DCL Learning Series

Marianne Calilhanna

Hello, and welcome to the DCL Learning Series. Today's webinar is titled "Inside the Transformation: How CompTIA Rebuilt Its Content Ecosystem for Greater Agility and Efficiency." My name is Marianne and I'm the VP of Marketing here at Data Conversion Laboratory. Before we jump into it, just a few things to let you know: the conversation today is being recorded and it will be available in the on-demand webinar section of our website at dataconversionlaboratory.com. We'll save time at the end to answer any questions. However, please feel free to submit them as they come to mind, and you can do that via the question dialogue box in your GoToWebinar interface. Next slide, please.

I want to briefly introduce Data Conversion Laboratory, or DCL, as we are also known. We are the industry-leading XML conversion provider and known for our expertise with standards like DITA, S1000D, JATS/ BITS, and SPL. We provide services that structure content and data to support our customers' content management, publishing, and digital transformation efforts. Increasingly, we help organizations prepare their content to be AI-compatible. At the core of DCL's mission is transforming complex content and data into the precise formats our clients need to stay competitive. We believe that well-structured content is essential for driving innovation and serves as the foundation for successful AI initiatives.

Today we're discussing CompTIA's journey to rebuild its entire content ecosystem, and we're fortunate to have some of the key people involved with this project. Welcome, Becky Mann, Vice President of Content Development at CompTIA. David Turner, Director of Digital Transformation and Content Technologies at DCL. And Bill Swallow, Director of Operations at Scriptorium. So thankful to have these three here to tell this fascinating tale of content infrastructure. And I'm going to turn it over to you, David. 

David Turner

Well, thanks so much, Marianne. We appreciate it and thank you for everybody who is participating. I'm really excited about this particular webinar because a lot of times when you see presentations about data implementations, we all tend to think of tech docs and just technical documentation and, really, CompTIA is a different story and I think it's a really interesting use case. In fact, I think that's where we should probably start today. So, Becky, if you could just start by telling us a little bit about who CompTIA is, what you guys do. Are you a society publisher? What is it you're publishing? Who are you guys? 

Becky Mann

Yeah, sure, David. Yeah, so CompTIA, we are the largest vendor-neutral credentialing body for technology workers. So we serve people who work in IT, data for and provide skills-based certifications. Through our education, our training, our certifications, and our industry research, we're promoting industry growth and building a skilled workforce. We want to make sure that everyone's technology benefits are accessible to everyone. 

3:56

David Turner

Awesome. So help me understand just about the kind of content. What are some of the kinds of content that you guys publish and who's writing it? 

Becky Mann

Yeah, sure. So we do a wide variety of different types of products. We have certifications, but my team actually focuses on the training and preparing people for those certifications. We do that through a wide variety of different products. We have e-learning, we have lab-based materials, we have exam prep, and so we are trying to serve a wide variety of different audiences and not just a singular channel. So for instance, we serve a global audience, people certified all throughout the world with CompTIA certifications and we want to make sure that they're prepared for those certifications. So we publish in different languages and different modalities for basically everyone. We serve government, we serve delivery partners, we serve academic institutions, which is exciting, but also challenging at the same time. 

David Turner

Yeah, understood. All right, well let's talk a little bit about the project itself and sort of what spurred you to take action. Help us understand a little bit about what were the different things that were happening with the business or maybe with your tech stack or with your content that sort of drove you to doing something different than you were doing before. 

Becky Mann

Yeah, it was a massive undertaking and change. We really had a convergence of three different things happening. We needed to scale our operations in creating localized content. We had a particular need in Japan where we were trying to efficiently localize our certification training and could not figure out how to efficiently move from our base eBook content into translating that into Japanese. That was when we were first kind of looking at how do we actually reuse material. And then while we were kind of digesting that, CompTIA acquired another company. We acquired the company TestOut, where they also created learning for CompTIA certifications. And so now we had two different bodies of material, similar certifications, so like A+ with TestOut and A+ with CompTIA, and we needed to merge our content together and we had two very, very different ways of creating content.

