One challenge when working with technical information is that publications can be very large. Several hundred pages is not unusual and in some cases over a thousand pages are necessary to describe complex service procedures and part catalogs.
Authoring and assembling large books can be a painful process as the sheer size can be taxing to software. XML, DITA, and managing content objects do ease the pain, it is what industrial strength publishing software is designed to do. However, there is only so much information the average workstation can process.

Many creative solutions have been implemented to meet unique business requirements for book assembly. The business requirements and data sources vary from company to company, such as selecting lessons individually to create a complete custom course; or selecting individual part list and image pairs to create a complete part catalog. As an application expert, I have personally coded many custom solutions to support cobbling books together over the years and I know that many other equally creative solutions exist.

PTC’s Service Information Manager adds three advanced capabilities to the XML authoring and content management system:

1. Translation Management
2. Part List Generation
3. Publication Structures

Publication Structures are the least sexy of the three and the one that truly revolutionizes the book assembly process. Publication Structures are used to assemble information objects that are to be published. Essentially each Publication Structure represents a book. You can add a table of contents, a parts list, or any other XML content object or images to the book right in the Windchill SIM web browser user interface.

Without Publication Structures, books are typically assembled manually in Arbortext Editor. Someone would still have to assemble the book manually in a Publication Structure, but the user experience is very different. To get a sense of this, in Arbortext Editor, if a writer wants to move a chapter to a different location, they would edit the document, select content, cut it, move to the new location, and then paste. In a Publication Structure, the user can drag and drop chapter or section objects in the structure without ever opening the book to edit it.

Publication Structures provide an out-of-the-box method of assembling publications for the technical documentation community without customizing. As a result, organizations are able to greatly improve the process of information delivery and are able to leverage dynamic publishing capabilities to bring products to market faster, and keep customers better informed.

Learn More

Refer to PTC’s web site for a complete description of Service Information Manager.

EAC information solution experts have decades of reliable XML solution experience. Explore the EAC website to learn more about our products and services or review the Product Development Information Services Brochure.

In the last few weeks I’ve discussed the benefits and costs of customization. This week I will review deciding whether to customize or not. If you missed these posts, you can read them here:

• Part 1: The Benefits of Customizing PTC Arbortext
• Part 2: The Cost of Customizing PTC Arbortext

So how can you weigh the benefits against the costs of customizing? If we examine the criteria outlined above, a general pattern emerges, which provides the key insight in making this decision:

Benefits mainly go to end users, and costs mainly go to developers and administrators.

Installations with large user bases, where the value of customizations can be maximized, are good candidates for customization. Also, organizations that have dedicated staff for maintaining the Arbortext system will have an easier time managing customized installations than organizations where maintenance and development is a part-time task for staff with other responsibilities.

In organizations that have a small number of users, it will be difficult to realize enough value in customizations to make it worth the expense of implementing them. In these instances, it makes sense to stick with a mostly out-of-the-box installation using a standard doctype like DITA or DocBook, possibly with some stylesheet adjustments to get the desired output appearance.

Consider standard features first.

With all software, you can get the most value from your investment if you maximize the use of its standard features. If you are new to the software or perhaps not leveraging everything the software offers, you should explore the best practices and benefits first to determine if customization is truly needed. With Arbortext, PTC recommends an implementation approach called “Value-ready Deployment” which leverages the value of Arbortext using standard features and recommended best practices to maximize the value to each customer before any customizations are made.

Also consider prepackaged add-ons.

EAC offers several prepackaged add-ons which add capabilities to the Arbortext platform at a lower cost than a customization. One of our add-ons is EAC QuickPubs.

QuickPubs allows users to create aesthetically pleasing Operator Guides, Service Manuals, and Parts Catalogs quickly while providing an easy way to style documents that fit your brand. If you decide to investigate customizing Arbortext for your environment, EAC can help you explore your options with a variety of prepackaged add-ons, training, and implementation services.

