think we can get started. Thanks everybody for coming here. I'm excited that we're all here to talk about, documentation and structured authoring and some of the cool things that we can do with our content, using the the modern strategies and tools that we have available to us. And so today, I've got a couple of guests with me. I have, Gershon Joseph from Poligo. He is an information architect, same as me. We also have Sarah O'Keefe, the CEO and founder of Scriptorium. So Gershon and I are from Polygo, which is a cloud based component content management system, which is really built with single sourcing in mind, allowing, content reuse for technical documentation, training content, policies and procedures, knowledge management, and such. But let me pass, the microphone, so to speak, over to Sarah so that she can introduce herself. Then we'll hear a couple words from Gershon, and then we'll get, started with the questions that we have. So, Sarah, thanks for being here. Would you like to say a few words to introduce yourself today? Thanks, Josh, and thanks to Poligo. And, hey, Gershon. My name is Sarah O'Keefe. I run an enterprise content operations consultancy called Scriptorium. We've been doing this for a since the nineteen hundreds as the kids say. So, we we were established in nineteen ninety seven, so we slid in, you know, right under the wire. And we're interested in questions around technology publishing and automation. So thanks for having me, and I look forward to it. Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. And, Gershon, would you like to introduce yourself and explain what you do as an information architect? Thanks, Josh. Yeah. So, my name is Gershon Joseph. I've been developing technical documentation and supporting documentation teams for a little over four decades. I've helped many companies from startups to large enterprises move to structured authoring with and without CCMSs. And, I've worked with the world's leading thought leaders in the field to develop and apply best industry best practices around content strategy, information architecture, and localization. I joined Paligo one year eight months ago as a solution engineer, and I'm focused on helping our customers get the most out of the Paligo CCMS. Absolutely. Yeah. I feel lucky that we have two just very experienced, veterans of the industry here. Before we get started in earnest, I'll say that the webinar is being recorded. So if there's anything that you, missed or if there's something that you wanna share with a colleague or a friend or whatever, all the registrants will receive the recording, so no worries about that. There is a tab on this Wistia platform here called chat. So if you've got comments or things you wanna mention, you can put that into the chat tab. But if you've got questions for the panelists, please put that into the tab called q and a, and then we will take a look at what we've got there. And towards the end of the session, we'll address some of the questions that you guys have. And, also, please participate in the polls. We have a number of polls that we'd like to ask of our audience just to kinda get an idea of where you guys are at. And in fact, our first poll will begin right now. So let me add that up here. We're asking what is the status of your content and status in the sense of is it structured, is it unstructured. Please take a look at the options there and, pick the one that most matches what is your situation is and, will address our audience based on, I guess, how you guys are doing. Very curious to see. Josh, I think the poll is technically closed. Oh, the poll perhaps might be closed. Yeah. I think I know why that might have happened because I put it there earlier. But, okay. That being the case, we have that chat, tab. So if people wanna put into the chat tab, just how are you doing with your content? Is it unstructured? Is it structured? Maybe you don't know what we mean exactly by unstructured or unstructured. So if you can, unstructured. So if you can, put some of your thoughts as to that question into the chat tab, we will take a look at that. Yep. I understand what happened there. So let us move on to the first discussion question that I wanna bring to, both Gershon and Sarah. So what what's wrong with unstructured content? We know that lots of people's content is Google Docs, Microsoft Word, whatever it may be, And that seems to work okay for some people. But what what kind of problems are people going to find? I wanna ask Sarah first. What what do you think is wrong with structured content? So initially initially, nothing is wrong with structured content. Right? If you are at a small scale, you have a small content set, you're just getting up and running, you can make it work, and it'll be fine. The problem that you run into is that unstructured content basically doesn't scale. And so as your requirements get more complex, which means you have content variance. I mean, the very basic one, like the instructor content versus the student content if you think of a test with an answer key. Or you have a light product and a premium product, and you really wanna single source those because you really don't wanna have to maintain two copies. And, oh, then you add an enterprise version, and now you have three. Oh, and now we're translating, so you have three times eight languages. Oh, wait. We're going into the EU. Now we have twenty six languages. Right? Those kinds of scalability issues from localization, from content variance, from product variance, and multichannel. So, oh, well, I was just doing PDF, and that was okay. It wasn't okay, but we thought it was okay. And then, oh, no. Wait. We also need HTML. Oh, no. Wait. We also need this. We also need that. We also need the other thing. Every time you add a channel, an output channel, a variant, a language, a localization, it becomes more difficult to manage that content in an unstructured environment. So the bottom line problem is that unstructured content doesn't scale for the kinds of requirements that we have for most technical content these days. That does make sense. I wanna add the poll back to the stage. We've, recreated it. So now we can get your answers in there, the proper way. But looking through the chat tab, what I've seen here, seems like, there's a mix of responses. Some people have both. Some people are already set up in their structures, but there's also a number of people who look like they're migrating from, structured to unstructured content, which is very interesting, because that migration is, of course, a whole a beast unto itself. Interesting. So while we have that poll going, let's bring ourselves to the next thing that I wanted to ask about, which was what are the benefits of moving to structured content? Because we know that there are certainly benefits that come from it, but the the process of that migration can be so time consuming or so expensive. Is