My team used a lot of contractors and consultants to create, while TestOut had a more homegrown in-house expertise. They were a little bit more technical in how they implemented stuff, so that was very structured. I used HTML files while my team was using a CMS, and so we needed to figure out how to work together and that's where we're like, we need one system for this, not just different areas and we wanted to see all of our content. I think that's the important thing. We don't just create text; we create lab activities, we create assessment questions, we create interactives. We needed one spot where we could see a holistic view of something and not have that be in the platform right before we're publishing. 

David Turner

Thank you. All right, well, Bill, let's get you involved here. 

Bill Swallow

Sure. 

David Turner

So, obviously you work with a lot of different organizations across different industries. Other than the super-high-caliber staff that you knew you were going to get to work with at CompTIA, what were the things that got Scriptorium excited about this project when CompTIA first came to you and was talking to you about it? 

Bill Swallow

This one was particularly interesting because it was a little bit out of the norm that we had been seeing up till that point. As you mentioned at the onset, a lot of times when you talk about DITA, you think technical content: manuals, online help, support portals, and whatnot.

8:06

You don't generally think about learning and certification content, which is really its own beast. So it got us very interested in working more with that type of content. We'd done some work with it on the side, but this was going to be a very deep dive and that got us excited. 

David Turner

I love it. I love it. Well, let's dig in a little bit, and I'm going to ask this question in a little bit different way. Normally when you see a slide that says who is Scriptorium, you turn to the person from Scriptorium, but I'm actually going to turn to you, Becky. Talk to us about Scriptorium, how you found them, why you chose them, what did you ask from them? We'll let you give a little bit of background and then we can turn it over to Bill to tell us a little bit more about them in general. 

Becky Mann

Yeah, so when we were trying to solve our problem around – we were looking at how do we make our localization process more efficient? And one of our vendors actually had recommended, "Hey, you should look into DITA." And so did one of my team members. So I was like, "Okay, well that's interesting. I like the idea of structured content and reuse." That was a big thing for us. We refresh our certifications every three years. 80% of the certification stays roughly the same, so being able to reuse things was really important for us to be able to drive efficiencies. And so we started doing a little Google searching honestly on DITA and Scriptorium popped up when we were combining DITA and content strategy. And so did a little bit more investigations. We actually played with their learning DITA site just to see what is this? Is this something that seems interesting? And started having a conversation with their leads on, "Hey, we have this problem. How can you help us? We know we want a strategy, we want a unified strategy for our content development. We need someone to help us and lead us through this change. Can you help?" 

David Turner

Well, Bill, I'll now give you a chance then to add a little color to that and then share anything else about Scriptorium that you think here in terms of introduction would be good. 

Bill Swallow

Yeah, we had a lot of interesting conversations. I know one of the big concerns that CompTIA had out of the gate was the ability to author in DITA because it was very different from anything else they had used. To be honest, learning DITA, it's a good representation. I mean it goes through the nuts and bolts of how you use DITA, but it doesn't cover really a flashy authoring interface. It wants you to learn exactly what this structured content looks like under the hood. And I know that raised some concerns on the CompTIA side and they're like, "Well, wait a minute, do we have to work in text mode?" So we were able to have those conversations that know a lot of the systems that you'll be working with have user interfaces that make it look much more familiar and easier to use.

To talk a little bit about what we do, we're a consultancy. We're focused on enterprise content strategy and enterprise content operations. Most of our work is in DITA. Not all of it, but I would say the major chunk of work that we do is all DITA-based and we help companies just like CompTIA get their arms around things, especially when they have a merger or acquisition which kind of forces two or more teams to collide together and start sharing a common repository. That seems to be a very common factor there. 

11:55

David Turner

Well, let's get into the business case. Typically, one of the questions that we always get from potential clients is how did you convince management to give you the money? Despite the pain that the people on the ground feel and how much sense it may make to you, you do generally have to go convince somebody in management to give you some money, right? So, Becky, how did you convince management to give you funding? How did you build this business case? 

