Updated Electronic Manuals Deliver Vital Information To The Field

Innodata Isogen Helps Defense Contractor Develop More Nimble Solution to Manuals

Challenge

An Army defense contractor faced a major challenge in updating its Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs). The IETMs were first introduced as an offshoot of the "paperless ship" concept in the late 1970s. Since then, many content management systems had come and gone. Many systems were no longer supported, which made updating sections in the manuals difficult and limited the ways the data could be presented.

Hardware had similarly evolved. Early IETMs ran on the fairly primitive computer systems of the 1970s and 1980s, which constrained their software and output capabilities. The old systems could not take advantage of interactive graphics and audio/visual information, nor could they be printed or viewed on modern hardware.

Software and hardware limitations complicated the exchange of data between the contractor and its customers, so the contractor required that the document-to-document system be compatible with others and adapt easily to today's publishing environment...