Introduction
A Component Content Management System (CCMS) is used to manage structured content, which is authored in a structural hierarchy defined in an XML schema. Content is authored in small components that are reused to make larger content deliverables. The granular content units managed and reused are the components in this hierarchy.
CCMSs can support standard schemas such as DITA, DocBook, and S1000D. Some organizations also create their own proprietary schemas, though this has fallen out of favor with the emergence of DITA. With sophisticated support for components, DITA is the best in breed standard for structured authoring.
Different types of components
Topics are the primary components in DITA. DITA content is authored in topic files, which are assembled and reused via content maps to rapidly generate publications and baseline content for authoring new publications. Out of the box, DITA supports four main types of specialized topics: concept, task, reference, and troubleshooting. In addition, DITA offers a variety of mechanisms for more granular component content management.. Without specializations, DITA supports the following main topic types:
- Topic – A generic topic. Some simple DITA implementations use <topic> without making use of any of the topic types below, which are specialized from generic topics.
- Concept – A <concept> provides conceptual information that helps readers to understand a product, task etc.
- Task – A <task> provides procedural information in step-by-step form.
- Reference – A <reference> topic provides supporting data, typically in table form, such as product specifications or lists of software commands.
- Troubleshooting – A <troubleshooting> topic provides troubleshooting actions in the form of conditions/symptoms, cause, and remedy.
Any DITA component can be tagged with metadata, which allows you to identify, search, filter, and publish based on specific criteria. In addition, binary files such as graphics are also managed as components.
Fragments within topics are also components, including paragraphs, tables, sections, notes, and so forth. The DITA <conref> element offers the ability to pull these fragments into any topic. This enables enterprises to create libraries of reuse content such as a file containing special information content used in the organization (note, warning, caution, danger, hazard etc.) The same special information fragment may be required in many locations across the document library. It can be pulled into all publications from one place. This provides efficiency, consistency, and the ability to edit once and update everywhere.
For branding, product naming and other purposes, DITA offers keys and key-based (indirect) addressing. Per the DITA standard, “The DITA key reference facility provides a layer of abstraction so that the resources addressed by references throughout a document may be defined globally at the map level.” This allows you to substitute text depending on the publication in which the content appears.
DITA also includes a powerful mechanism called specialization, w
How Components are Used in CCMS Software?
The power of structured authoring and DITA can only be fully realized when the content is managed in a DITA Component Content Management System (CCMS). Maps, topics, integrated graphics and other binary files are the key components/building blocks managed by the CCMS. Typically, topic level DITA components are managed within the CCMS as separate files. .
A good CCMS excels in providing agility for users, with tools for managing component reuse, whatever your reuse strategy is; to manage metadata and make changes to metadata as required; to add rules and checks to help users enforce content requirements, and to extend the writing tools to adapt to new challenges.
A CCMS and DITA structured authoring enable standardized content models and templates for content creation. It also allows you to tailor your processes for review, approval, and release to match your business requirements and use cases. Reviewers and contributors can collaborate in real time on the Web at the appropriate level of granularity to provide review comments, change content, and see each other’s comments. Reviewers need only look at the exact topics and sections that are their areas of expertise. Authors can accept or reject changes to quickly finalize content for publication. This streamlines your processes, improving time to market, technical accuracy, quality and consistency, giving a better customer experience and lower support costs.
A DITA Component Content Management System allows you to branch and merge content components, and tracks the relationship between components in trunk and their descendants in branches. This is useful when authoring related content, for example if you are developing a variant of a software product. Content can be easily merged back into trunk, with changes accepted or rejected. In addition, a CCMS makes it possible to track the relationships between source and target languages for localized content, enabling you to efficiently run localization cycles for your content releases and localize only the changed content between cycles.
Content findability is essential. A modern DITA CCMS offers tools and configurable views for finding content, and excels in metadata handling. The right CCMS allows you to precisely identify topics within a map, folder, project, or branch based on virtually any criteria – full text search, filename, author, creation date, metadata, and so on.
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Conclusion – Introducing the XDocs DITA CCMS
Components are the essential, fundamental building blocks for structured authoring. They enable modular content creation, content reuse, filtering, branch/merge operations, and localization management.
The XDocs DITA CCMS provides the features you need to realize the benefits of component based authoring. With full support for the DITA standard, intuitive content creation and editing, and enhanced content reuse capabilities, XDocs makes content creation quick and efficient. Standardized content models, templates, rules and checks help users enforce content requirements and extend writing tools in regulated industries.
Streamline processes for content creation, review, approval, and release with XDocs workflow. Reviewers and contributors collaborate in real time through an intuitive web interface, provide review comments, change content, and see each other’s comments. Authors can accept or reject changes to quickly finalize content.
XDocs Release Management efficiently manages multiple documentation versions and releases, allowing you to create and maintain variants of the same documentation concurrently.
The XDocs localization module streamlines localization processes, reducing costs while increasing efficiency and productivity, and enhancing your ability to produce high quality multilingual publications in PDF, HTML and other formats.
XDocs’ highly configurable search and metadata capabilities and views allow you to find, filter, and sort content, define metadata taxonomies, harvest metadata from DITA content for content queries across the system, and inject metadata into content in bulk. Metadata taxonomies can be based on industry specific semantic specializations, which is especially useful in highly regulated environments for content reporting and compliance.
The XDocs DITA CCMS provides flexible, configurable publishing to virtually any format (PDF, HTML5, XHTML and so on) in virtually any language. At publish time, content can be filtered for product variant subsets, branded for different corporate sub-brands with different look-and-feel options or product names, or batch published. In addition, XDocs publishing integrates with Bluestream XDelivery to provide a full content delivery solution for your organization.
Contact Bluestream for more information about the XDocs DITA CCMS.