Becky Mann

So really what we were doing is we started with why would this benefit us? That was really kind of the key area of how do – we did have a problem of we had two different systems, we had two different portfolios that we needed to bring together, but we were also seeing, too, that our current system just we're kind of maxing out of it. We had this a la carte piecemeal situation where we couldn't see everything and we couldn't repurpose stuff. My team was spending a lot of time on dry manual processes to convert content into different formats instead of creating new content, which is not going to help us create more products. So, that's really where we focused is how does this actually help us move the business forward and ultimately get us to market faster? That was our driving goal is that, hey, by implementing something like this, it will allow us to cut our lead time down and actually concentrate our resources around doing very detailed value-enhanced work versus just mechanical data conversion that isn't really value added. 

David Turner

All right. Well, very good. Well, let's jump in and let's start talking about the strategy itself. So Bill, you guys were hired into start designing some sort of a solution. How did that process happen and what were some of the key parts of this strategy? 

Bill Swallow

Yeah, we approached this one on its surface very similar to how we approach all our engagements, but the specifics really made it a unique project, a very unique project compared to others that we work on. We do a lot of general interviewing, fact-finding, try to find where the pain points are, and certainly one of them was we just have these two completely different groups. Each one has their own love-hate relationship with how things work in their own organization and then try to put that together into a new single means of working. 

So we had a lot of good chats with people at CompTIA, took a look at the samples of content across both groups, tried to find commonality, noted the very, very, very wide swath of differences in how they approach things and try to align them in some way going forward, trying to basically finding that sweet spot of compromise and functionality that they're looking for. It was quite unique diving in, especially since we had to use the data learning and training model for a lot of this content. And I guess the benefit and drawback there is that that model is – it's functional, but it's fairly sparse, so we had to build a lot of what they needed out. So again, it was going back to those requirements and making sure that we were kind of hitting everything. CompTIA is a little unique in that way because their certification goals drive how the content needs to be structured and how it needs to be presented.

16:00

So they have their own roadmap for how things need to get done, and we had to align that with, okay, so given that, how do we work and how do we bring things in? So it was quite interesting. 

Becky Mann

I was going to say, too, that I think the really nice thing about working with Scriptorium on this is that we were two new teams brought together and this allowed us to – we almost had this commiseration of like, "Oh, well your system sucks too." We saw each other's pain points and it really allowed us to really focus on, okay, well we know where our pain is, where do we move forward? How do we make this better for all of us and we gain efficiencies and value to our work? How do we get rid of all those things that we both hate doing and make it a little bit more efficient for us? And so I think it allowed us to have a mediator to help have those conversations, but then it really also strengthened our team and made us a lot closer too because we were having those in-depth discussions on like, "Well, how do we move forward?"

It wasn't us versus them, it became on us – how do we move forward on this? Versus, "Well, I need to adapt all my things to your way." Like, "Nope, we're both adapting." We're going to take the best of what CompTIA was doing with how we implemented in consultants and added in different activities, and we're also going to take in what our TestOut colleagues were doing and how they were structuring things and getting things to market. So I think that was a really valuable part of the relationship. 

David Turner

I mean, that was something that struck me in working with you guys is how well the two groups worked together. I can remember talking to my colleague Leo and him asking which group is he from? Which group is she from? Because we couldn't tell, you guys. There was no animosity. The change management piece really happened well, and there was this joint commiseration, and I think it led to building out a pretty solid plan here. Here's the slide that you gave me, which looks like crazily complex. So I'm just going to be quiet and let you guys talk a little bit here about the general approach to designing the project here in this slide, and then after that we'll jump in and I want to talk a little bit more about the content model. 

Becky Mann

So, Bill, do you want me to? 

Bill Swallow

I can jump in. I'll jump in with an overview. But yeah, as we discussed, there really was a problem that there were two different groups with two various different systems, and they both came to an understanding that they needed to move together and find a mutually agreeable solution that works in all cases. So at the center of that, you have your CCMS or the component content management system, but on the side they have their own internal LMS, CertMaster, which is over there on the side. And then you start adding in all of the different pieces that need to connect or need to be published out to, and things got interesting rather quickly because they have a good deal of translation that they do.

