Announcing 2.0 Release of XML Documentation Add-On for Adobe Experience Manager

When we released XML Documentation Add-On for Adobe Experience Manager last year, we started with the vision of creating a One Adobe Solution for Technical Content. It was a culmination of hard work put in by our product team and intensive communication with our customers.

Today, I am delighted to share that we are releasing version 2.0 of XML Documentation Add-On for Adobe Experience Manager. This is a huge milestone for us, not only because it takes the product to the next level of maturity, but also because it addresses some of the most common asks by our customers.

In this Blog Post

Baseline Publishing

The screenshot shows the Baseline Publishing feature of the XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager

Enterprises have demanding technical documentation needs, especially when it comes to publishing the content for end users. At times, there is a need to publish an older version of the technical documentation for fixing errata or for other product-specific reasons. Audit compliance might also require the ability to publish older documentation versions at any given time. Thus, publishers want the ability to pick and choose the versions for all individual topics and assets of the publication.

The Baseline Publishing feature, introduced in this release, provides this capability in an intuitive interface. In addition to choosing the file versions for all directly referenced files in the publication, it also allows choosing versions for all indirectly referenced DITA content and assets. It provides various autofill options, thereby minimizing the amount of work required.

DITA Map Collections

The screenshot shows the DITA Map Collection feature of XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe's DITA CCMS

Enterprises also need to frequently publish large volumes of content. This can be quite a tedious task and needs regular monitoring. The 2.0 release provides a simple and logical way to organize publishing tasks in a single place with the help of Map Collections. These collections allow you to create groups of ditamaps, efficiently organized by the various formats and locales that you might need to publish them in. You can start batch publishing tasks and monitor their progress from a single dashboard.

Automating post-generation tasks

The screenshot shows the Post Generation Workflow feature of the XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager

There is often a need to carry out some automated tasks on generated output before you push it to your website or end users for consumption. This could range from applying metadata on the output, to triggering email notifications to reviewers, to pushing the generated output to an external server. All these tasks can be initiated automatically via workflows which are launched as soon as the output generation is complete.

Customizable Web Editing Interface

The screenshot shows the DITA Web Editor of the XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager

Collaborative content creation is common these days and it is critical to make this process efficient for a timely delivery. Subject Matter Experts & Casual Contributors need to contribute content in ways which don’t require them to know the complexities of DITA. That has been a major driver for the web-based DITA topic editor which provides an easy-to-use WYSIWIG interface.

In this release, we make the web editor customizable by allowing you to add custom widgets to the toolbar. These widgets make it easy for Casual Contributors to add new content in correct structure without writing a single XML tag. Templates can be configured for various DITA elements and custom widgets, that can guide Subject Matter Experts when contributing content.

Web-based Inline Review & Annotation

The screenshot shows the Inline Review feature of the XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager

A critical part of collaboration is being able to review and provide detailed feedback to authors. This release provides web-based inline review and annotation capability which allows multiple reviewers to provide feedback concurrently. The reviewers can easily annotate, insert or delete content. Other reviewers can see comments in real time, and respond to and vote on the comments, enabling a highly collaborative environment.

The authors, on the other hand, can easily accept and reject changes, allowing them to work through the feedback quickly. The changes, when accepted, get incorporated into the document automatically.

The feature enables an iterative review cycle, where the reviewers can see the document evolve in relation to their feedback. They can easily view the differences between two versions of the document as part of the review process, allowing them to easily track how their feedback has been incorporated.

View Incoming and Outgoing References

The screenshot shows the incoming, outgoing and broken references of a topic (dependecy management) in the XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager

Content Reuse is one of the greatest benefits of using DITA. However, when modifying a referenced topic, one has to be very careful of the various contexts it has been used in. It is also good to view all content referenced within a topic, especially any references which might be broken/missing.

In XML Documentation Add-on 2.0, you can no view incoming, outgoing and broken references of a topic from its properties page. These references are clickable to allow you to easily navigate between them.

Other Enhancements

In addition to these, we have added several other features:

As you can see, we have worked tirelessly over the last year to reach this important milestone. It is only our commitment towards creating an outstanding experience for our customers, which keeps us going. We look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions.

If you are interested in a personal demo of the product or understand how it can benefit your organization, you can reach out to us at techcomm@adobe.com.