Content Restructuring with Single Sourcing

Background

Our team answered an open proposal to help restructure and reorganize informational guides for a tech company. This content was all over the place, with inconsistent styles and no way for the company to update its content easily. Our team took on the task of restructuring this content into a form that was efficient for both the company and the user.

Task

Of the two guides presented, we chose to focus on chapter one of both guides, plus an appendix from each, for the open proposal. After importing the existing content into MadCap Flare, our team evaluated and categorized the content. We went through each file, organizing them into chapters and tagging the type of content it represented — a task, concept, or reference. Our team also identified any content that needed to be broken up, combined, or otherwise edited.

After our team had a better grasp of what the content contained, we began to take our first steps into fully restructuring the content base.

Our Process

The company had a few main goals for this content: create consistency; be able to update all of the content at once; make the content searchable online; be able to personalize the content; and make both print and PDF forms of the content.

Our first task was to create templates for each of the major categories we found — task, concept, and reference. These templates were then applied to each article within our project’s scope. Once we organized each article into our templates, we used MadCap Flare to expand the content’s keyword and metadata base. Then, we moved to the final step of applying simple style changes and previewing the print and PDF versions of the content.

The Final Project

Our final project fulfilled all of the company’s content goals. We provided consistency through the careful organization and structure of our template system, and our expansion to the content’s knowledge base of keywords and metadata allowed users to easily search the content online. 

Our use of MadCap Flare as a single sourcing program allowed for the content to be expressed in both print and PDF form. Single sourcing also permits the company to update the content in one step and maintain style consistency across all platforms.

Through our collaboration, my team was able to successfully restructure and organize this company’s content in a way that benefits both the company and its users. Our work within MadCap Flare displays an understanding of how content’s structure is related to the overall success of how its ideas are communicated, and how efficiency and consistency can be achieved within pre-existing content.