AND WHY DITA WILL FAIL

ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE

BUILDING AN ENTERPRISE-WIDE CONTENT PLATFORM

From ECM to Content Services ECM Is Dead? What Next?

Content Strategy – Across Departments Content not Files or Documents

The Complete Digital Age Not just Persuasive Marketing Sites and Retail

Where to Start Requirements and Solutions

Change Management Stakeholders matter

DITA and the Enterprise Can a 15 year old tech-docs spec fit in the broader business context

Agenda

http://blogs.gartner.com/michael-woodbridge/the-death-of-ecm-and-birth-of-content-services/

From ECM…

ECM

Library Services

Security MetadataTransforms and Output

Workflow & BPM

Imaging Search Rights MgtWeb Content

MgtDoc/File Mgt

OCR Records MgtDigital Asset

MgtExperience

MgtCase Mgt

Business applications Business applications Business applications

…to Content Services

Platform

Component

Component

Application

Application

http://blogs.gartner.com/michael-woodbridge/the-death-of-ecm-and-birth-of-content-services/

Platform

Application

What’s It All Mean?

There has never been a “One Size Fits All”

Especially for 100s (1000s?) of Business Content Types

Simple Needs = Simple, Cheap Solutions, e.g. File Sync & Serve

Complex Needs = Complex, Valued Solutions

Business Goals & Processes are the Priority

& their related Content Types

Modern Compute Services deployed as required

Ultimately Knowledge Management and Knowledge Transfer

Content Automation is key to enabling higher value

Higher Quality Content, Presentation, & Interactivity

Device Appropriate and Advantageous

Faster Time to Market …today and in the future

Satisfied Customers - Priceless

Where Are We Now

Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet Market Share Worldwide

http://gs.statcounter.comDelaying Action is Bad for Business

>50% of Web Traffic is from a Mobile Device

And Growing Rapidly

Marketing Websites = Persuasive Content

Gain Interest in a Product or Service

Small, Simple Content and/or Custom Media

Intranet Sites = Search and Navigation

All the Important, Actionable Content is locked PDFs

Business Critical, High Value

Enables Decisions to be Made

Purchase a Product or Service

Execute a Business Process

Mobile Users Don’t Read PDFs

Why Are We Still Here/What Are We Missing?

2017 InfoTrends Content Automation Research

Why Are We Still Here / What Are We Missing?

Device Appropriate

Responsive

Interactive

Sort & Filter Tables

Interactive Charts

Personalization

PDF is Fast, Cheap, Easy

Or is it?

Monolithic Document

High-Quality Print

Not Useable on Mobile

Contextual

Content not File

Social, Sharing, Feedback

No Distractions

Flat and Responsive

Embed, don’t Hyperlink

Needs to be Future Proof: Watch, Eyewear, Augmented Reality…

Structured and Componentized Content

XML Has Proven Its Value in TechPubs and related

But Gaps Still Exist for Non-Technical Users

Schema and Output Development is still too hard

Authoring Usability = Hidden Rules

Authoring for Digital: Responsive and Interactive

HTML5 is Here and Keeps Getting Better

Take Advantage of the Available Skill Sets

& What Are We Missing?

Quark is tackling these challenges through Smart Content

Find an Expert to Help

There are Many in the Industry

Identify Highest Value Content

Revenue? Cost? Quality?

Identify Pain Points

Digital and Mobile

Time to Market, Incomplete, Inconsistent

Usability

Content Analysis

What do we have? What do we want?

