MadWorld Presentation

1. PRESENTED BY
Intelligent Content and Flare
Denise Kadilak

2. • Information Architect/Team Manager
• 20 years experience
• 8 + years working in Flare
• 4th year presenting at MadWorld
• Part-time college instructor
• Blog Writing with a Flare
About me

3. • What is a Intelligent Content
• Key Features
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• How it works in Flare
• Why important
Agenda

4. • In very broad terms
– Intelligent content is designed to be modular, structured, reusable,
format free, and semantically rich and, as a consequence,
discoverable, reconfigurable, and adaptable
Anne Rockley, Intelligent Content: A Primer
What is Intelligent Content

5. • Content that is not limited
– Serves a variety of purposes
• Help
• Support
• Training
• Professional Services
• Marketing
What is Intelligent Content

6. • Content that is not limited
– Delivers in several outputs
• Online
• Print
• Word
What is Intelligent Content

7. • Key Feature
– Modular
– Structured
– Reusable
– Format-free
– Semantically rich
What is Intelligent Content

8. • Designed for reuse
– Not a traditional document
• Creating documents one at a time
– A bunch of separate content components
– These are assembled into documents
– Flexible
• Shared across product lines
• Shared across departments
Modular

9. • Consistent
• Efficient
• Agile – reuse to satisfy a variety of content needs
– Write content once and reuse many times
– Slide decks, white papers, reports,
– Satisfy cross-departmental needs
– Reduced translation costs
Modular - Advantages

10. • XML most common format
• Allows you to classify content
• Readable by humans and machines
Structured

11. • Semantic structure tag (kinda Metadata)
– Styles
– Conditions
• Faster production
• Template driven
Structured - Advantages

12. • Reuse existing modular content to create new content
• Text is most common but can be applied to most media
• Not cut-and-pastes
Reusable

13. • Reduces content-creation time
• Eliminates duplicate content
• Consistent content
Reusable - Advantages

14. • Formatting lives outside of the content (css)
Format-free

15. • Easily switch out formats
• One set of content can be reused in a variety of channels
– Print
– Mobile – phones, tablets
– Web
• Agile
• Efficient
Format-free - Advantages

16. • Includes machine-readable information (metadata)
• Label or attribute applied to content
– Product?
– Language?
– Role?
Semantically Rich

17. • Customized content
• Improve findability
• Decrease translation costs
Semantically Rich - Advantages

18. • Lack or context – but not really
• Extra time to plan and produce
• Difficult environment in which to work
• Content management
• Advanced technologies
• Steep learning curve
Hurdles

19. • Increasing demands on our content
• Agile development process
– Rapid iteration
– Incremental change
• Global markets
But Worth the Challenge

20. • Organizational silos are (or should be) crumbling
• Technologies are there but we’re stuck in an aging
paradigm
But Worth the Challenge

21. • What is this?
– Related to the “Industry 4.0” concept
• 4th Industrial Revolution
• Automated Manufacturing
• Transformation from products to services
• Smart production lines
– Building with semi-autonomous components
– When added or changed, the whole production line/product automatically
adapts to new configuration
Relationship to “Documentation 4.0”

22. • Counterintuitive to deliver technical documentation in
– Monolithic document formats
– Lacking structural information
– Metadata
• Information needs to become “Intelligent”
– Content modularized in self-contained topics
– Enriched with classifying metadata.
Relationship to “Documentation 4.0”

23. • Not a new or revolutionary concept
• Been around and practiced for several years
• Mostly in an effort to create cost-effective content
• But now, in context of Industry 4.0, it is becoming
mandatory
Relationship to “Documentation 4.0”

24. • Almost forces you to create intelligent content
– Modular
– Structured
– Reuseable
– Format-free
– Semantically Rich
Flare Meets the Challenge

25. • Source files or Masters
• For reuse:
– Condition tags
– CSS
– Master Page/Page Layouts
– Variables
– Snippets
– TOCS
– Targets
Flare – the Process (Basics)

26. • Global Project Linking
– Granular reuse
– CMS (sort of…)
• Run-time merge
Flare – the Process (Advanced)

27. The End

28. • Intelligent Content: A Primer
• Technical Documentation 4.0
• Semantically Rich Data
Resources – Intelligent Content

29. • Topic-based authoring
• Topic-based and Structured Authoring Made Simple in
Flare
• Content Reuse in MadCap Flare
• Flare Global Project Linking Guide
• Flare Run-time Merge
Resources – Intelligent Content

30. My contact information:
• Denise.kadilak@Blackbaud.com
Questions?