Using legacy tools like MSWord and FrameMaker severely limits your ability to access and utilize the collective intelligence of your company or organization. A centralized, standards-based approach to information and content management liberates your knowledge, with definable ROI.

1. 9 critical reasons why your business needs
to change its documentation processes

2. First, ask yourself...
● Are your writers still creating content with thirty year-old legacy tools like MS
Word and Adobe Framemaker?
● Can you search across all the collective intelligence of your company from
one central source?
● Do your documentation processes align with your agile/development
processes?

3. Then consider...
● Would you ask your developers and product managers to build using
Commodore computers (same era as Word/Frame)?
● How much time are your people spending simply looking for existing
information, in your enterprise?
● Has documentation creation ever held up shipping a product?
These are simple questions but they go to a big point: Things have changed.

4. We’re not in Kansas anymore...
● Information and documentation are marketing and sales tools
● Buyers look for them online, on their mobile devices and desktops
● Modern documentation is fluid and often requires regular updating across
multiple media
● Large amounts of content can be reused across multiple versions, product
lines, and across markets: legal notices, warnings, images, boilerplate in
general
Legacy desktop tools cannot manage modern content requirements.

5. Nine Things That You Can Do With A Modern Tool:
1. Write
2. Manage
3. Organize
4. Search
5. Reuse
6. Publish
7. Translate
8. Connect
9. Scale

6. Let’s take a quick look...
1. Write content in a familiar text-editing environment
Asking people to learn an entirely new interface, for familiar activities, makes no
sense. We recognize that acceptance of a new technology is based on seeing a
path from the familiar to the new. MSWord-like authoring views are important. We
don’t ask authors to learn code.

7. Let’s take a quick look...
2. Manage workflow: authoring, editing, reviewing, and publishing, from a
central source
Legacy workflows for documentation involve writing, sharing via email, copy
and paste, and sneakernet. Reviewing with this model creates multiple
versions in multiple places, opening up multiple opportunities for errors and
omissions. Publishing to multiple channels requires constant reformatting.
Centralizing these processes in one database (single source of the truth) turns
content into components that can be managed like data. That opens up a
realm of new capabilities...

8. Let’s take a quick look...
3. Organize content with taxonomy and metadata
The foundation of modern content management is based on classifying your
content with metadata (information about information) and taxonomy (applying
broader classes like product line, market segment, intended user, etc.).
Once classified, each piece of content, in that central database, becomes
searchable across your enterprise.

9. Let’s take a quick look...
4. Search through large content sets in milliseconds, with metadata-enabled filters
We’re not in Google anymore. Metadata-enabled search powers the ability to find
content, down to the sentence level, across millions of documents, in multiple
languages.
Metadata applied by the system enables high velocity (milliseconds), filtered
search (think: Amazon left hand search filters column).
No more finding reusable information by asking people for it.

10. Let’s take a quick look...
5. Reuse content across various documents, departments, and formats
Once you can find content, you can repurpose it with reuse. This means no more
duplication of efforts, higher leverage of your people’s knowledge and more
accurate documentation.
It goes further: Individual snippets of content like product names or specifications
can be tagged in the system. If they change, one change is updated in every
instance of that snippet, across all your documentation.

11. Let’s take a quick look...
6. Publish to multiple media channels (PDF, web, mobile, knowledge base, etc.)
without constant reformatting
Your internal and external consumers of your content are no longer content with
reading PDFs or manuals. They are looking for content that can be delivered
wherever they are, on the device of their choice. It should be searchable and
personalized.
Omni or multi-channel publishing of your content, properly formatted for each
medium, is automated. Authors don’t format, the system does.

12. Let’s take a quick look...
7. Translate and localize far more efficiently, avoiding duplication of efforts
When your content is created as components in a database, translation becomes
far more efficient. Translation managers know which content, at any given
moment, requires translation, eliminating costly re-translations of complex
documents containing only incremental changes.
The system communicates with existing translation tools and workflows.
Translation can be aligned with development for faster time to market.

13. Let’s take a quick look...
8. Connect. Assure interoperability of content files with other systems, with
standards-compliant XML file format and APIs
Legacy tools create content in legacy, proprietary formats requiring conversion to
work with modern systems. Standards-compliant XML files are readable by a wide
range of complementary software applications. No more ‘lock-in’ of your
information.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) connect your content with other
enterprise systems.

14. Let’s take a quick look...
9. Scale to hundreds of thousands of docs, millions of topics
Based on architecture (DITA), developed by IBM and now open-sourced, created
to manage 70 million docs in up to 40 languages.
You won’t outgrow the system.

15. It’s deceptively simple...
easyDITA is the next generation foundation for
documentation creation, management, and distribution.
With easyDITA, your intellectual assets become liberated from siloed, proprietary
file formats. This opens up an entirely new set of possibilities for taking full
advantage of the collective intelligence of your company or organization– and
sharing it with the world.

16. www.easydita.com
Thank you and we hope you change the world