amy Bowman, Splunk
March 2019, Volume 21, Issue 1
Zero to Hero (Director’s Column)
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Tables Must Die!
Larry Kollar, ARRIS
Thriving in an Environment of Change
Neeraj Bhatia, Guidewire Software
User Assistance: From Afterthought to Valued Stakeholder
Samantha Rudolph, SAP
If you are looking for an article published before 2019, please contact us at [email protected].