it worth it? Like, what are the benefits that we get from moving to structured content? I'll I'll ask you again, Sarah. The first thing I mean, the first question is, is it worth it? Right? I mean, you are gonna have a cost associated with this. And to Gershon's point, with or without a CCMS, but, you know, if you do put in place a component content management system, there's an investment there. There's an investment in migration. There's an investment in changing the way that you that you work and all the rest of it. So the question you have to ask is, what benefits am I gonna derive from this, and what makes it worthwhile? And the most obvious place that we always start is cost avoidance, and cost avoidance has to do with formatting automation. So in a structured content environment, you have the ability to create your content without attaching or gluing it to the formatting piece. And what that means is that I'm not creating a page based layout and then trying to repurpose it for HTML, you know, in in addition to the PDF that it's designed for. Instead, what I'm doing is I'm creating content, and then I'm saying, okay. Now make me a PDF. Now make me HTML. Now oh, I've translated it into French, Italian, German, Spanish, output it in those languages or out the formatting in those languages. So separation of content and formatting ultimately is a cost avoidance measure and also a velocity issue because the formatting is automated, which means I'm not having to do it by hand. Right? I'm not taking the German preformatted or sorry, the English preformatted, translating it into German or Italian or French or Spanish, and then having to reformat everything. Rather, I take the source, typically English content, translate it into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and then layer on the formatting, automatically. And so, typically, a technical writer working in an unstructured environment, something like Word, is spending up to fifty percent of their time. I've seen thirty percent, fifty percent, sixty percent of their time on formatting. And so all that work goes away. You can see this in localization. If you look at the localization, numbers where typically you have a localization service provider, They will typically break down that invoice into project management, linguistics, like actual translation, and DTP, desktop publishing or formatting. That formatting piece is going to be somewhere in the vicinity of thirty to fifty percent of your total invoice and sometimes higher for, I'll call it more complex languages. And, of course, complex is in the eye of the English speaking beholder. So automated formatting and then this, again, the scalability issue. You can go much beyond what's possible to, you know, the human brain in an unstructured environment. Absolutely. Gershon, I wanna pass the question to you. What are some of the benefits that you see from moving to structured content, especially in addition to, saving on costs? Oh, I heard an answer, but then it looks like it faded out a little bit. Gershon, are you there? Well, I think, we did get a oh, I hear some typing. Let's, let's take ourselves to the question, after that or rather the poll, I should say, and while we let, Gershon reconnect there. So we have another poll that we wanna bring to your attention, which is about the publishing channels that are most important for your customers. Because as we know with, the benefits that you get from structured authoring is that you're ready for whatever publishing channel might come your way. Right? But what are important to you? Let's add this one to the stage. Curious to see the responses of our audience. Yeah. I'll be curious to see what comes up here because hello, PDF. That's we we all want PDF to go away, and we all sort of say we don't wanna do it anymore, and yet we can't seem to kill it. It's it's and it's and it's a challenging thing to do. Right? Print is is really significantly more challenging than some of the other outputs and has different requirements than HTML. They're in a way almost incompatible, and so it leads to some really interesting challenges. One of the things that I like about, structured authoring is that you're you're ready for these publishing channels that you might not even expect yet. Right? Like, once you can access your content through an API, you're kind of ready to program whatever comes your way. You know, we know about PDFs and online help or whatever, but, maybe there are other platforms that we are preemptively ready for. Thanks for the fact that it's structured. We're we're getting a lot of demand for things like, JSON. Because if we can encode the content into something like JSON, then it's more efficient to deliver it into mobile apps and those kinds of things. Hey, Gershon. I'm sup Hey. Ah, you're back. Let's see what happens. I'm trying to be back. Yes. So, Gershon, perhaps I can pass the next question to you. I'll close our poll there. And our next question that we wanted to discuss was about, CCMSs. Do we really need a CCMS? Now I heard you mentioned at the beginning that you've worked with, structured authoring both with CCMSs, perhaps not with CCMSs. So you have this perspective of how much of a difference this particular tool really makes. Can you speak to, how necessary a component content management system really is? Sure. So the answer as you'd expect is it depends. Mhmm. And then you can extend the the the it depends a bit further because I know of one very large enterprise that does structured authoring without a CCMS. Now they're the exception. They're not the rule. But usually, if you need additional things beyond just the things that structured authoring give you. So, for example, you want workflows, you want review and approve, you want the ability for casual contributors like subject matter experts to also submit content. And you want to automate your translation workflow as much as possible. And lastly, if you want to integrate with all sorts of third party things like content content delivery platforms, again, translation management systems, perhaps, different means of delivery, maybe an ontology management system, maybe a future management system. So the more things you want to integrate with, the more a CCMS really becomes necessary. But if all you're doing is, publishing your content to a small number of, targets or you have a reasonably limited set of variants in your content, you can get by without a CCMS. Once things start getting more sophisticated, then a CCMS definitely helps. Yeah. Makes sense to me for sure. Sarah, is there anything that you would add to, what Gershon's response was in terms of when or how necessary a CCMS really is? I I agree with all of that. I would add to that that you want to look at the question of what it will cost you to buy the CCMS or, actually, buy, license, configure, maintain, administer, versus what it'll cost you to perform