When implementing Skribenta, we help you get a running start.
You are in control of your planning, but we recommend implementing our products in iterations. The first iteration often has the goal to be able to do the same things as before, but with new and better tools. Skribenta's flexible design means that you can import your current content without carrying out extensive information analyses or changing your business critical processes in major ways. Once that goal has been reached, it is easier to move from there and start optimizing different aspects of your content production and delivery.
To achieve this goal, three main activities are involved:
Import current content,
Define style sheet(s), and
Learn the system.
Unless you prefer to make a completely fresh start with your technical information, we help you migrate your current content into Skribenta. Whether you use Word, Indesign, FrameMaker, DITA, or some other XML format, we have supporting tools that help make the process more efficient.
While importing, we also guide you to introduce single sourcing. If you have 20 manual variants that largely consists of the same information but with some differences, the aim would be to create one shared source in Skribenta with conditions, so that all the 20 manuals can be generated from it.
If you have translated the content to other languages, we also help you import the translations to a translation memory in Segment Localizer.
Technical writers used to working in paged based tools like Word or Indesign, moving to a CCMS with focus on optimization and content reuse requires new ways of thinking about documentation production. Skribenta comes with a comprehensive help system but in order to help you hit the ground running we also provide introductory training for new technical writers.
Courses cover fundamental aspects of using Skribenta, such as how to navigate and find information, how to rely on a style sheet instead of always thinking about what the content looks like, best practices when getting started with single sourcing, and translation management. They are most often conducted online, but on site training can also be arranged when required.
When your users start working in Skribenta, they are sometimes not sure about the best way to do things. Skribenta is a flexible environment and early mistakes can always be fixed later on. Still, to make users feel more confident we also offer hands on support, where we work together with your users to solve issues, teach them about advanced features in Skribenta, or guide them around decisions about content structuring.
One of the first tasks when starting to use Skribenta is defining your style sheets. Depending on your needs, you may need just one style sheet, or several. In many cases, there is one style sheet for printing to PDF, and another for web output. Our style sheet developers go through your content structure and visual requirements with you and help you set up the new style sheets according to your needs. The styling mechanisms that are built into Skribenta allows us to construct style sheets that can meet high quality requirements both for online viewing and printed documents.