Technical writers work across different verticals and deliver tons of rich content every day. This includes writing about a company’s products and services or creating knowledge bases, APIs, manuals, user guides, release notes and more.
Documenting stuff is a great practice, but the challenge faced by organizations is to maintain it in a way that it can be accessed and used by the concerned individual across different areas of operation.
When there are multiple documents across different verticals with many technical writers on board, it becomes difficult to establish consistency and maintain a standard flow in the documentation.
How can you tackle the situation?
In order to establish a consistent flow across the entire documentation, you need to establish a process that is easy to follow and allows writers to generate content with a holistic approach.
What is single sourcing?
When we create the entire content at one place, we call it single sourcing. This concept allows you to reuse the content and publish it across different channels as an when required.
Single sourcing content publishing is a great strategy to tackle this. And MadCap Flare is the perfect platform to do so.
How to execute it?
- The first thing that you need is inputs from the writing team. They will have to plan out the categorization carefully so that the content pieces can be repurposed across different platforms
- Secondly, content needs to be checked for plagiarism and should be placed at a single location
- Finally, you need to make sure that a consistent content architecture is set up and has a standard look and feel throughout all documentation projects
What are the benefits of migrating content from different sources to MadCap Flare?
- Reduced Costs: Since all your content is stored in a single place that has a defined architecture, you can find any content piece easily. Additionally, it becomes easier to maintain your new repository.
- Increase in Productivity: With an established architecture inside MadCap Flare, you will be able to use the master templates and styles without much hassle
- Quick Publishing: You can link the right design template inside MadCap Flare with the page you want to edit and publish it in a few minutes
- Content Categorization: You will be able to maintain the hierarchy of the content you publish with categorization. It is important because it defines how the entire navigation menu, knowledge base, and documentation are located. All the pages and links will start working in a proper flow once the hierarchy is defined
- Easy Maintenance: It will be easier for you to maintain and update content on a regular basis. As technical writers will have access to the content, they will be able to update it easily and send it for approval to get it published
To Wrap Up
Migrating your content to MadCap Flare is a smart move. Apart from the aforementioned benefits, you will also be able to reduce redundancies in the content and eliminate errors efficiently.
Duplicates are removed by following the content structure and using variables inside MadCap Flare.
Also, by placing your content inside MadCap Flare, you will be able to publish it on different formats whenever the need arises. Some formats include HTML5, PDFs, e-pub, Word Docs, clean XHTML, FrameMaker and more.
Streamline your content and migrate it to MadCap Flare today! Contact Us