Solution Vendor Selection

Criteria based on Business Priorities

Don’t forget IT Needs

Content AutomationGetting Started

Resistance to Change

Muscle Memory - Don’t slow me down

The Devil I Know – Don’t cause me new pain

Loss of Control - Creators are Creative

What’s In It for Me? -Sometimes a Carrot, Sometimes a Stick

Identify a User Community Champion

Open Minded, Hungers for Change,

Provide Choices not Mandates

Surveys, Rank Ordered Priorities, A Few Nice to Haves

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Everyone performs better if they understand why, when, how

Managing Through the Cultural Changeof New Tools

Technical Barriers Developed for IBM use by 2001

2 years after HTML 4.01 was recommended, 15 years before HTML5

Purpose Built to Solve TechPubs challenges

Topic-based, Specialization, Components

Requires Adoption of Topic-based, Structured Authoring – a big first “byte”

Tools

Unfriendly to non-technical

XML IDEs for Schema Development; DITA Open Toolkit for Output

Can DITA Succeed Across the Enterprise?

Social Barriers Technical Language

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (speaks to the Geek in all of us)

Topic-based Authoring: Topic, Task, Concept, Reference, Specialization, Topic Maps, etc

Dominated by XML Technical Experts

Smart, Demanding, Highly Technical, Hungry

Supported by IDE’s for Technical Users

Demos with tags hidden are great… but full-time authors turn on tag view full-time

DITA is Wildly Successful and will continue to be in Tech Docs

“DITA is great if your authors think like programmers”-an XML Services Professional

Kept the powerful architecture concepts

Class/Type “specialization”

ConRef syntax for components

Built with HTML5 in mind but different where needed

Root tags stay the same, “type” attribute for content classes

Metadata in Meta fragments

Limited, System-only use of XML Attributes

Meta Fragment for storing simple to complex metadata collections

HTML Meta in header, Smart Content Meta Fragmentavailable at any level

Does not Encode Information Mapping or Topic Based Authoring

I.e. Task, Concept, Reference: Strength or Weakness?

Encourages the reduction of hidden rules

Highly restrictive content models require exception to implement

Our Advice: solve context problems downstream

Content Automation With Smart Content

Quark AuthorWeb Edition

Quark Publishing Platform

Customer’s App

QuarkXPress

Quark AuthorWeb Edition

High Fidelity Print and PDF

QuarkXPress

3rd Party CMS / System of Record

HTML for Web and E-mail

Gateway App

App StudioSaaS Portal

Quark Enterprise Software

XML Author

Thank You

Computing Evolution in the Enterprise

Micro

Personal

“Big Iron” Compute

DistributedServers +

“Green screens”

Desktop Software

Client-Server

Thin Clients

Rich WebClients

PC-Server

Virtual Machines

Smart Mobile

Mainframe

Internet

CloudPaaS

1970

1980

1990

2000

2005

2010

Distributed Cloud OS

IaaS

SaaS

2020

MobileApps & Web

Next GenClients

IoT

Web Services

Micro Processor

2015

Corba

Structured Text Evolution in the Enterprise

SGML

MIL-STD

38784XML, XSLT

DITA 1.0

1970

1980

2000

2005

2010

20202015

HTML

1990

GML

Mil-Std

28001

Docbook

DSSSL

FOSI

HTML 2

HTML 4

HTML 5

TEI

Hytime

DITA 1.1

DITA 1.2

DITA 1.3

Smart Content

xHTMLXSL-FO

David White, CTO

Smart Content For

High-Value Communications

Why: Authoring Usability a Primary Focus Want a Generalized Standard for Non-Technical

Docs

Who: For High-Value Content and non-Technical Authors

High-Value = “content you sell, content that helps you sell, content that helps you run your business”

Subject Matter Experts = business, financial and legal analysts, product management and marketing, and more

What: Content Methodology and Schema in RelaxNG

When: A Work-In-Progress

Looking for interested parties to work toward standardization

Smart Content

Extending XML-Based Automated Publishing to the Non-Technical

Fine-Grained Knowledge Capture is the Altruistic Value

Automation provides Business Value

Structured Input (GIGO) is the Requirement

Authoring Usabilityis the top step to Close the Gap

Author must take action to experience a rule Click one or more widgets to understand what is/is-not possible

Discovering a Rule that isn’t explained sufficiently Constrained and Context-Specific Content Models