Transform the way you design and publish product information through QuickPubs, an EAC product for PTC Arbortext. For more information about QuickPubs, you can download the brochure here. Publish faster, cheaper, and better today!

In my last post, ‘The Benefits of Customization,’ I told you I would review the cost of customization in my next post. If you missed it, you can find it here:

• Part 1: The Benefits of Customizing PTC Arbortext

Of course, the benefits of customization don’t come without some associated costs. Here are some examples of the cost of customizing PTC Arbortext:

Development Costs

The most obvious cost is the cost of initially developing and testing the customization code. This will vary based on how extensive the customizations are. Also, don’t forget to keep maintenance costs in mind. Bug fixing, adding new features, and adapting customizations to changing requirements all require additional investment.

Version Lock-In

When you develop customizations, you generally work with a specific version of Arbortext. Depending on how extensive the customizations are, there is a chance that some part of the customization will break when you upgrade your Arbortext software to a new release version. In that case, you have two choices: either spend the resources to update the customization for the new Arbortext version, or commit to remaining with an out-of-date version of Arbortext to keep your customizations running.

Proprietary User Skills

With customization, you will need to take user training into account. For new features that don’t come out-of-the-box, you will have to develop your own training and support materials, and make sure your end users are up to speed on how to use the new features. In addition to the direct costs, this can also make recruiting new staff more challenging. There is a lot of DITA expertise in the marketplace, which you can leverage if you are using standard DITA. But if you are using a custom doctype and customized Arbortext Editor interface, you may not be able to get the same advantage from potential employees’ previous experience with XML editing or with Arbortext.

 Technical Support Complications

PTC’s tech support staff know the base products quite well, and can help troubleshoot problems with out-of-the-box installations pretty quickly. However, with a heavily customized environment, troubleshooting can be more challenging, for PTC tech support as well as for yourself. In some cases, it may take extra time to determine whether a problem is due to a bug in the base Arbortext software, or something wrong with your customization code, or some kind of interaction between the two. In some cases, PTC’s advice for resolving the problem may boil down to “remove the customization.”

EAC has created a tool to help eliminate some of these costs allowing you to publish faster, cheaper, and better. QuickPubs is an EAC product for PTC Arbortext that removes the cost of development and provides a user-friendly interface.

While Arbortext comes with some publishing capabilities right out of the box, most users will acknowledge that they often need to customize the document stylesheets to meet their publishing standards. Customizing the stylesheets isn’t difficult, but it often requires prior training or hiring someone with the appropriate skilled and experience, both of which have an impact to turnaround time and cost. EAC has packaged attractive stylesheets for Operator Guides, Service Manuals, and Part Catalogs into QuickPubs so you can publish manuals that look as good as your products from day one. Should you need to modify the document stylesheet, QuickPubs also offers an easy interface to customize the style layout and formatting with a few clicks.

Stay tuned for the next post where I will discuss things to consider when deciding to customize or not.

If you would like to learn more about EAC QuickPubs and how you can publish faster, cheaper, and better, download the brochure here!

This is part one of a three part series regarding PTC Arbortext, deciding whether to customize or not. In this series, we will discuss the benefits of customization, the costs of customization, and deciding whether to customize or not.

You’ll often hear of DITA in the technical documentation world. DITA stands for ‘Darwin Information Typing Architecture’ -it’s an XML-based open standard for structuring, developing, managing, and publishing content. Quite the mouthful huh? What you need to know about DITA is that it leverages XML to be used as a way of writing and storing your data so you can manage it like an asset. What does it have to do with PTC’s Arbortext? PTC was the first company to ever deliver a complete DITA solution – one where organizations can finally start to maximize their investment in service lifecycle management.

One of the most fundamental questions you have to face when considering an Arbortext implementation is whether to use the technical documentation software out of the box or develop customizations to adapt the software to your specific use cases and work processes.

