Healthy CollaborationA Tale of Two Information Products

Debra BissantzMaria G. EssigCMS/DITA NA 2016

Introductions

o Deb – Technical writer• Responsible for technical documentation

• DITA-savvy

• Tools administrator

o Maria – Content technical manager• Responsible for consumer medical content

• Relative DITA newcomer

• Liaison between content developers and software engineers

Healthwise helps people make better health decisions.

Our Teams

o 1 technical writer

o 20 technical subject matter experts

o 30 content developers

o 6 language editors

o 10 substantive editors

o 4 localization specialists

o 4 translation specialists

o 100+ medical reviewers

Change Is in the Wind

o Moving to DITAo New CCMSo New processes

o Future Plans

Why DITA?

Medical Content

o Large documents with many sections

o Varying readability by product

o Multiple products with similar language

o Limited reuse strategy

Technical Documentation

o Overuse of FrameMakerconditional text

o Multiple contributorso Lacked archiving or

retirement strategyo Limited reuse strategyo Delivering PDFs

Quandaries Ahead

o Learning curveo New repositoryo Requirements for technical documentationo Regulatory requirements for medical contento Established manufacturing pipeline

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Collaboration

Team Effort – Divide & Conquero Medical Contento Technical

Communicationso Engineeringo Editorialo Localizationo Translationo Medical Reviewerso IT

DITA Content Modelso Specializations for consumer medical contento Constraints for consumer medical contento Default DITA for technical documentation

Specializations

o Topic types• Concept

• Task

o Body elementso Section elementso Inline elementso Constraints

Constraintso Allowed elements

• <p>

• <ul>

• <dl>

• <note>

• <table>

• <xref>

o Constrained domains

• Highlighting

• Programming

• Software

• User interface

CCMS Implementation Process

o Initial testing with out-of-box versiono Defined customizationso Defined Healthwise configurationo User acceptance testing of custom CCMSo Scheduled testing periodso Team of 12-14 userso 3-4 expertso Daily scrums

Requirements

o Separate technical documentation from medical content

o Develop elaborate metadata customizations to support medical taxonomy and ontology

o Loosen required metadata to support technical documentation

o Support two DITA content models

Final CCMS Configuration

o Manage repository access through user permissions

o Compatible configurations and customizations for both content types

o Multiple publication outputs

CCMS Success…

Initial Setup

o Templateso PDF plug-inso Conref source contento User permissionso Specialized DTDso Specialized schemas

Making it work

Technical Documentation

o 2,500 pageso Clean up contento Analyze structureo Develop reuse

strategy

Dual-Path Approach for Medical

o Path A – DITA factory• Team of writers, editors, medical reviewers

• Manual effort to convert new content

• Lots of copy and paste

o Path B – Automation• 40,000 pages of existing content

• Extract and convert

• Engineering team

Path A – DITA Factory

o Running parallel with CCMS implementation

o New content o Author, edit, and

review in Microsoft Word

o Copy and paste into DITA topics

Path B – Automation

o XSLT to burst existing content to DITA topics

o Batch load into CCMSo Review markup o Clean up existing

content o Multiple iterations

“And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done– done, see you!– under that sky there, every day.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The Future at Healthwise

Content

o Convert all medical content by end of year

o Convert all technical documentation by July

o Consider adding other documentation assets

Peopleo Training the entire teamo Creating DITA style guideo Documenting best practiceso Developing workflowso Providing user-friendly tool for medical

reviewers

Continued Maintenance

o Review our constraints and specializations, looking for improvements

o Consider constraints for technical documentation

o Update PDF plug-inso Add other output formatso Upgrading to DITA 1.3

Delivery Options

o More frequent deployments

o Agile developmento Technical

documentation web portal

o Medical content API

Thank You!o Testing Leads

• Maria Essig• Akheil Jain• Paul Lehnert• Christian McKenna

o Testing Team• Terrina Coffer• Carrie Henley• Chris Hess• Arlene Hull• Kacy Laragan• Tara Records• Monica Rhodes• Terry Smith• Bradley Steele

Questions