They have a series of, whether it's videos, images, whatnot, that they're storing in a digital asset management system. They're publishing eBooks, they're publishing PDF, they're being able to publish into their LMS. There are a couple of other LMSs involved, one of them there is lab development Skillable, then they have customer LMSs that they're delivering out to from theirs. It got a little crazy pretty quick, but I think we were able to wrap, get our arms around a lot of that pretty early. 

20:07

David Turner

Becky, what would you add? 

Becky Mann

Yeah, I think that's a good summary. I think the big thing that really was kind of our focus is we needed a central spot that we could see all of the different components and obviously DITA is best for text. That is what DITA functions, but being able to put in objects so that we at least have stuff linking and can relate to like, "Oh, okay, I know there's a lab activity here. I know what the instructions are. Yes, I can't see the entire thing, but I know it's there." That's really important for us as course designers to know how do all of these components come together versus before we were developing everything kind of separately. And so if we had to change the text content, it was really hard to update the assessment questions because we'd have to go into a different system and look at it versus now we have it all in one system and they're actually tied together. And so it allows us to operate a little bit more cohesively and functionally versus very desperately. 

David Turner

That's the Heretto CCMS and I think we're going to talk about that in just a minute. Let's jump over and let's talk about the content model a little bit. So, we've been talking about this being DITA-based and for those of you who may not know as much about DITA, DITA is an XML standard that's very modular. Like I said, it's typically been used a lot for technical documentation. But the thing is about DITA in any XML is that XML stands for extensible markup language, right? Because the idea is that you want to be able to extend your XML tags based on whatever community you're in.

So we get standards like JATS and BITS and DITA and things like that that kind of cover communities. And I think the DITA L&T is – the learning and training specialization is – you could describe it as an even more narrowly focused set of tags. It's been extended to be able to handle things like taxonomies and to be able to capture learning objectives or learning level, things like that that wouldn't necessarily be in a general – it takes advantage of all the elements that are in DITA foundationally, but then adds this other layer. But that doesn't necessarily mean, as Bill talked about earlier, you can continue the X, the extensible part, take that specialization and then further extend it to meet the specific needs of your client. That actually takes a bit of balancing because you don't want to go so far that it becomes custom XML and you lose the value of being part of the DITA community, but you want to be able to have it specialized. So Becky, had CompTIA really even heard of DITA before this? How many people on your team – 

Becky Mann

I would say it was probably three months beforehand, and it was because of our localization experts who were like, "Hey, I've used DITA in my translation. It allows us to translate things a lot easier because we know what format to expect and we can exclude certain things that don't need to be translated." And that was really key for us. Whereas before we weren't able to use that process, and so there was a lot of just cleanup and busy work that needed to happen as well. So I think that was where we had first heard of it and we had heard of XML obviously, and so we're like, "Well, that seems like an interesting spot." I think the other thing too is with our content, it is very tech-based, right? We serve technology workers and so we're talking about networks and command line and all of those things too. I think our content lends itself to this format as well. 

David Turner

Yeah. Bill, any comments about how you directed or special things that you did with this content or with this content model? 

24:00

Bill Swallow

I think the best way to say is that we kind of really leveraged that X and extended it quite a bit for what CompTIA actually needed. The learning and training specialization, again, is a great starting point, but there are only maybe five or six assessment types that you can really use. And they didn't meet everything that CompTIA needed, so we needed to take a big step back and say, "Okay, so how are we going to create these new types of assessments in DITA and how are we going to trap this information? How is it going to be passed over to the learning management system? Will it understand it?" So that was a very interesting aspect to this project where it was, "This should work, so let's give it a try." And fortunately, CompTIA had their own learning management system in-house, so they had a playground to actually be able to try this stuff and we were able to marry up what we were able to do in DITA with what an LMS is actually looking for as far as triggers and be able to combine those and get them to work. 

Becky Mann

Or find out where it didn't work, right? 

