tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Professionelles Schreiben / Technical Authoring
Light at the end of the tunnel
After converting the format-based FM materials to structured FM, the
road opened up and the destination – an intelligent content reuse system
– became visible at the end of the tunnel. Instead of purchasing
one of the available CMSs, a tailor-made system was created using FM’s
built-in ExtendScript. With this system, the authors can start working
on moving elements into a repository, working slowly towards ever
higher reuse percentages in the full set of documents, without ever leaving
any content behind.
The choice for a tailor-made system allowed a couple of things that
would have been hard to achieve with many of the existing CMSs.
First of all, there are no unwanted side-effects of the CMS and its publishing
engine, which might introduce small differences in the final
layout of the new materials compared to the legacy documentation. In
a company where the house style is strictly enforced, any small deviation
will cause problems and might mean a lot of customizing work to
be done in a “fully finished” solution. The tailor-made reuse system does
not change the source materials or the publication engine; it just allows
pushing materials into a repository of reusable elements.
Also, the tailor-made reuse system does not require all parts of the
document to be in the repository. Even if half of the materials are in and
the other half is not, there is nothing that keeps you from publishing
the documents. This allows for a smooth transition to maximum reuse of
your structured FM content.
The small print
This short article does not give any details about the techniques that
were used and, most of all, the bears we had to shoot off the road in
order to reach our destination. It has been quite a challenging project,
as the format-based FM materials were of the most complex and technically
advanced type that Jang has ever seen in his career. If you do want
to see a little more of the pitfalls and workarounds in the conversion
to structured FM, you should probably also put TA16 (Jang’s tutorial on
conversion techniques) on your list.
Contact:
jang@jang.nl
susanne.dahlen@iar.com
tekom-Jahrestagung 2012
395