In practice, this is not so much of an either/or decision, as a how-much decision. In other words, nearly every implementation has some amount of customization, even if it’s just tweaking a composition stylesheet to add your own appearance specifications to the composed output. For some applications, where one of the standard doctypes such as DITA or DocBook is adequate, that’s all you need. For other applications, you may want to add custom features, user interface elements such as toolbars and custom dialogs, a tailored doctype or schema to support specific data requirements, connections to other enterprise systems such as ERP systems, and so on.

Adapting Arbortext software to your specific business environment can provide a number of advantages. Here are some examples where customization can add value to your implementation:

Author Efficiency

Custom features and user interface controls allow the author to work more efficiently.

Example: if authors frequently need to change one type of element into another similar element, then adding a toolbar button and/or keyboard shortcut to trigger the operation can let authors do it with a single click or key press, as opposed to using the Change Markup dialog.

Workflow Integration

Custom integration with software can streamline processes in the workflow.

Example: Suppose you have part data stored in an ERP system, and you are writing support documents associated with the part data. In a stock Arbortext installation, you might need to export the part data as an Excel spreadsheet, and then copy portions of the exported data in Excel to paste into the XML document in Arbortext. In contrast, a customization could allow authors to click a toolbar button, make a few quick selections in a dialog box, and automatically extract, format, and insert the part data in the correct location in the document.

New Capabilities

Customizations allow you to add new features to Arbortext Editor.

Example: Suppose you have a metric that you want to track on your documents that depends on the number of specific elements in each document, such as graphic elements. You can easily add a feature that would count instances of a specific element and report that for a document. You could also generate a report for a set of documents found in a directory tree or a folder in a content management system (CMS). This would let authors get this information directly within Arbortext Editor, without having to switch to an external tool to do the analysis/reporting.

This publishing engine software can be customized in a number of ways, and frequently we see users customizing their stylesheets to make them look better or compliant with their publishing standards. Arbortext stylesheets are used to publish documents that have consistent styling and formatting, no matter who authored the document. Sometimes these stylesheet customizations can be significant and complex, but often we see a need to make simple modifications to the fonts, logos, and page margins. EAC QuickPubs provides users an easy way to make those simple style modifications and create great looking documents.

Stay tuned for the next post where we discuss the cost of customization.

If you’re looking for ways to adapt your environment to fit your organizations needs, EAC QuickPubs may be for you. It’s an add-on designed to style documents that fit your organizations brand at a lower cost than a customization to PTC Arbortext. You can create aesthetically pleasing part manuals, owner’s guides, service manuals and more with ease. Publish fast, cheaper, and better today!

Transform the way you design and publish product information through QuickPubs, an EAC product for PTC Arbortext. For more information about QuickPubs contact us. Publish faster, cheaper, and better today!

Creating Ideal Translation Workflows for Optimum Results 

In Part Two of this post on coupling products for translation, we’ll discuss the specific steps that are required to implement complete translation projects – from managing technical content objects to managing costs and file collaboration. Refer to Part One for the overall solution design which shows the strengths of PTC’s Translation Manager, Windchill ProjectLink, workflow, reporting, and multi-lingual publishing and how they can be leveraged for translation.

The Process 

There are six process components to the overall translation solution. The process starts and ends with PTC’s Translation Manager. Windchill ProjectLink is nested in the middle of the process to facilitate the business project, cost collaboration, and file transfers with Translation Service Providers.

Step 1. Designate Objects for Translation 

The first step of the process begins with source content that is ready for translation to the target language(s). The content is stored in Product or Library folders in Windchill/Arbortext Content Manager. Here the project owner identifies complete document structures or document objects to be translated. A translation work package is created for the objects. The Translation Service Provider and target language(s) are designated with the creation of the translation package. Languages and Translation Service Providers are configurable.

