One of the challenges when considering moving to a single sourcing authoring environment, such as DITA, is determining the Return on Investment. This often boils down to a key question: how much content can you actually re-use? Organisations typically attempt to answer this question in a number of ways: Conducting a semi-manual information audit of the… Read more »
Category: single sourcing
Our client’s fire risk assessment report generator goes live this week
In the UK, every building, apart from private single dwellings, needs to be assessed for fire risk every three years. To do this, a fire risk assessor will assess the building and write a report on their findings and recommendations. For offices, these reports can be 30 pages long, and it can take an assessor… Read more »
Building intelligence into business documents
Often business documents, such as sales proposals and annual reports, are a joint effort between various people and departments. It involves collaborative writing and incorporating existing content. For printable documents, this collaboration can make it really difficult to maintain a consistent level of quality, writing style and “look and feel”. For Technical Communicators, there’s an… Read more »
Video of a simple report writing solution
Here’s a video of a proof of concept prototype we’re putting together for a client. The system automates the creation of field reports. It creates a skeleton document, with key content populated. Many pages contain guidance on what to write.It is probably the lowest cost content management system we’ve put together. If you can see… Read more »
So what is Single Sourcing and what is DITA?
Single Sourcing reduces the need to create and maintain duplicate content, by enabling you to use existing “chunks” of content. This means you can have the same information in different publications, and you can have a library of existing content to re-use when you’re developing new documents. The content is stored independently of the formatting,… Read more »