Presented at DocTrain East 2007 Conference by Steve Manning, The Rockley Group -- Reuse has been (and continues to be) a best practice for the technical communications and training communities. Many companies are struggling with big translation localization expenses. DITA is the word most used when you ask about hot trends in the industry. What do the three preceding sentences have in common? Simple. Component-based content is part of the solution.
So what is component-based content management? Thats what this session aims to help you understand. You will learn what component content management is, what the benefits are, and how it is currently being applied in different organizations. You also learn how a content component approach can help you solve your content issues.
How important is component-based content creation and management? It has taken over from DITA as the most talked about subject in documentation. It is being used in many companies who have followed traditional methodologies for creating things like technical documentation, training materials, help systems and so on. But in the push to do things faster, cheaper, more flexibly, and for more people, companies are discovering that by moving to a component based approach, they can do things faster, cheaper and more flexibly.
Some of the advantages they are gaining are in automating the production of outputs—getting PDF for print, PDF for online display, and HTML—with a single push of a button. Or, they are getting flexible content, where reuse is a matter of reconfiguring a list of topics, rather than cutting and pasting chunks of content between large binary files. Or they are beginning to manage extreme time frames, where panic used to be the order of the day come release time, and make release time something that is not so likely to turn hair gray.
This session will describe content component management in detail and help you grasp the concepts needed to figure out if a move to component-based content can help you solve your content challenges.