At the completion of this step, the content is prepared for translation. It results with a collection of XML objects to be translated in a zip file. The source objects are set to the In Translation lifecycle state and the source content continues to be managed in relation to other content and states.

Step 2. Create Translation Project 

In the second step, ProjectLink is used to create a translation project that contains any business-related activity required for traceability. This activity includes deadlines and due dates, assign internal resources to the project, and expose the project to Translation Service Provider(s) or other external users outside your firewall. Any cost information, such as Requests for Quote and quotations received can also be stored under the project.

To start, the translation zip package is posted to the project. From here, the package is available for workflow and lifecycle activities as well as for collaboration with Translation Service Providers. If a process for approving translation costs is required, the cost approval workflow would be executed on the translation package stored in the project. Providers will be able to see the source content in order to estimate the level of effort and designated project participants can see cost approved or not approved activity.

Step 3. Route Objects for Translation 

This step in the workflow is for actual translation activities. Here Translation Service Providers can:

1. Checkout and Download the package when it is ready to translate and
2. Checkin and Upload the package when the work is complete.

This activity makes use of the translation package on ProjectLink so that collaboration with users outside your firewall can work on the project. The user interface is self-serving and provides traceability out-of-the-box. The zipped file is automatically iterated and historical versions are maintained on checkin so that everyone on the project is aware of the project status. Users can schedule alerts to immediately know when a critical threshold is reached. Therefore having the lifecycle states in ProjectLink enables real-time reporting on activities to show key performance indicators. Is the project on time? On budget?

Step 4. Route Translated Collateral for Approval 

The approval workflow activity in step four supports reviewing translated content delivered by the Translation Service Provider. Reviews may be performed by local native language review teams or it may include users that have other roles on the project. This activity uses the translation package on ProjectLink so that collaboration for users inside or outside of your firewall can continue to work on the translation. As a result of this workflow, updates can be made either by the Translation Service Provider or by home team members.

Once the translation is approved, the translation project can be concluded and all ProjectLink activities closed. Even so, an organization may still elect to store invoices and final cost information in the project for matrix reporting and future planning purposes.

Step 5. Store Objects in Translation Library 

After objects are translated, the final translation zip package is returned to the Translation Library where XML objects and images are stored. Here the translated target objects are bound to specific revisions and iterations of source objects for each language. For clarity on object status, objects are marked “Translated” or “Translated, Ready for Publish”.

When the objects are returned to Windchill/Arbortext Content Manager they can be published, updated, and iterated just like any other object. This is important since changes may be necessary to:

1. validate the markup;
2. facilitate aesthetics for publishing;
3. change product names, service marks or other marketing decisions;
4. change dates or other metadata.

Step 6. Route Assembled PDF Document for Approval 

In an environment with shared document components, status checks are necessary to verify that all objects included in the document are ready for publishing. This is a key element of the process since some objects may be In Translation, others may be at earlier iterations with no recent updates, or they could be universal images that require no translation. When all objects in the translated document are Ready for Publish, the published document is created, and routed for review and approval. This may be the first time that a translated document is being reviewed as a whole, thus it may be the first time that all content is reviewed relative to the content around it. At this point, it is expected that any changes made during this stage would be made by the home team for content stored securely behind the firewall.

The document review and approval process should be the same as your usual published document review process with different resources for languages. Documents can contain a single language or there may be multiple languages per document depending on the style guidelines for your organization.

Summary

For anyone that has been involved in the translation process, you can likely sympathize on how complex and challenging the tasks can be. By putting ProjectLink to work in your translation process, it does not have to be the case. With PTC’s Translation Manager and Windchill ProjectLink, workflow activities can be more transparent, helping to streamline the translation process across all documents and languages that need to be managed. If you have questions about how ProjectLink, Translation Manager, or multi-lingual publishing solutions can be integrated into your organization, be sure to contact the EAC Product Development team from the links below.

Learn More

Be sure to read Part One of this post to learn more about the solutions being deployed in the workflow being described.

