Adobe & Medidata Solutions Worldwide – Accelerated Workflow to Deliver One Voice with Adobe Technical Communication Suite

To help empower clinical researchers to bring new drugs to market sooner, Medidata Solutions Worldwide – a leading provider of cloud-based clinical solutions – strives to offer its customers easy, immediate access to rich product and training information. To support this goal, the company standardized on Adobe Technical Communication Suite. The result: its dispersed knowledge management team can collaborate and effectively reuse content to create eLearning courses, online help systems, show-me videos, lengthy training manuals, and other valuable content that is available across devices.

“After years of using various Adobe products for one-off tasks, we determined we needed a more integrated approach,” says Nitza Hauser, director of technical communication services at Medidata. “Turning to the Adobe Technical Communication Suite has greatly helped support the work of our large cadre of writers and instructional designers who have a shared goal of collaboratively publishing comprehensive, customizable, and high-quality training and support materials that deliver excellent experiences to the global scientific community.”

“Single sourcing with Adobe FrameMaker has enabled us to collaborate on projects in parallel, rather than in linear workflows, and helps efficiently ensure that all our materials are written in one voice.”

Gwen Tanner, Manager of knowledge development, Medidata

The company originally used Adobe RoboHelp to create online help systems, both Adobe FrameMaker and Microsoft Word to author manuals, Adobe Captivate to record simulations, and Adobe Soundbooth to edit audio. Multiple types of content needed to be available for localization and output across many formats and channels, including mobile. After moving to Adobe Technical Communication Suite, the firm’s entire knowledge management department became unified within a single authoring, editing, and production environment.

All authoring is now done collaboratively using FrameMaker. In one click, FrameMaker files can be converted into Adobe PDF files, which are used in review and approval cycles and then published as online help systems using RoboHelp as well as PDF manuals. Short show-me video content created in Adobe Captivate and output as SWF files are incorporated into the online help systems built with RoboHelp from the FrameMaker source files. Additionally, content is repurposed into training materials and integrated into the company’s learning management system (LMS).

For the inventive, global company, the adoption of Adobe Technical Communication Suite is providing tremendous returns, especially as the Medidata team collaborates to localize more than 60 eLearning courses for countries worldwide, including Japan, Korea, and China. With the Adobe software, Medidata is improving collaboration across teams, reducing redundancies, and speeding delivery of high-quality content across media.

To download the complete case study, click here: Adobe & Medidata Solutions Worldwide