Are you a documentation manager looking for an efficient way to manage your documentation projects?
If so, you may want to consider investing in a DITA CCMS. These tools enable you to increase productivity and better manage all aspects of your DITA projects. CCMS streamlines all aspects of documentation projects. You can create a wide range of content for your company, and publish it in a variety of output formats.
But before you make a decision, you need to make sure you’re choosing a system that meets your needs. Here are the key points to consider when choosing a CCMS!
Support for DITA standard
You need to choose a CCMS that supports the XML standard you use in your business (such as DITA, Docbook, S1000D or XHTML).
It may seem obvious, but DITA is central to the features offered by CCMS. It is therefore essential to choose a solution that can best manage all aspects of documentation creation with DITA. In this way, you will be able to make the most of your projects and all the aspects associated with them.
If you are a large organization, or if you want to ensure that your CCMS will be able to support your organization for years, your CCMS must support any XML schema or DTD. This allows you to work more flexibly, while reducing costs. Just like Kaplan, invest in a single CCMS with which you can use multiple XML-based standards.
Large-scale collaboration between users
Make sure you choose a CCMS that enables easy, large-scale collaboration between users, whether they are internal or external to your company.
Documentation projects require several stages and phases, and involve different contributors:
- Technical writers,
- Your SMEs (Subject Matter Experts),
- Translators,
- Project managers,
- etc.
Your CCMS must enable collaboration to facilitate exchanges, contributions, performance and consistency of documentation projects.
Content reuse
Content reuse is a central aspect of technical and structured authoring. This concept makes it possible to generate coherent, highly efficient documents, by reusing sections, topics or components across several sets of documents or projects.
It is therefore essential to choose a CCMS that allows you to benefit from the advantages of reusable content.
Easy maintenance of links
Choose a CCMS that properly maintains links between content, topics and components. This allows you to keep your content up to date and to apply a modification to all affected documents. Easy link maintenance saves time and improves consistency.
Ability to combine several content sources
Your CCMS must enable you to combine content from different sources, so that you can achieve a wider range of possibilities for your projects. Sources may be Web, third-party systems, and more.
Optimized translation management
Some projects or documentation need to be linguistically adapted by internal or external translators.
Translation often comes at the end of the cycle, since it requires a final, validated version of the document. It is sometimes difficult to obtain a concrete view of the status of translations or updated segments that need to be translated. Moreover, as with content, translations need to be reusable across documents to improve consistency and reduce associated costs.
Your CCMS must enable impeccable management of translations, allowing translators to intervene, to have information on the status and progress of a project, and to know which content needs to be adapted.
Finally, your CCMS must enable writers to continue working on the source or target documentation, even if translations are in progress on the content. This allows more agile management of your projects, as editors don’t have to wait until the end of a translation cycle to make changes on the content.
Publishing to multiple formats
Your documentation projects can lend themselves to a variety of supports and formats. Whether you need paper, digital, PDF or WebHelp (HTML and Javascript): your CCMS must offer you a wide range of output formats to suit a maximum number of documentation types, purposes, and audiences.
Turn to a CCMS that offers the latest version of the DITA Open Toolkit and its related updates, which is the reference for DITA publishing. A centralized publishing process in one single solution brings your document projects to the next level with ease, while meeting your current and future format needs.
List, search, and filter capabilities
Search and filter features greatly optimize navigation and access to content. A CCMS offering these features will save you considerable time, enabling you to find the information or content you need quickly and efficiently.
Search feature is essential, especially when working with large corpuses and documents. Teams need to access content for reuse quickly and efficiently, and in a centralized way using CCMS.
Efficient review process
The review is an essential step in ensuring the quality of documentation and the relevance of information. It is a stage during which non-editorial contributors may be involved, including your SMEs.
So make sure you choose a CCMS that not only allows contributors to collaborate, but also offers a simple interface for efficient content review.
Reviewers, such as your SMEs, need to have one single and simplified view of the document, which is the result of the previous versions. A simple review interface with a view of changes optimizes the process and makes the CCMS easier to handle.
Integration with other systems
Your CCMS needs to be extensible and easily integrated with other systems or third-party tools through APIs. It should be perfectly attuned to your changing business needs, allowing you to add features over time.
The CCMS must be flexible and adapt 100% to the needs and constraints of your team and your business.
Accessibility and availability
A CCMS can be either a SaaS (cloud-based solution) or an on-premises solution. You need to choose the hosting that suits you best, for greater flexibility in deploying and managing your system.
Finally, your CCMS must be available on any operating system, such as PC, Mac, Linux or even mobile devices.
Keep in mind that your CCMS must match the needs of your documentation team and include as many of the features listed in this article as possible. Componize is a leading provider of DITA CCMS solutions, and our system provides all the features listed above and more.
To learn more about how Componize can help you manage your documentation projects more efficiently, ask for a trial!
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