February 21, 2012

Content Management

In addition to the complexity of gathering, organizing, and presenting technical information, technical writers have to deal with managing multiple versions of the same content. Sometimes the versions correspond to different versions of a product and sometimes they are tied to different products. For example we maintain documentation for at least two versions of four different products. Two of the products share content with a third product. Keeping track of what version of a document goes where and where to make changes so that they apply to the proper products and versions is complicated.
For the last ten years, I have worked at companies that use a source control system for documentation content management. In general, source control systems are a good match for a documentation content management system. They use a centralized repository for storing content objects. They provide change tracking and versioning. They provide mechanisms for managing and viewing different versions of the same set of content objects.
I personally have used ClearCase, Subversion, and Git. They all have done the job asked of them. In ClearCase we didn't really tax the system much. We were working with FrameMaker BLOBs and only working on a single version of the content at a time. We also relied on the build team to manage the view specs, the branching, the tagging, etc. We used Subversion in the same way we used ClearCase, but slowly started working with XML content objects that were shared across product lines. Things got trickier once we started sharing content and we lost the team that managed the views and the branching. By the time we got to Git, we were completely on our own managing a spaghetti of branches and tags.
The drawback to all of them is that they are tailored to being used by developers. The interfaces are hard to use and non-intuitive to writers. They also lack a lot features that writers need like searching content and flow control. For example, to get the proper view of a content library in SVN we had to write and maintain checkout scripts to get the proper versions of all the proper repositories. If you worked on multiple versions of a product, you needed to have multiple working copies. It works well when it is all set up properly, but it is a major pain point. It is also fragile. It is easy to make a mistake that breaks a lot of things and is hard to undo.
There has to be a better way. I had always heard that there were products that are tailored for managing documentation content, but never had budget.
Recently, I have started investigating CMS systems. The first trouble was figuring out what type of content management system. There are Web content management systems that are used to build Web sites. There are enterprise content management systems like Share Point that are designed to store all sorts of content objects.
I am interested in component content management systems. This type of system stores content modules that can be assembled into final documents. They typically use XML as the content model and provide features for dynamic ID generation and linking. They also typically offer hooks into the major XML editors. They also offer searching and process control features.
I don't expect that any system will completely hide the ugliness of managing multiple versions of a diverse set of content. It is an inherently tricky problem. There will always be the problem of maintaining a coherent methodology for identifying variants and making sure changes get applied to the proper variants, etc. My hope is that a CMS system places a more friendly veneer over the process so that it is easier for a writer to work with.
I'd rather have writers focused on content than on managing the versions of the content.

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