Leading Telecom Manufacturer Converts Legacy Technical Documents

XML Conversion Enables Company to Tag and Index Content in DITA-based XML Documents

Challenge

New product introductions are a staple of any telecommunications equipment manufacturer, which routinely create and market new features to improve communications and catch the public eye. But for one telecom, years of innovation also generated a vast library of hundreds of thousands of user manuals and technical documents, created and stored in a wide and sometimes incompatible range of formats. Many were produced in standard formats such as Framemaker, Microsoft Word and Excel, while others used proprietary in-house software and Interleaf and Arbortext.

In addition, many customers continued using the legacy products. As a result, those customers required support long after their products had been superseded with new ones. The manuals and support documents for the older products were packed with critically important technical details and illustrations, which meant that updating or maintaining that material was a time-consuming task that required the technical document team to pull content from multiple platforms. Meanwhile, the challenge of sorting and reusing material kept growing as the company introduced new products to market...