the, the content management functions that the CCMS automates for you outside the CCMS. So, you know, same thing. We have customers running on what we call bare metal. So a file based system, and then they've got all their pieces and parts as they go. Well, how much time, money, effort, people are you going to have to invest if you don't have a piece of software that is doing all the things that that Gershon's describing for you. And so, ultimately, it's a business decision. In most cases, if you have a you know, again, the the bigger your workflow, the bigger the number of people, the more complex your requirement, the more obvious the business case becomes for CCMS. But even at a small scale with just a couple of authors, it's very common that you can justify it. If you have ten or fifteen or twenty authors, it becomes a very rare kind of organization that is not operating in a component content management system. Absolutely. So I wanna take us to this question about how much effort is involved in migrating. We talked a bit about the benefits of moving to structured content. So we know that, you know, there's a reason to do it. There's good reason to, but it is filled with effort. Right? So what kinds of effort are we looking at? You know, do we need outside help to do this? Is this something people can learn for themselves? Let me pass this first to Gershon. How much effort would you say is involved in migrating this kind of legacy content? I would start with a question. Do you really need to migrate all your legacy content? Yeah. Because a CCMS is not a digital asset management system. Right? So or or DAM as we like to call them. It's not a place where you just throw all of your assets. Right? It's a it's a place where you develop and manage and then publish that content from. So very often, the first question I'll ask, any customer that I'm that I'm interfacing with, including Polygo customers that are just starting their journey inside of Polygo, and I did this when I was doing other CCMSs as well, is do you really need to bring content in? And if you do, how much do you want to bring in? So my best practice is, if you can afford to start fresh in the CCMS, you take advantage of the new paradigm because usually they're coming from unstructured. Right? So you take advantage of the new paradigm. And then I recommend importing just a minimal viable set. So do for example, if you have five variants of a product and they share a lot of content, import one of them, then reconfigure the content with, variables, profiling and so on and so forth. The various reuse, things that we've got, for example, in Poligo. And once you've got the one variant configured properly for the CCMS, then you can start extending that within the CCMS to add the other variants. So you don't need to, in this use case, you don't need to import all five variants. You import the one and then build the other four out inside the CCMS. So, that being said, I do have customers that want to import everything. And, sometimes it's a business decision because the more you want to import, the more work it's gonna be. Of course, you can farm that out to a third party partner or consultant. And then the other side of this, which I'll briefly point to is the effort involved depends on how clean your unstructured content is that you're starting with. So for example, if you're coming from Word or Google Docs and everything has been locally formatted, or styles have been used but have been used inconsistently, applied inconsistently, you're first going to have to fix up the Word files to get them consistent so that the import works. Because the import basically maps styles to XML constructs. And it's very often that people think that they were that their unstructured contents has been well, you know, well governed and all things are styled, but this is not always the case. Yeah. Like, so you talk about this idea of clean or unclean, maybe unstructured content. How often would you say that people think what they have is clean, it's ready for migration, but it's actually not? A hundred percent of the time. I've yet to find the company whose content is actually consistently styled because they got different writers. And when using an unstructured tool, there's no enforcement from the tool. So you're relying on the users to do the right thing. And over the years, different you know, there have been different technical writers working for the company. Or if you consider startups, their early content was often developed or written by developers or product managers. They only hired a tech writer later. So the earlier content usually is much worse than the newer content, but very often that earlier content is still very much needed by the customers. Absolutely. And so I wanna ask Sarah about, you know, similarly how much efforts involved in this. But I also first wanna mention that we would love questions from the audience who's watching now. So if you wanna post things into the q and a tab, we will be able to get to your questions before too long, actually. But, Sarah, how much effort have you seen going into this legacy content? And and another thing I'm wondering even is, like, how long does this kind of process tend to take? I'm sure it depends. Right? But, like, what are the kinds of things that determine how much time, how much effort goes into this. Well, I'm gonna cast some broad aspersions on legacy content. It you know, the the question of how well has it been how well has the template on the back end been implemented? So did you have styles in Word or FrameMaker or InDesign or whatever we're dealing with here? Broadly, the unstructured FrameMaker people are gonna be a little bit cleaner because FrameMaker does sort of or I shouldn't call the people clean. The unstructured FrameMaker content is going to be a little bit cleaner, right, because there is a huge emphasis on on templates and tags in even in unstructured FrameMaker. The word stuff is a mixed bag. Sometimes people are okayish about about using tags and styles and actually applying styles. And then InDesign is going to be a hundred percent of the time a train wreck. Right? Because InDesign is intended for put stuff on the page and make it look beautiful. And put stuff on it on a page and make it look beautiful is completely incompatible with tag it in tag it consistently. It it does have styles. People just don't use them. So, what really happens is that when you look at your unstructured content, all the little tricks and workarounds and things that you got away with in unstructured content are going to be exposed when you move over to a structured authoring environment because, you know, you're separating off the formatting. So all those things you did for formatting purposes are now irrelevant, and they go away. And so what's left is that corpus of content. Now on migration, you know, there's some things that we can do to work