Single-Sourcing Content Restructure

Background

Our team answered an open proposal to help restructure and reorganize a technology company’s informational guides. The company had a few main goals for this content:

• Enable simultaneous updates across all content.
• Personalize content according to user needs.
• Ensure content is searchable online.
• Establish consistency and a clear organizational hierarchy.
• Provide content in both print and PDF formats.

Our team took on the task of restructuring this content into a form that was efficient for both the company and the user by using MadCap Flare’s single-sourcing capabilities.

This project was completed in December 2024.

Evaluating the Content

After importing the existing content into MadCap Flare, our team evaluated and categorized the content.

We identified three main content categories—tasks, concepts, and references—and tagged each file accordingly. We also determined if content needed to be broken up, combined, or otherwise edited.

Our team used Trello to manage our workload. We used our meetings to proactively assign tasks and deadlines, ensuring a smooth work environment and careful deadline management.

After our team had a better grasp of the content, we began restructuring the content base.

Applying Single-Sourcing

Our first task was to create templates for our three major content categories. These templates used prompts to mark where content needed to be added or moved, as well as the insertion of pre-existing content. 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. Our team evaluated each piece of content to determine the most relevant keywords and pieces of metadata to add to the final product.

Then, we moved to the last steps of applying style changes, previewing the print and PDF versions of the content, and editing our final work.

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 exported 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.