Bill Swallow

Yeah. 

Becky Mann

We have that happen a lot. 

David Turner

All right, so let's break down the solution a little bit more. We've talked about the content model in the general overarching environment. Talk to me a little bit about the different players. I think we've identified four main players. So Bill, I'll let you just lead us through this. Tell us the role you played, just recap again, I guess, what we've already talked about and then we'll talk about the other pieces. 

Bill Swallow

Sure. Yeah, we put together the basic strategy, the content model helped out on the taxonomy side, get a roadmap for implementation going there. That included everything from selecting CCMS all the way down to what types of outputs do they need and how are we going to provide those and building the solution out with CompTIA and the chosen CCMS vendor, which was Heretto, and kind of went from there. Heretto really worked close with us to make sure that everything that we were either testing in the content model or developing for the content model would be usable in the UI for CompTIA and really helping us build out a lot of those publishing pipelines as well. Making sure that the user interface wasn't getting too complicated because one of the goals was make sure that the authoring was easy. 

David Turner

And Heretto, really, I think that's one of their strengths is that it is easier. They do have an easy interface. I think it comes from that heritage, I guess, of being easy DITA, et cetera. Becky, what kind of questions, concerns, pushback did you get around CCMS, if any? 

Becky Mann

Oh my gosh, we got a lot kind of all over the place. I think everyone's nervous about change. We had an interesting dynamic on my team as well. We had some very technical people who weren't as nervous about it. They were authoring in HTML natively anyway, and so they were like, "Oh, this is fine." But then on the other side, we have us and other members of my team who are working with authors and they're like," I don't understand all of this at all. "And so I think that was a big learning curve that we needed to overcome, but I think once everyone started – we did a lot of training. Bill and his team met with us a lot. We had representatives from all the different parts of my team so that we helped step through things as decisions were being made. I think we've worked on this for 18 months. It's not an overnight thing, but it was a very collaborative, iterative process and making sure we were all coming along in it. 

28:08

David Turner

All right, well, let's talk about the next part, which is my favorite part of the whole webinar, and that's where we get to talk about DCL. Okay, so a lot of people look at this, Bill, and they say "Oh, well yeah, I've got to have somebody migrates our old stuff from the old to the new." But typically when we talk about it, we talk about it as conversion or transformation and migration is a part of that, but it's not really the focus. In your mind, what's the difference between conversion and migration? 

Bill Swallow

When I think of migration, it's usually more of a lift and shift kind of picture where you're taking content from somewhere and you're dropping it somewhere else and not necessarily making any substantial changes. Whereas what we're doing with conversion and through DCL is taking many different content formats and matching them up to what the target needs to be. So matching them up to every single DITA element and the attribute we possibly can so that we have clean content coming in that will validate out of the conversion process before it even gets into the system. 

David Turner

A lot of times it's not a simple one-to-one. You got one HTML file, you don't end up with one data file, you end up with –

Bill Swallow

Exactly. Yeah. Breaking things up, moving things around, and sometimes restructuring. Yeah. Now sometimes you work with customers, you just decide not to convert or migrate anything, especially when you deal with learning content, they're like," we could just move forward with creating stuff new. "What made it important for CompTIA to convert content and migrate it over? 

Becky Mann

Well, part of it is just maintenance honestly. We have 38 different courses that we support on the market right now, and that's not how many stuff that's in development. And so we needed to be able to update and publish and fix issues for the stuff that was live and in market. And having our team work in – I think at one point it was probably six different systems – it's just not feasible at all either. So we needed to just really just get into one spot, and then also we're looking at our future development plans and we know, hey, we want to be able to get a leg up and start moving forward with a new version of Security +, for instance. Will we have that content in our system? It's validated, we have it already started, we can just go. We don't have to mess around and convert it, and we can just go into like, "Okay, what has changed in the objectives? What additions do we want to make?" And we're off to the races. 