around local overrides and and script things to fix those. So it looks like a heading one, but it's really a body tag. We can, you know, we can work with that, and we can, run through some funky scripting things to pick up all the things that are in fact headings but weren't tagged that way. But, you know, that's a custom migration coding project. So you I mean, you can just hear the dollar signs, right, or euros. Take your pick. So how bad is the legacy content? How much cleanup is required? You know, Gershwin's point about triaging the content is a really, really good one. Do you have to bring in fifty thousand pages of content, or can you cut that down to five or ten thousand pages of your core content? The other thing we've seen, which is a slightly different I don't I don't think it's a contradiction. It's just a different possibility. The other thing that we've seen is a sort of just in time approach. So you look at the content and say, okay. This content is in maintenance mode. We're leaving it back here in unstructured content land. We expect to change it once every two years, maybe. Not worth it. This content is live, and we're gonna move that over. And even within that, you can say, well, these are the documents. This is the content that we expect to be working on in the next six months, so let's move that over. So So it's a subset of a subset. And then as we work out our conversion process and we figure out what what's the front end cleanup that's the most valuable and what are the things that we can and should do here, then we can, you know, sort of entrain the content into a sequence that brings it over as we need it and brings it over just in time to then make the updates in, you know, that particular content set. That doesn't always work, but it is a, valuable option to have if, you know, if that can work in your environment. Absolutely. Thank you for that. We have actually a question that I've seen come in here. I go for a while. Josh. Can I just add that previous question, please? Go right ahead. It's a piece that I did not answer yet, which Sarah didn't, really touch on either, which is, you know, we focused on the pre work in getting the unstructured somewhat structured so that it'll come in cleaner. But no matter how clean the incoming content is, in whatever format it's in, there's always gonna be post import cleanup or rework that has to happen on the CCMS side. And this is not a Beligo thing, this is with any CCMS. You're never going to get a perfect migration. There's no such thing. There's always work to be done upfront and work to be done afterwards, and that needs to be considered as part of that migration effort, planning. Yeah. That's absolutely true. And, oh, one other thing. One other other thing. When an organization moves from unstructured to structured content, very commonly, it's in the context of actually changing how content is, produced. And what I mean by that is that the new content is going to have a different, not just look and feel, but a different strategy than the old content did. So just to take a very high level and kind of dumb example, your old content was PDF and chapter based and kind of page based, and we thought about page spreads because that was kind of We're talking about page spreads. Oh. Oh, am I I see Gershon still here. Yeah. Should I take that? Sarah. Sure. Yeah. Gershon, can you finish Sarah's thought, please? Sure. We're taking turns dropping out with with internal issues. Anyway, yeah. So what Sarah was saying is when your target is PDF, you're really focused on that design of the PDF. So you're you're manually tweaking keeps and page breaks and, making sure that you have, a certain number of list bullets, on the at the bottom of the previous page or you move the entire bulleted list to the next page, things like that. So you spend your time tweaking the page layout. Once you get into the CCMS and your primary, target format is probably online, some form of HTML usually based, you know, HTML based solution, whether it's a help center, whether it's, you know, some kind of other content portal. Now that you don't have keeps because you don't have to worry about keeps on the website, right, on a on a web page. So your design is now more focused for that online experience. You want to take advantage of colors, whereas on PDF, you often just do black and white, especially if you or your customers print those things out. Right? So, the way that you structure the content is very different as well. And you're also going to want to add metadata so that so the search finds things. You may want to work with a specific search engine where you can tweak relevancy. You want to add synonyms. You want to, you know, have taxonomies applied to the to the web pages that you're you're creating from the CCMS. So it's a whole different, you know, a whole different paradigm and a different concept. So you can't just write as if you're still writing for PDF and and pages. You need to now write something more generic. And actually, I would propose you don't even write specifically for the online. You want to make sure that a topic contains, or talks about a single idea, and then that topic can be used anywhere. And, unfortunately, I wasn't online for the the earlier questions. But, very often you can actually repurpose content in a CCMS, in something else. So for example, it may have been designed by the technical writing team, but it can be used by the the instructional designers for training content. It can be used for marketing content. You may even take feature descriptions, which were written by the product management team, and you can share those across the three teams that I mentioned. Right? So you don't wanna write for a specific output. You wanna write so that it'll work regardless of the output and even regardless of the context in which that topic happens to land up in. Mhmm. Right. And so you mentioned about how you can write something that maybe a a other department will use. And and there, I think we're getting into the idea of reusable content, which is really a big selling point of the CCMSs. Right? So something that I'm wondering, before we head into our audience q and a, and there's still time for people in the audience to add their own questions to the q and a tab, and please do. But I'm kinda wondering about, you know, when we're making that migration, how do we identify reusable content? Maybe it hadn't been written that way to begin with, but now that we have a CCMS, now that we can reuse, what what are some good strategies for kind of looking through what we're bringing in and identifying this as, okay. I'm gonna make this reusable now. I'm gonna rework my content to take advantage of reuse. How do we even begin to go about that sort of thing? Let's see if we can pass this to, Sarah first. Provided, Sarah. There's some software tools that can help with it. Yep? Yep. Go right ahead. So