https://youtu.be/4XSSvjbrFn0 – Adobe DITA World 2018
As someone in the Technical Communication industry for over 30 years, I have seen many customers’ workflow, trends fizzle out and die and the industry technology blossom into robust platforms that offer more than their original designs. I have worked on many very large projects over the years but none as educational as working with the GSA to automate and redesign many of their document creation and workflow processes. It was challenging to work on such a massive and influential document such as the FAR—a collection of 70 years’ worth of congressional legislature that is used to keep our government procurement process running.
However, I found that this project pushed the boundaries of what I thought possible for a data set this large. I am excited by what my team and I were able to do with XSL programming and creating custom menus and commands with ExtendScript because it now allows us to open the door for higher powered, modern publishing methods, automated content assembly and quite a few other possibilities.
The biggest issue that the GSA had was managing their LSA Tables (Lists of Sections Affected). The content is new regulatory content that needs to be added to the FAR or one of the other regulatory documents they manage. So, we decided to automatically generate these tables, so they populate in the FAR or other documents during a custom-built menu command that publishes in a fraction of the time it used to. This type of speed counteracts much of the delay the process saw before, making the FAR a far more intelligent, yet identical, version of what it used to be.
Underneath it all, is DITA. A perfect complement to a massive document like the FAR. It has the flexibility of multiple toolsets and publishing engines with the ability to leverage stylesheets and scripting because it is built on the foundation of XML. Using DITAMaps, we were able to chunk this massive beast into its respective sections and easily navigate chapters, parts TOC’s and subsections at a microscopic level by nesting DITAMaps within DITAMaps. And, when in FrameMaker, they get the WYSIWYG view that allows them to see their changes without feeling like the content is so overwhelmingly large to search through. DITA was also essential for how all the autonumbering and cross-referencing was handled. Publishing too, using the DITA OT outside of the authoring environment, making them tool independent for publishing.
What was also fascinating was seeing how the business side of the project unfolded. I’ve always been interested in how my customers operate and what will make them happy and successful, so I was really focused on trying to understand how the process differs from gov’t to the private sector. What I really enjoyed was how much the policy team’s success hinges on their content, and how our solution showcases the elegance of the GSA’s new FAR architecture.
All in all, we were targeting speed, and that is exactly what we delivered—a high powered workflow, automation, and the means for overall improved efficiency. So, as the future chugs along and the FAR grows, they will have a compact, portable content delivery method that can grow along with it.