David Turner

Yeah. I found, too, that it seems like a lot of people when they start working with something new like a structured authoring system, a DITA type system, it can be easier for them to start by editing existing content as opposed to trying to create something from scratch, even if they've got a template laid out. A lot of times they get that familiarity with the system, but anyway, just one other question about this –

Becky Mann

I was going to say David, though, that's actually a really good point because just the nature of the content that we build, we do have a lot of reuse across multiple courses. Talking about networking, I think we counted at one point we had six different videos about IP addresses. Well, that doesn't necessarily make sense. How about we have one or at least a really good topic that includes the vast majority that we can then tailor from instead of six different areas that we can't even find where it is? So having that central repository of all their material was really important for us. 

31:55

David Turner

So, Bill, just one other question for you. I know sometimes clients come to you, they're trying to decide, do we do this conversion ourselves? Do we ask Scriptorium to do it, or do we hire a conversion vendor like DCL? What's kind of behind that decision process and what made it make sense for CompTIA to use DCL? 

Bill Swallow

Yeah, I hate to say it, but it depends from case to case. Sometimes you look at a particular content set and the client just is unhappy with it anyway as is. And they're just like, "We've been meaning to rewrite this. We don't want to go through and convert things. We're going to completely redo our content." So we will take what we have and we will rewrite it in the system from scratch. That's great. The learning curve is a bit higher because they're starting with a blank slate in the new system, so there's a lot more handholding that goes on there. Likewise, we've had some clients that just asked us to either provide a conversion script of some sort or what have you, and that's usually because they have either an older version of DITA or maybe DocBook or some other fairly well-structured XML content set. It's very easy for us to then learn the rules in that model and apply it to DITA and just create basically a conversion script that just moves things around and renames them.

Then of course you have the full conversion, and I think that made the most sense for CompTIA, one, because they had a fairly substantial amount of content that they wanted to leverage as is. Their content really shouldn't change unless it's being updated for a particular reason because they have to maintain very strict standards on their content and they had multiple formats coming out that needed to all get migrated to the same target. At that point, it doesn't make sense to hire someone like us to build a conversion script for all of that and some of it is a very difficult to script. We'd rather rely on you guys to take care of that heavy lifting. 

David Turner

And we're glad that you did. Anyway, let's move on and let's talk about the other player. As much as I could talk about DCL all day, there is another key player here and that's CompTIA. What was their expectation in this process? 

Becky Mann

I mean, my team wa – obviously, we were all on board on getting into a central authoring system. I can say right now, too, we're all just like – we just want to be in the same place. We want to have the same process. We want to know what to expect, and so that was where we were really motivated. The interesting thing that we saw is certain people were involved obviously a lot sooner than others. Like my direct reports, they were involved. At the beginning they were helping test everything, finding where everything broke, teaching their teams how to use it. And so it was just this kind of continuous process of getting more and more people into the system as we were going through it. I know I actually have my entire team working on the finalization of our conversion right now. We are expecting that we will be fully implemented in Heretto publishing to our LMS by the end of next month for all of our courses in our portfolio, which considering we started working in Heretto in of 2024 is a pretty great feat. 

David Turner

That's great. Well, one of my favorite questions to ask in these projects is talk to me about the unexpected. Actually, what? I think I skipped a slide here. Hang on a second. There we go. I'm sorry.

35:59

So, now that you've had this plan in place and the resources are lined up, how were you able to keep this on track? What was different? What was the same? How did you keep this thing going? And we'll start, Becky, let you talk a little bit about that and then, Bill, let you spend a couple minutes talking about that. 

Becky Mann

Well, we kind of approached it from a wide variety of different ways. So I think the important thing to note is that we were in the process of implementing the system, but we also had to get new product out the door and not just new product, it was the new product under the combined version. So we were kind of developing our new learning products while implementing this system, and so we kind of divided a little bit of how we were going to approach this. We had the team working on – we kind of looked at the long map of, okay, when can we actually start authoring new content? Where does it make sense? And so we looked at, okay, what? Q4 titles, that's going to give us the longest roadmap runway to get everything in place to launch that. Then everything else, we're going to use our old systems and we'll come back to that and convert it while we're all kind of learning things together. And I think while it's always hard to be working in two systems, I think it was the only way we could actually keep our production pipeline moving and developing while still also moving forward our ecosystem development. 