there's some software tools that can help with this. But, ultimately, what you're doing is saying, we wrote seventeen versions of how to log in to the system. Let's look at them. Let's pick the best one or rewrite to make a single best one and then use that throughout those those seventeen places with appropriate variance separated out. This is where starting to think about best practices around technical writing becomes helpful. You know, how do you do this? How do you do it best? How do you work through that? And, you know, there's a cost associated with with managing every single topic, every single piece of content. And so the less content you have, the lower your overall cost. Now I'm not saying throw things away there. Right? But it's more like one topic used in seventeen places is way, way better than seventeen copies of almost, but not quite anything. Mhmm. And, Gershon, is there anything that you would wanna add to that? Yeah. Firstly, I fully agree. The one thing I would add is, when you do find that single way that you wanna say it, you can still you can actually expand it, you the usage of that single topic by leverage leveraging features like variables and profiling so that that so that a single topic can actually be used, in more, contexts as it were. So in in more in in additional publications. So, you know, at a simple level, if you have the the first few steps of many procedures is often the same because you have to get into the system the same way or you need to arrive at the same place in your software in the same way. So you can reuse those three steps. You'll find that they've been written different in different ways as Sarah mentioned. But you can reuse those three steps very often without doing any profiling or using variables because you're saying exactly the same thing. Right? So that's a sort of simpler way of reusing where what you see is what you get in all the the publications that are gonna use it, in all the documents that are gonna use it. Then there's, what I was alluding to was the the most sophisticated use case where you can actually expand from from just text to additional information so that if, for example, you're you're white labeling, so you're publishing to some OEMs that you you manufacture on behalf of, And you can use the same content. And if they don't call their their feature x, they call it y. So that's where variables come in handy. And then to take it one step further, if you have variants of the product, could be hardware, could be software, let's take a hardware example because I've been throwing out lots of software examples. So the back panel may have some additional interfaces that you don't have on some of the other models. So those additional interfaces can be profiled. So when you're publishing for a model that has them, they're included. When you're publishing for a model that doesn't have them, they're excluded. But the description of that back panel is one single topic used across a hundred and fifty different models that you actually manufacture. Absolutely. Thank you for that thorough answer, Gershon. I want to take us into our q and a, and I popped the question up on the screen for just a moment there. But we're starting to get some questions coming in that I think are, pretty interesting here. Well, let's add the first one that I saw, which would be this. And I think the question's a little bit specific to Pligo, but I do think that we can kind of, extrapolate from this some lessons about structured authoring and the benefits from it. So let me ask this to Gershon since it's a Pligo question. Susan asks, as different languages may have different text lengths, I'd like to know when publishing documents in multiple languages, does, you know, ACCMS support automatically adjusting the table columns width according to the text length in different languages. What what would your answer be for that, Gershon? So this is not a this is not a Peligo question. This is actually for all unstructured content, whether you have a CCMS or not. It actually applies. And remember the idea of unstructured content is you remove the format from the content. So once it's being translated with or without a CCMS, preferably with if you're doing translations, life's much easier that way. Less stressful, let me tell you. The translated content is then published using the same style sheets, the same method that you would publish the English. So in terms of table column widths to HTML, the web browser deals with figuring out the column width, you know, fitting the content into the the available space. So, most most web browsers do a good job of that. And, I'll just throw in a a best practice. Do not put specific column widths in your in your source content in the XML because then you very often the web browser, or whatever rendering engine it is, even to PDF, they'll just take those column widths as is and they went to the auto fitting. Right? Mhmm. If you're publishing to PDF, the best rendering engines, that are out there, they do an excellent job of sizing column widths in tables. So if you're going through x through XSLFO to get to your your, PDF, you're gonna have to have a rendering engine like Antenna House or RenderX or one of the many others that are out there. And, the better ones have a have an algorithm for fitting content into table cells. If you're using the freeware FOP, it does nothing to to tables. You get the worst tables from FOP. You you so you you need to actually have use a commercial grade, rendering engine, and you get really, really good results. And the the beauty here is you don't need to faff around, tweaking these things because it works every time. You know, and absolutely if you're going to Spanish or German, you're likely to have more content on the page than you will have in English. Absolutely. It's a very thorough answer. So I think we can even move on to the next question, which I'll pass right to, Sarah. So this question that I see from Andy is about, what are some tips to do a content audit for a successful, as you say, minimum viable content set, as a first step into a CCMS. What are your thoughts on this one, Sarah? We we usually do this as kind of a top down exercise. So and and it's important to note that those of you on the call that work in, you know, a technical writing, information development, whatever organization, you're the experts on your content in your domain. I know a lot about publishing, but I don't know a whole lot specifically about your products. That's that's your job. And so my job is to come in and help you uncover, you know, that knowledge and then marry it up with the knowledge that we have about, you know, technologies and automation and fun stuff like that. So okay. What kind of content do you have? And you're gonna say, we have user guides and admin guides and installation guides and, service manuals and operator manuals, and then we're gonna talk about