[Adobe Customer Story] How Ciena creates technical content for every need and preference
Some of the world’s largest data and communications network providers rely on technologies from Ciena to move the massive amounts of packet traffic that power the connected world. Ciena helps support their success with user documentation including user guides, installation guides, and quick start guides using Adobe Technical Communication Solutions. This new Adobe Customer Story gives insights into how Ciena makes Technical Communication a success.
Increasingly diverse audiences want to access content according to their needs and preferences for web, mobile, desktop, and print materials. When customers said they wanted more ways to access Ciena’s resources, the company sought a solution that could improve the availability, navigability, and usability of its more than 25,000 pages of technical content.
Using a single source of unstructured content, Ciena’s document team could lose a full day per 200-page manual fixing formatting errors. These issues don’t arise now that we’re authoring in DITA with the new release of Adobe FrameMaker.
Susanna Carlisi, Content Strategist & Tools Specialist, Ciena
The new release of Adobe FrameMaker enables Ciena to deliver complete libraries of detailed product information or concise, customized documents that focus on a specific task or issue without having to re-create content. Implementing topic-based DITA authoring with FrameMaker also lets Ciena transition to XML publishing without requiring an expensive custom XML infrastructure.
“Customer research showed that we need to create a wider variety of content in multiple output formats,” says Susanna Carlisi, Content Strategist & Tools Specialist, Ciena. “We’re creating multiple formats for our documentation using our existing content by transitioning to the latest version of Adobe FrameMaker for DITA authoring.”
Initially, Ciena plans to leverage existing content and convert it from unstructured to structured FrameMaker with DITA, and then add strategic DITA elements, such as the short description, and metadata. Ultimately, Ciena plans to leverage content reuse, including a component content management system (CCMS).
The full Adobe Customer Story with Ciena is available as a PDF for download here.