Bill Swallow

Yeah, that's actually quite common. It's quite common to have both systems stood up. As you're implementing one, you're still maintaining things in the other so that you don't have that break in productivity, that break in being able to release because yeah, the work doesn't stop just because you're implementing a new system. You still need to deliver, especially if you have fixed deadlines, paying customers waiting, anything like that. So it makes sense to do that. I mean I think it was very smart to choose a particular project as your target to say, "This is the first one that's going to be published out of Heretto from a conversion angle, and then this is the next one that's going to be published out of Heretto from a ground up authoring effort." And being able to take those steps, it did allow you to kind of compartmentalize that work. 

Becky Mann

It also helped us just test. I think that's really the biggest thing that we saw is that we have the idea of, oh, this is the model, this is how it should work. I think the name of the game is that there was a lot of edge cases and situations where we're like, "Well, we think it should work this way." And they're like, "Oh, no, it didn't." Or why is this failing? And so giving ourselves that lead time of expecting that, we built that into the process so that we weren't necessarily delaying a product or we were trying not to. I mean, we had a couple cases where that happens, but I think we all expected it. 

David Turner

Well, let's talk about that, and that gets us back to that favorite question I was about to ask, which is you did allude to the fact that you were kind of building the airplane while you were flying the airplane. Which when that happens, something unexpected always seems to come up, something that threatens to derail all the timelines, something that threatens to derail everything you've been doing. What were the unforeseen things with this project and how'd you address them? And that's for you –

Becky Mann

No, I was going to say sometimes I feel like I block out all the bad things. I'm just on the other side. But I think the really big one that threw us for a loop is that I want to say we did actually – I was looking back at my notes earlier and I was like, "Oh yeah, we published a course in the summer of last year." It was a small tiny course, six hours long. Our normal courses are about 40 hours.

40:02

And so we're like, "Okay, small amount of content, we should be able to do this." And we made it work. It was a little hairy, but we got it to work. But then when we went to do it for one of our certification-based courses, we realized, oh, there's all these other things that we haven't accounted for. And things like exam objective mapping, which is really critical for our customers to understand how our content relates to the exam, that was a real hairy beast that we had to tackle and iterate on multiple times. So we had a lot of DTD conversion that ended up happening in September, so we could get out that October release in time but it also meant it affected everything that we had authored and created earlier. That I think was probably the biggest surprise is like, oh no, we have to go adjust all these other things that we've already been working on. That was one of the big surprises for us. 

David Turner

Bill, and for you? 

Bill Swallow

Well, no, that was a big one. I was going to relate that we could only get our arms around so much content to be able to build the model, so we worked off of what we all collectively thought was a good representative set of content. And as Becky mentions, it's like, well, it's great that we've got all that content in, but there were factors like what are the system requirements for this little tiny bolt over here? How does this fit into the puzzle there? Once you start finding all these little bits and bobs that start either breaking, not fitting right, falling out, it's like, okay, we need to rethink how we're doing this because it looked good for the trial set of content that we were using but as we expanded to the greater content set that was out there, those edge cases really became – it wasn't necessarily a bad situation, but it was an eye-opening situation where, oh, for this particular course, this particular need is here for this specific bit of content. That's nowhere else and we can't get rid of it because people are expecting it to be this way. 

David Turner

I think it's important to say to everybody, we don't want to give across the idea that it was crazy here because we're building the airplane and we're flying it. The truth is, no matter how much planning you put on the front end, there are going to be surprises. But what makes the ability to handle the surprises and the challenges is how well you plan and prepare and frankly, the quality of the people that you work with along the way. Michael Jordan in the nineties, there were always weird things that could come up at the end of a game time, but he could deliver over and over again because he knew how to deliver and he had set the table. Would you rather have Michael Jordan or, I don't know, think of some other basketball player in the nineties? I think that's great. One example I think of is Becky, there was a content set you sent us, I wouldn't say with a panic, but there was like a late set. You were like, "This changed and we've got this amount of content and we've got this deadline." So it was like, But fortunately, I think Leo turned it around, if not in 24 hours, it was in 48 hours. I mean, it was really fast. 

