XML Documentation Add-On for Adobe Experience Manager 1.1 released
Thank you for an amazing response to the XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe’s DITA CCMS. After a mammoth initial release, this release keeps the momentum going by delivering several high-impact features in web authoring, content management and output generation.
One of the main drivers for the solution has been to provide a seamless publishing mechanism for technical content to Adobe Experience Manager. We continue with this endeavor in the 1.1 release, by providing a new way of integrating technical and marketing content on Adobe Experience Manager, called Blended Publishing.
In this Blog Post
- Introducing: Blended Publishing
- Extended DITA Open Toolkit Support
- Support for Adobe Experience Manager 6.2
- DITA Authoring and Management
- Support for Unstructured Adobe FrameMaker
- Other Enhancements
Introducing: Blended Publishing
Blended publishing is the ability to publish DITA content within an existing Adobe Experience Manager Site. So, let’s say that you have an existing page and you want to pull content, authored in DITA, into some blocks on that page. Earlier, you would duplicate that content and put it manually in your Adobe Experience Manager site. Now, you can directly publish the DITA topic right into to the relevant components on the website. This allows you to mix marketing and technical content on the same page and enables greater content reuse. It also provides a more consistent and relevant content to your end-users in an easy-to-consume way.
Blended Publishing is connecting the dots between marketing and technical communication content. With XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager marketing content blends seamlessly with technical communication content, blurring the lines between traditional pre and post sales communication into one unified customer journey.
Extended DITA Open Toolkit Support
Release 1.1. also comes with big improvements for output generation. Support for DITA Open Toolkit has been greatly extended.
- Generate outputs in any custom format – Out-of-the-box support for generating outputs in custom formats using DITA Open Toolkit.
- Support for all DITA Open Toolkit versions – You can use any version of DITA-OT with the Add-On, and are not restricted to the DITA-OT version that ships with the product. Of course, we will support any custom DITA-OT transformations you might have built, as well.
Support for Adobe Experience Manager 6.2
This release adds support for Adobe Experience Manager 6.2. So, now you can get native DITA support on both Adobe Experience Manager 6.1 and Adobe Experience Manager 6.2.
DITA Authoring and Management
The web-based DITA authoring experience has been made more robust and user-friendly. The topic editor can be used to create new DITA topics. It comes with four default authoring templates, but you can easily create new templates as well.
The web-based map editor has been enhanced with improved key management, relationship table editing and XML source code editing.
Support for Unstructured Adobe FrameMaker
Migrating to DITA can be a complex process. Very often it is required to break up the process into phases. By migrating the critical or more widely used content first, you can immediately start reaping the benefits that DITA brings like content reuse, reducing localization costs, etc., while keeping the remaining content in FrameMaker. But, that can be challenging as you have to maintain two different systems to manage the FrameMaker and DITA content.
This release adds support for unstructured FrameMaker documents and books as well. This will allow you to manage both FM and DITA content on the same content management system in the intermediate term. Books containing unstructured FM and DITA content can be published to popular formats like PDF, EPUB, HTML5, etc. You can also publish individual FrameMaker documents to these formats. This will ease the migration process while also reducing the costs involved.
Other Enhancements
Besides these, we have made several improvements in performance and troubleshooting.
Automatic Link Management capability has been enhanced to handle moving/renaming files and folders, and translation.
One of the cool things about DITA is the ability to reuse content in several ways like content references, cross-references, href, keyref, etc. But that also brings the challenge of maintaining these links and references when you move/rename the content. XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager 1.1 takes care of this by automatically adjusting all forward and backward references to any content which is moved or renamed. Moreover, if the content has links which have a language code embedded in them, then those are also automatically adjusted during the translation process.
So, that’s the release in a nutshell. It packs quite a punch! We look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions. If you are interested in a personal demo of the product or understand how it will work in your organization, you can reach out to us at techcomm@adobe.com.