Completely Foreign to Word Users

Causes Usability Headaches, esp. for Cut/Copy/Paste

The more complex and unique the fragment, the less chance of success

Rules not apparent, blocked Paste may not be explained

Hierarchy Sections = Containment

Non-Recursive, Nested Divisions Require all intermediate levels be present

Can’t just change style or increase/decrease Indent to promote/demote Section

Usability of XML Authoring: All the Hidden Rules

Technical Author’s Best Available Solution: Turn Tags View On - Minimize SurprisesWrite In XML Every Day - Know the Schema Inside-Out

Insert Markup First, then type

Change Markup

Balanced Markup means overlapping start/ends for many content-cases

Requires targeted programming to support each use case

Examples: Emphasis, Highlighting, Commenting, Change-tracking

Many More

Usability of XML Authoring: Author Behavior Changes

Improve The Authoring Tool

But No (easy/feasible/acceptable) Answer

esp. for the Non-Technical

Gross Edits Example:

1. Cut a ten element, 2 deep fragment from one context

2. Paste into new context with different content model

3. How to Present the Multi-Step Resolution Required?

The Most Common Answer(also complaint, accusation, and tool vendor beatings)

Return to First Principle: Why restrict? Remove as many content model restrictions as possibleWhen Possible, let the downstream processor resolve

List in a Para or List outside of Para?

Author Doesn’t Care, and

Author Shouldn’t Need to Care

Allow Both, or

Allow only One and offer Increase/Decrease Indent

Another, Simpler

As Discussed on Tuesday: Whitespace can provide a lot of semantic context if we just let it.Good enough for Russian Syllabotonic Poetry, Good Enough for Me

e.g. Indent doesn’t have to mean “fixed formatting.”

After 21 years of Markup, I no longer care about the separation of style from semantics. We can make more people productive with both

How

many h

ours

waste

d?

Archetypes Baseline for processing of semantics

Starting point for configuration

Syntax HTML-like: <section type=“introduction”>

Friendly & Familiar to HTML developers CSS, JavaScript, etc.

No Order and Occurrence Control of Blocks and Inlines*

Section Type Defines available Block and Inline Types

Any Block in Any Order

Any Inline in Any Block

Removes Many (sadly not all) Cut/Copy/Paste Hidden Rules

*Exceptional Cases only, e.g. Figure

What’s This About Smart Content

Content Type Smart Content HTML DITA

Sections section div topic

Blocks p p p

Inline formatting tag b, i, u, etc. phrase

Unordered or ordered lists ul, ol ul, ol, list type="type"

Tables table table table

Images image img image

Media media video, object object

Metadata XML meta fragment tag attribute = "value" tag attribute = "value"

Basic Content Types

<collection name="contributors">

<member name="contributor">

<group name=“details”>

<attribute name="role">

<value>Supervisor</value>

<value>Admin</value>

</attribute>

<attribute name="name">

<value>Sam Markup</value>

</attribute>

</group>

</member>

<member name="contributor">…

</member>

</collection>

Meta: Enhanced for Authoring Collection: Enables UI generated

for repeated structures: Add+

Member: Identifies boundary for 1 collection member

Group: Enables UI generated for collecting fields together

Enables Hierarchy by nesting Group

Attribute: like you know, except…

Multi-Value Support

Well-Known Contexts Set Expectation “Conference” Balisage versus Other Conferences

“GOP Candidates” World versus Trump-itization

“XML Documents” separation of formatting from content

Repurposing is A Very, Very Hard Challenge The Past Overwhelms the New

Take Quark for Example

Sometimes the Challenge of “Just Marketing” Is Cause enough for a change

“Web Experience Management,” anyone?

When Relevance Fails Us

Thank You

Download a FREE copy of The Beginner’s Guide to Smart Content:www.quark.com/smartcontentebook

Setup a discovery call to see if content automation is right for your business: www.quark.com/contact

Next Steps