DITA Basics
Find out if DITA is the solution for your content, and start learning to use it.
Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
With a combined six decades of experience in technical communication and XML standards, we can help you with structured content creation and management. Also, our strategic partnerships with the main players of the structured content field give us knowledge that makes a positive difference.
We love solving problems in real-world conditions. People with true-to-life business issues need solutions that work and feel comfortable. We believe the best technology is out of view, like a modern engine that never gives you the feeling your journey is out of your control.
Unlike other companies, the Content Era never tries to overwhelm or dazzle you with gadgets. We listen before we speak. We want you to identify your pain points so we can create a solution that meets your needs.
Many consultants in our field talk about the path to a bright new future, but they send you down the wrong trail when you ask for directions. At The Content Era, we know your existing content is valuable. We do not assume that your legacy content was created just to pass time. If your content added value in the past, a significant portion of it is likely to remain valuable in the future. Thus, many of our projects involve conversions to structured content and between XML standards.
As experienced professionals, we have managed many automated and semi-automated content conversions. Whether you created all your content in a word processor, a publishing application, or a computer-aided drafting program, we know what to do. We can pull your valuable content out of those formats and publish them in an agnostic, XML-based structure that frees you from proprietary tools and environments.
TCE is known for it's complex documentation and software solutions. Over the years, our combined experience with enterprise level data management/conversion/migration has taught us the fundamentals of utilizing a scalable methodology to enhance the development of business assets. We are also familiar with the concept that the experience of a given product or service can drive it's own revenue. With that in mind, we introduce our customers and prospects to cloud business solutions that enhance the development of their electronic assets and help them drive revenue through repeat customer engagement. We do that by providing them with industry expert level advice, demonstrations and training on the asset management solution that makes sense for them. We can then support the implementation and configuration of cloud business tools and provide consulting on how to leverage analytics to hit KPI's and goals using the cloud service tools.
One of the great advantages of having structured content is the fact that there are lots of tools to automatically transform your content into almost any other format. And not just the format can change - your content can be completely reshuffled or merged with content from external sources. Some transformations are used to convert one type of structure into another, for instance when you are importing tables from Excel into a DITA workflow. Other transformations take place in the publication process, where DITA (or other XML-based content) is transformed into HTML pages for your website.
Using XSL to define transformations often feels like waving our magic wand at the content: with a simple push of a button, the content is reshuffled to create a totally new appearance. One of these transformations produces the content you are currently watching on our website. Our content creators work in a Word-like environment, leaving the creation of cool web methods to a one-time definition of the transformation scenario.
If you want to find out how your content can be transformed to reach new goals, do not hesitate to ask us for advice or a demo.
At the start and end of projects, we usually schedule training about the technologies that are being used. At the start of the project, the focus is on getting you to understand the issues in your existing content and how to avoid them in structured content. At the end of a project, we teach you about the new technologies that were applied and the structure that was implemented. So that you can handle the system without requiring us to come in and help you out all the time.
A list of more-or-less standard training topics is given below. If you require training on another aspect of technical information, structured content or publishing methods. feel free to contact us with a specific request.
Find out if DITA is the solution for your content, and start learning to use it.
Convert your legacy content to structured FrameMaker without breaking your publication chain.
Define a structured authoring workflow to increase the productivity of your authors and the quality of their content.
Automate routine tasks in FrameMaker with the built-in ExtendScript Toolkit and the JavaScript language.
Create structured content in FrameMaker for authors at different levels of experience.
Improve the work of your authors by limiting the number of DITA elements they can use.
Create templates with the industry’s leading technical writing solution.
Introduce writers with little or no experience in using advanced authoring tools to FrameMaker.
Create structured content in <oXygen/> Author for occasional and inexperienced authors.
Customize <oXygen/> Author to reduce complex tasks for authors that lack technical skill.