For its 2015 CMS/DITA North America presentation, Bluestream CTO Jim Tivy proposed a practical question: how can documentation stay distinct for each product release while still sharing useful content?
Separate the release. Share the content.
Bluestream announced Jim Tivy’s presentation at the 2015 Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference, hosted by the Center for Information Development Management. The original post described a three-day event with four presentation tracks.
Tivy’s session considered organizations managing releases in sequence or in parallel. Documentation needs to accompany those releases accurately, even where one product generation shares topics with another. The talk was intended to connect common use cases with release-management tools and underlying technologies.
In a multiple product release environment, product releases may be happening in sequence or in parallel. Managing the documentation that accompanies product releases requires tool features and underlying technologies that allow the separation of content as well as the ability to share content from one release to another. Furthermore, the release management of content has to be presented in an understandable fashion.
Session abstract reproduced from Bluestream’s 2015 announcement
Jim will discuss common release management use cases while considering diversity across organizations. Taking those use cases, he will explore release management tools and technology solutions including release management features in DITA 1.2 and new features in the upcoming release of DITA 1.3.
Editorial context · October 2026
A release is also a content boundary
Sequential releases
Ask which approved topics should carry forward, which must change and how a previous publication can still be identified.
Parallel releases
Ask which changes belong to one product line and which should be shared. Test this with real content rather than only a folder structure.
The abstract refers to DITA 1.3 as upcoming because it was written in 2015. OASIS subsequently published the DITA 1.3 standard in December 2015. That historical sequence matters when interpreting the technologies discussed in the session. See the OASIS DITA 1.3 standard record.