the audience for each of those. And you sort of, you know, just keep drilling down from there. Oh, we have elearning content. Alright. Well, what kinds of things are in your elearning? Do you have animation? Do you have simulation? Do you have videos? Do you have assessment questions, tests, etcetera. Right? So we have these kinds of deliverables, and then those are composed of these kinds of things, and then you just keep kind of going. So, ultimately, when we start doing a CCMS build or an assessment, then what we're looking for is a set of content that represents your all the variety that you have in your content. You know, we have these types of documents. We have these types of variants. We do, regional content. We're in the US, and we have content variants for each of the fifty states, which is actually pretty common in insurance land. Or we have one version for the US and one for Canada, and, oh, there's a few additional things for Puerto Rico. And, PS, Puerto Rico gets Spanish. Right? Because remember that language and location are not always the same thing. So the minimum viable content set is the smallest possible set that you can get down to that is a reasonable reflection of all the things that are going on in your content so that when you move that into the CCMS and when you start publishing and when you start trying to do, you know, interesting things with tables, you have a representative set that can allow you to test this. Now in our case, because nearly always, there's not such a thing as, one document or one deliverable that represents all the variants. You know, you have your user guides and your installs and your this and your that. We very, very often put together what we call a FrankenBook Mhmm. Which is, you know, a document or a collection of content that has all of these different things in a single deliverable even though, normally, you would never put them all in a single deliverable. So we mix and match all that thing stuff in there so that we can have maybe two or three hundred pages that represent your larger three thousand, thirty thousand, three hundred thousand pages of content. Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned the numbers at the end because I was wondering, like, what percentage of your content should be the the minimum viable content set? Is it, like, five percent of the total, ten percent of the total? But it sounds like it's a fairly small percentage. Does that sound right, Sarah? It's maybe it's ten percent. I don't know that I've yeah. I don't know that I've ever thought about it that way. Maybe it's ten percent, but I also think that the bigger your corpus is, the lower the percentage is gonna be because you just have lots and lots of copies of the same kind of document or I shouldn't say copies. Right? But you have eighteen products, and each of them has a user guide and an install guide and a service guide and this guide and that guide. You're not gonna see a ton of variability within those user guides. But if you have five thousand pages of which five hundred are user guide and five hundred are admin, and, you know, I don't know what the rest is, then it's probably gonna be a much small the the minimum viable content set is going to be a larger percentage of that total. Mhmm. Gershon, are there any, additional tips that you have in mind for making a, successful minimum viable content set? Yeah. One of them that, I've seen used and I have used is if you have good metrics on, how how people use your current content. Now if you're coming from PDF, you probably don't unless you can actually speak to your customers. Sometimes that's the only way to get the information. You know, which parts of which PDF do you use the most? But if you're already delivering online, like if you have if you're using Unstructured to get to online help, for example, which is then also not just in the doc in the application, but also on a website somewhere and you're doing analytics, you can see which topics folks are going to most. And you'll even see which topics nobody has gone to for the last eighteen months, for example. And then what you do is based on the number of hits each topic gets, you then decide to essentially start with the most used. And, again, as analytics, you can understand for yourself and the context at the moment may not be very much, but it's it's guidance. Right? It it's a data point. But very often that's used as a starting point from which you can then decide, okay, if these topics are all getting large hits and these are in an insulate you know, this part of the installation, then this part of installing our product, you know, probably is very interesting to the you know, or at least needed by our user community. So you can start with that. You know, so you can select those things that are are viewed more often. You can actually use that data also even subsequently to identify topics that you may want to revisit and re architect. Why are they being visited so often? Is there improvements you can make in the product, for example? You know, so that is the sort of what I've seen people do. I don't always propose that as a starting point, but very often when I ask them if they have any user any usage data, that's all they have. Right? And again, if they're in, you know, if they're doing print or PDF, then it's it's much more difficult. You need to actually interview people to find out how you know, where's the content that's of interest to them that's of the most interest to them or the most used. Yeah. And then we'll put that in. Great point about how, the most used content by your users might not perhaps be what you expect it is. Yes. So you wanna make sure you can prove your, assumptions based on user metrics. Certainly. I have another question that I wanna add to the stage that looks pretty interesting. Thomas asks, if you're making a business case to a director to invest in ACCMS and upgrade the authoring infrastructure from unstructured to structured. What's the most significant feature you can advise on mentioning to have it make financial sense for a team? I think we've touched a little bit on the benefits of moving to structured content, especially around, you know, we save costs, but maybe we can speak more specifically. What kinds of costs are we saving, thanks to being in a structured CCMS environment? Let me ask Sarah that one first. What are some of the things that you had mentioned in order to make this effort, make financial sense? So there are five there are five levels of things that you can look at in terms of business strategy, and I'm gonna try and recall what they are live on air, which is likely to end very badly for me. However, the first thing I'll say, is that I would be careful about doing this based on on feature set. I think you wanna make a distinction between we need structured content and we need, like, x y z feature, and therefore, we should buy x y z