Case Study:
Producing and Delivering Product Content to Multiple Audiences in Scale
The customer, a multinational computer networking company, produces over 100 new products every year. Each product is accompanied by a massive amount of product content, including technical documentation and technical support literature, translated to over 30 languages. The company was looking for a solution that would enable them to effectively produce large amounts of high quality content in scale and deliver it via multiple channels.
Deployment type: On-premises, distributed architecture
DITAToo's users locations: USA, Taiwan, Thailand
Integrations: Salesforce, Confluence, Oracle RightNow
Goals
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Reduce the load on the customer support and service costs.
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Provide users with multiple ways to access the product documentation.
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Deliver product documentation faster.
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Reduce the translation costs.
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Improve collaboration between teams.
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Provide the company's support agents and sale reps with access to the up-to-date product documentation.
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Increase the SEO of the company's website.
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Get insights on what users actually read and whether the product content actually helps them. Based on these insights, the documentation team would improve the quality of the product documentation.
What We Did
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Deployed the DITAToo distributed architecture for the team located across the USA, China (Taiwan), and Thailand. The distributed architecture allows the technical writers to eliminate latency and communications lags when communicating with the DITAToo content repository.
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Integrated DITAToo with Salesforce (used by consumers, support agents, and sale reps), Confluence (used by internal collaboration between teams), Oracle RightNow (used by support agents).
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Converted legacy content from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA.
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Developed publishing stylesheets to PDF and HTML (for context-sensitive help built into the software products).
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Provided DITA and DITAToo DITA CCMS training.
Results
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Company’s consumers can now access the product documentation via a self-service portal powered by DITAToo and Salesforce, printed manuals, as well as context-sensitive help built into the software. As a result, the load to the customer support center has reduced.
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Customer support agents have now access to the up-to-date product documentation and can quickly find an answer on user’s questions.
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The translation costs were reduced by almost 70%.
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The technical writers can now write and deliver documentation faster thanks to the ability to manage and reuse content and deliver it through multiple delivery channels with a click of a button.
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The technical writers have now better understanding of how consumers interact with the product content and use these insights to improve the product documentation.
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Thanks to the DITAToo distributed architecture, the publication team located around the world can access the DITAToo content repository without any communication lags and latency.
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Those technical writers who are using legacy content formats (such as MadCap Flare or unstructured FrameMaker) can use the DITAToo content repository to store and manage their unstructured content using the content management strategy unified for all types of content.
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The technical writers have become more efficient thanks to an ability to manage, reuse, and publish content to multiple delivery channels.
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The technical writers can now perform batch publishing to PDF and Web Help with a click of a button.
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The translation process is now fully automated thanks to the tight integration between DITAToo and XTM translation management system.