In 2011, Xerox and Bluestream announced a joint presentation about moving from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA, with a focus on how a large organization arrived at a practical content management decision.
Xerox and Bluestream: from perfect to practical
Xerox’s Creative and Technical Communications (CTC) group was responsible for customer and service documentation. The group decided to transition from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA and selected Bluestream XDocs as its component content management system.
The announced presentation framed that journey as “Getting from perfect to practical.” It was intended to explain how the team reached its decision and how XDocs fitted within CTC’s overall go-to-market strategy.
Starting point
Customer and service documentation authored in unstructured FrameMaker.
Decision
A transition to DITA with XDocs as the component content management system.
Business fit
A solution evaluated in relation to CTC’s wider go-to-market strategy.
What the announcement did and did not report
The original post said the session would describe significant cost savings at Xerox. It did not publish an amount, methodology or measurement period. It also did not name the individual speakers or specify a session time. The 2011 conference website was supplied as the source for further event information.
Editorial context · October 2026
Translate “practical” into testable requirements
The lasting decision-making question in this short announcement is how to connect a content system with the work the organization needs to do. A useful requirements review starts with actual publications and handoffs: who creates the material, who reviews it, where it is reused and how it reaches its readers.
- Define the transition: Identify the source formats and the content that needs restructuring before it can support the intended DITA workflow.
- Test a complete publication: Use a representative set of content to expose dependencies, review steps and output requirements.
- Make the business case measurable: State the baseline, effort and expected benefit before treating a projected saving as an achieved result.
These questions are new editorial context, separate from the 2011 presentation announcement. They do not add outcomes to the Xerox case.