software. Those are kind of two separate decisions. So there's we need structured content, and, also, we think, you know, Poligo is the best fit for our environment because we've done our requirements, and it's the best fit. Okay. So cost avoidance or sorry. Actually, the number one reason is compliance. If you have compliance issues and regulatory issues, super valuable thing. Cost avoidance is the next one. So we talked a little bit about avoiding manual formatting and the cost savings you can see there, especially if you're localizing. And then as you move up the scale, you have things like velocity, time to market. We can deliver faster. We can have a branding advantage because our content is better than our competitors. And there's a fifth one that I'm forgetting, but I'll get you a link. So, basically, I would actually throw this question back to you and say, who is your director? What are their priorities, and what do they care about? And in a, you know, in an honest way, sell them on the initiative that you're trying to do based on their quarterly goals. Right? Is there quarterly goal to cut cost, or is it to cut the localization delay from six months to three months? Right. So we're looking at the goals of our content more so than, what kinds of new features might we be able to add. Gershon We have these goals. And, hey. Look. It has this feature which will. Right? That's a subtle distinction, but I think it's important. For sure. Gershon, is there anything that you're thinking of adding to what Sarah has said? Yeah. I obviously fully agree, to Sarah. I would add, that it depends on another couple of things, for for the team that is asking this question and doing this research. One thing we see very often, during discovery calls and we ask is, what are your challenges? What are your pain points right now? In others, where are you hurting now? Because, you know, if it ain't broke, then then there's nothing to fix. Right? You don't just move to the CCMS from unstructured not to achieve anything. Usually, there are significant pain points that, a CCMS can address. And, I'm gonna throw this in as well because this is very important and we haven't touched on it or at least I don't I assume Sarah didn't touch it earlier when I was, having some issues connecting. And that is very often the tool doesn't solve the problem. It's your internal business processes that need to be fixed first. Sometimes there are two methodologies that need to be changed as well as, the business processes. If you don't change any of those things, no tool in the world can solve your problem. So, you know, firstly, it's very important for us to understand what are your challenges currently? What are your issues? Is it that the customers are complaining that they can't find what they're looking for? Are they, is it something else? Again, you know, translation costs or the time to I've got cases where it just takes too long to actually deliver the content, you know, if they're in unstructured and it takes them a month to get content out, you know, that could be the challenge. So firstly, it depends on what are your current challenges. And then the second question I always ask is what's your vision? What's your goal? What's your end point? Because very often the company hasn't really thought that through. And then what I do is I help them by explaining the art of the possible. You know, I talk to content delivery platforms. I talk to more sophisticated search engines. You know, once I've gotten some feedback from them so they can realize at least, you know, in the future at some point in time, oh, maybe we can go, you know, we can deliver we can have all these cool things in a personalized content, for example. So every user based on the their subscription gets to see what they subscribe to in some cases, which they don't do today. Today, it's one size fits all. Right? So firstly, understand what your challenges are right now. Then figure out what's your vision. You know, what's what what we call in in the industry, what's your target state? And those things are going to generate a whole bunch of requirements. If you're generating requirements without those two things, your requirements are likely to be wrong anyway, or less useful than they than they could be, if I can put it more more politely. And then, usually, it's an easy sell because if you got pain points and the CCMS is solving the pain points, you wanna put dollars to the pain points. Right? So, for example, if you if it's taking you six months and your translations by the way, I see this often. In unstructured content, the translators love translating unstructured content because they charge you for the the desktop for the GTP, desktop publishing, the formatting of those longer lines, those longer sentences. So they actually go and reformat the word before they make a PDF, for example. And they charge you a lot for that. It's easy work and they get you know, it's it's really nice that you if you're not taking that DTP cost of the translation out just by going to structured authoring, sometimes that's all you need. I've had projects where after the first translation they've received, they've achieved return on investment of I was a consultant, an external consultant. So three months of consultancy at the rate that we were charging. The price of the CCMS, and it was a high end enterprise CCMS, much more expensive than Paligo. And, the time that they spent and the time that they that their translators spent realigning the the translation memory. They achieved ROI on the first translation within four months. We had told them that they'll see ROI between twelve and eighteen months. After four months, they got ROI. That's really great. No. Yeah. That that's a great example. Thanks for sharing that. We've got, let's say, roughly five minutes left. So I wanna throw this perhaps last question onto the stage. Something that is asking about something specific, I suppose, to their situation, but we can talk about how structured authoring, helps such a situation as this. So Thomas asks, how can documents with lots of annotated images be made more efficient with structured documentation? Sarah, what are your thoughts when you see the words lots of annotated images? How can we make that more efficient? Alright. So, first of all, I'm gonna assume that what we're talking about is an image, maybe a screenshot, or maybe a photo of a piece of hardware that has a bunch of lines with a bunch of text. Like, this is the on off button, and this is the breaking whatever and, you know, all these little labels that are on there. Those present actually, never mind structured documentation, they present a huge localization challenge because all of that text is sitting on the image. And so when you send that image for localization, if you did the best practice, which I promise you didn't. Right? But you have the image and you have a layer with all