This post is a continuation of Part 1.
In continuation to Part 1, this blog highlights what is content reuse and why should you be thinking about it?
In points one and two we covered 1. How Maximizing Content Reuse Will Save You Time When Done Properly and 2. Organizing Content Into Topics Allows For Quicker Publishing. Up next, the importance applying single-sourcing techniques to your programs.
3. Single-Sourcing Allows You to Publish Training Material With Ease
Single-sourcing is the practice of reusing common content throughout your learning and development deliverables. If you have one version of a procedure for Group A, another version of the procedure for Group B, and a different variation for Group C, you do not need three versions or files in different places to maintain for each procedure. Instead, you can arrange all of your content into one procedure, maintain it as a single topic, and let the software do the heavy lifting to create the desired output.
With a topic-based authoring solution, you can publish multiple outputs, in multiple formats, that include or exclude content from topics and use any combination of topics in any order. You can also easily reuse content such as a note, warning, table, or stepped procedure in multiple topics. You can learn more about all of the wonderful time-saving benefits of single-sourcing and multichannel publishing here.
4. Applying Single Sourcing Tactics to Images and Videos Can Save Valuable Time
With a single-sourcing application, you can single-source your images, just the way you single-source text, by producing only one set of images for all outputs. You can specify that the online images should have one group of settings, for instance, while the printed images have another group of settings.
5. Streamline Content Delivery With MadCap Flare
With your content authored in a powerful authoring and publishing solution like MadCap Flare, you can easily create how-to guides, product documentation, tutorials, training content, and more, all using targets. A target is one instance of an output. It is the engine that takes all of your files and settings and brings them together to produce the end result. They are easy to configure and don’t require any programmatic knowledge.
Single-source authoring is for anybody who wants to work less and produce more, and MadCap Flare can make it easy to get started.
About the Author: Jennifer Morse has more than 20 years of software sales experience in the technical communication and content development industry. In addition to overseeing the customer success and sales engineering teams, her focus is to promote customer onboarding, promote the value of the company’s solutions to the marketplace, solicit customer feedback, and report on trends in the industry that can help improve the company’s offerings.