Why Translation Workflows Matter

For companies who require product documentation to be localized for regional use, the sheer number of translated objects makes translation management very important to the business and organization as a whole. Suppose, for the purpose of simple math, that you are translating to 9 languages. One source language plus 9 target languages is 10 languages total. That means up to 90% of the content you are managing is translated. 10% of those objects could be global images that do not require translation, which would drop managed translated content to 80%. In global companies, it is fair to say that a large majority of the content you are responsible for is translated.

One might think that the translation process would simply involve handing off copies of documents to translation teams and then waiting a few days/weeks for the local language versions to arrive, but in reality this process is much more complex. Even when the material is developed in a sophisticated technical documentation tool like PTC Arbortext, it remains necessary to closely administer this activity to avoid risks associated with mandates that vary in different geographies, inefficient file tracking, incomplete reviews, and delays throughout the translation lifecycle.

This is the first of a two part series that discusses how to optimize translation processes by coupling two complementary tools, PTC Translation Manager and PTC ProjectLink. By combining these tools, organizations can overcome several obstacles that either slow workflow processes or increase costs during the translation of technical documentation. Part one outlines these tools and the processes they are designed to address. Part two details how more efficient translation workflows can be arranged in order to expand past administering translated XML objects, to include management of peripheral translation activities such as cost quotations, file sharing, collaboration with translation service providers, and quality assurance processes.

PTC’s Translation Manager

Translation Manager is a component of the PTC Windchill Service Information Manager. The Translation Manager prepares content for translation by identifying document components to be translated, creating work packages for translation or translation service providers, and setting the InTranslation lifecycle state. Key features include:

• Automate the creation of translation packages using workflows
• Restrict creation of translation packages to authorized translation users
• Generate a translation package from a Publication Structure or an Information Structure or
• include select document objects by assigning the proper translation attribute and life cycle state
• Automatically associate translated dynamic documents with their source objects
• Identify whether a translation exists for a source document or not
• Bind specific revisions and iterations of source objects to translated target objects
• Publish translated dynamic document structures.

Post-translation, the Translation Manager stores content by linking translated objects to source document objects in the translation library and sets the Translated lifecycle state.

Windchill ProjectLink

ProjectLink enables defining and executing project plans as well as associating project tasks with product deliverables. Through a self-administered virtual workspace, ProjectLink provides project management capabilities and access to accurate product information for resources inside or outside of your firewall.

In this solution, Windchill ProjectLink is featured to facilitate translation tasks outside your organization.

Windchill Workflow and Reporting Features

Workflow and Reporting are core features of the PTC product suite and are available in all Windchill-based products including Arbortext Content Manager, Service Information Manager,  and ProjectLink.

Workflow

Windchill Review and Approval Processes are used to automatically set the state of objects to the target lifecycle state and invite a list of Reviewers to provide comments.

Reporting

Windchill offers multiple tools to help decision-makers easily visualize trends, patterns and relationships using graphical and drill-down reports of key performance indicators. Simple and easy-to-use reporting and charting tools enable users to configure and save reports.

Publishing

PTC Arbortext Publishing Engine is a server-based system that assembles XML content and automatically publishes the content in both print and electronic forms, all with high-quality layout and formatting.

Stylesheets

Predefined stylesheets are used for layout and page composition. There can be different formatting options based on the language attribute assigned in the XML file.

XLIFF for Generated Text

Text that is generated by the stylesheet is translated once and stored for future use in an independent file. For example, text like the word “Table” is not translated with content. This is supported using XLIFF technologies. XLIFF is the XML Localization Interchange File Format which is used to store extracted text and carry the data from one step to another in the localization process.

Summary

As you can see, there are some pretty sophisticated tools available to support the translation process. The challenge is knowing how to leverage these tools to create a process that maximizes efficiency. Stay tuned, because we will be discussing just that in part two.