the text in it. Then what you can do is create another layer for each language and swap out the text that needs to be in those layers. And then when you go to render your, you know, Japanese version, you turn off all the layers except for the image and the Japanese layer, and you smoosh it down, which is a technical term, and generate a PNG or whatever it is you need and then include that in your docs. The canonical solution to this for localization purposes is that you take the text off the image. And instead of having text on the image, you have a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And then under the image, you put one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and you put the text of each label. What that does for you is it means that the image probably doesn't have to be localized unless the image itself. Right? You're looking at the software, and the software is translated, which we'll set that aside for a minute. But the image itself now just has numbers on it and lines and the actual photo, so that's reusable. And the legend, which is now in your text, is much, much easier to translate because it's going to go through the regular translation process with all of your other text. So, that's the translation based solution. That actually has not a whole lot to do with the question of structured documentation. Right? Because you can use that workflow in an unstructured environment. Makes sense. Gershon, is there anything you would wanna add to Sarah's answer? No. That was my answer. Perfect. Perfect. Alright. So let's add our final question that we have to the stage here. Camille is asking, how would you handle customers that need restricted access or yeah. They need restrictions to their access of different chapters of your documentation and how to make this access management low maintenance for technical writers. I think I have maybe a few ideas how this might be done, but I'm curious to ask Gershon, how can we take advantage of structured authoring and perhaps the metadata that it allows us to add to our content so that we can, achieve a use case like this? Leading the witness. Yeah. So, on the authoring side, once you're instructed authoring, you can, for example, within Poligo, there's an audience tag and an audience attribute to use, proper XML terminology. And you can assign that, to different customers. There are other attributes as well. So region, country, products. So you can actually combine those if you need to. You can, we integrate that with our taxonomy. So you can think of it as a taxonomy based or taxonomy driven, thing. Now that's all inside Caligo or whatever CCMS you're using. Right? XML based CCMS, let's say, to be clear. And then, the other half of the of the equation is the platform to which you are publishing. Now you can build that yourself and have all of the features you need. So based on the taxonomies that we publish, that we're including in the output, you can then have access control driven. Again, you could build that experience or that portal yourself. What I would recommend is, to use a, content delivery platform. Mhmm. And we integrate with some. So Peligo integrates with Zoom In and Fluid Topics, for example. We have direct integrations with them. So you, but even if you're using some other CDP, you can just publish and then upload that zip file to them. Again, they're gonna get all of that taxonomy, and then they are built to to sort of manage this type of personalized or, you know, access controlled, access. And, again, it's not you know? So you can make this as sophisticated as you want. So you can even integrate the the CDP with your system that kinda controls your licensing or a copy of your system that controls the licensing. So you can see, okay, Gershon has access to these three features. I'll let him see that. Sarah has access to one of those features and two others, and I'll give her access to that. So you can do that on the fly, or it can be every now and then you just sync them. Right? So there are lots of, I would say, possible, technical solutions to this. But the the the sort of good piece for the technical writers is your side in in applying those attributes is relatively straightforward. Once you understand what you need to do, you just do it on every topic that you're that you're writing. And then the magic happens on the technology side. Mhmm. That that relates to my experience as well. Sarah, is there anything that you would wanna add to, the answer Gershon provided? No. He's he's a hundred percent right. I'll just say that if what we're talking about is an issue around export controls, you have to be quite careful with this and add some more checks and balances in. But, otherwise, a hundred percent agree. Awesome. So we've got one more question, and I'll add that to the stage now. This one sounds, I guess, about, a Pligo question. Can Pligo send notifications to other users whenever the content of a topic or publication changes and whenever the status of a topic or publication changes to release. I suppose I should ask this question of Gershon, who could probably tell us about Pligo specifically. What do you think, Gershon? Can Pligo do this? We can definitely do it via the APIs. I think this is a this is a request that we've seen from one or two customers recently or maybe not so recently. You do see who's done what or, via the the activity feed that we've got, on the dashboard. So we do have the information available. In terms of sort of pushing that information out to folks, I'd have to I'd have to go and research if, if we have that as something that we can configure. I'm not aware of that. So we can get back to you, Andre, via via email after the after we've done some homework. For sure. Alright. So that is the remainder of the questions that we had. Here we go. Yeah. I was frozen for a second. Glad I'm back. It looks like, Sarah may have dropped off, but that's all good because we're towards the end of the hour here. So for those of us who are in the audience who have made it all the way to the end, our heartfelt thanks for joining us. Thanks for sticking through all the little, technical quibbles and everything. We appreciate it, and we appreciate your questions. And we wanna continue the conversation with you. So if you need help with your content strategy, please visit scriptorium dot com. Please get in contact with Sarah. And if you're interested in learning more about Poligo or about a component content management system and whether that's right for you and what that would look like in your use case, please go ahead and visit poligo dot net, and you can reach out to us. And we're absolutely happy to talk to you about that. Well, thank you everybody so much. I think we're gonna conclude it here. As stated before, this is recorded, and we'll send the recording out to everyone who is registered. Thanks so much, and, have a great rest of your day, everyone.