In February 2007, Bluestream announced that Workday had completed an initial implementation of online documentation and application help using XDocs, with DITA at the center of its content approach.
Why Workday selected XDocs
The announcement described Workday as a provider of on-demand enterprise business services and named support for the DITA XML vocabulary as a deciding factor in its selection of XDocs. The initial implementation covered online documentation and application help.
XDocs was a configurable, DITA-ready content management system built on the XStreamDB native XML database. It provided a single-sourcing environment for XML and non-XML content.
“Workday’s choice of DITA as our documentation schema was the deciding factor in our selection of XDocs”
Stan Swete · VP, Products & Technology, Workday · 2007
“Their support of the DITA Open Toolkit processes made our content publishable right out the box. And their configurable transformation pipelines have allowed us to deliver our DITA-based documentation and help content with a Workday look and feel.”
The content architecture in practice
“Aside from the DITA support, what impresses me about XDocs is the power of the underlying native XML database. We’re taking full advantage of features such as an XPath-sensitive full text search and XQuery-computed resources.”
Mark Fletcher · Information Architect, Workday · 2007
“Our writers are also seeing productivity benefits through the content reusability that DITA and XDocs provide, and from the WebDAV interface, which allows them to interact with the CMS directly through our XML editing tool.”
Mark Fletcher · Information Architect, Workday · 2007
Bluestream’s announcement reported expected cost savings and an improved client online experience after implementation. It supplied no quantified savings, productivity study or customer-experience measurement, so these remain qualitative claims from that announcement.
“We are very pleased to be working with such a technology progressive company”
Jim Tivy · CTO, Bluestream · 2007
“Workday’s decision to adopt DITA as their content standard puts them among today’s bleeding edge technology organizations.”
Editorial context · October 2026
Three layers of a documentation system
Content structure
The schema shapes how information is authored and reused. In this announcement, that choice was DITA.
Repository access
The database and editor interface affect how writers retrieve, update and manage the material.
Reader experience
Transformation pipelines determine how managed source becomes branded documentation and application help.
The story is useful because it names each layer and includes observations from both a product leader and an information architect. When using it as an evaluation example, keep those observations attached to their 2007 implementation. The announcement does not establish Workday’s current documentation stack, current customer relationship or later business outcomes.
Company information and contacts from the original announcement
Archived wording. Company descriptions, roles, addresses and contact details below are preserved as part of the historical record and may have changed.
About Workday
Founded in March 2005 by Dave Duffield, Aneel Bhusri and a recognized team of enterprise software veterans, Workday is building the next generation of on-demand, ERP solutions to meet the needs of today’s dynamic and global businesses. Workday’s Enterprise Business Services were built using the most modern, standards-based technologies, providing an unparalleled level of agility, ease-of-use, and integration capabilities. The company recently delivered its first suite of services, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), and is developing additional suites including Workday Financial Management, Resource Management and Revenue Management. For more information about Workday, please visit http://www.workday.com.