Becky Mann

Yeah, it was really fast. 

Bill Swallow

It was really quick. 

David Turner

And so I think when you go into these projects, that's why it's important to find somebody like a Scriptorium that you can work with because they're going to help you to minimize those, and when those do come up, to be able to take advantage. All right, well, let's jump in and let's –

Becky Mann

Oh –

David Turner

Oh, go ahead. 

Becky Mann

I was going to say, I mean back to your basketball analogy, it's having the nineties Bulls, right? It wasn't just Jordan, right? It was Scottie Pippen and all the other players, too, that helped support him,

44:02

And so I think that's also was critical is we knew we could rely on you guys. I remember coming to Leo and you David, and being like, "We need to convert all of our content by the end of the year, so please, what can we do to make this happen?" And you're like, "All right, let's figure this out. We'll get it done." And you guys delivered it I think a month in advance. It was just amazing time turnover that allowed us to really be like, "Okay, we can move forward and we're going to have some cleanup to do, but it's just some cleanup versus a big renovation if you will." 

David Turner

Yeah. Well, thank you. Well, let's jump in and let's talk about the impact, the outcomes, et cetera. I've got some just random statistics here. Tell us about what you feel like you were able to accomplish here, Becky, and then we'll move in and we'll talk a little bit about the benefits after that. 

Becky Mann

Yeah, so besides just going through – we were creating new courses last year, and then we were also moving in all of our other courses as well. So in total, we have 38 courses in Heretto right now. We were able to convert over 33,000 XML files, and that's from two different sources. I think that's the part also that I want to emphasize, too, is that because we had two different ways of structuring our content, we had two different very set of models that we had to converge into one. And so your team did a great job of really like, "Okay, this is TestOut content, this is how this is structured, this is how it needs to look. Oh, this is CompTIA content, this is how we need to manage it." And now we just have all of CompTIA content now, which is really amazing. We've worked with over 150 of our users in the system now publishing – we've published eight different courses in the past year, so we've really been able to scale up our production timelines in the new system. 

David Turner

Well, let's talk about that a little bit more here. I think we talked about some big benefits that we thought came from this. I've listed four here if you want to talk about each of these or if there's some others. We've got –

Becky Mann

Yeah, the multi-channel publishing is probably my all-time favorite feature of our new system. As I mentioned earlier, we deliver eBooks, we deliver print books, PDFs. We also do teaching aids for our content as well, which we deliver as PDFs. And we're able to create those through the system thanks to the transforms that Bill and his team have created for us so that we are no longer manually creating those objective mappings. That was a very painful process for my team. That took forever. We don't have to do that anymore. It's all tagged in there at the system, and so that I think is really great. We publish once now rather than multiple times.

We're also developing new products continuously. We've got a new series that we're working on. We've got new extensions that we're working on and refreshes. Our certifications refresh every three years, so we are constantly looking at creating stuff as well. And then our localization process, this is probably the one that one of my team members is most excited about. We can now actually have a constrained system for translating our products. And then even more importantly, we can create versions as well so that we don't have to –  if there's an update, we can target that revision. We don't have to do a full-blown refresh of everything else. So it's really allowing us to optimize our publishing process. 

David Turner

Yeah. I remember a client we worked with before and they talked about how building a database system like this shortened the cycle for a revision by months because you were able to reuse so much, you had such a starting point, you had everybody in the same place that you were able to bring those things, really, together quickly. Bill, any thoughts, comments, color about these items as well? 

48:03

Bill Swallow

I think Becky really hit it well. I know that the multi-channel publishing was a godsend for them because they were maintaining five, six, seven different copies of the same content because they were targeting one for eBook, one for a lesson plan, one for an answer key. It was all the same content, but it was all authored individually and now they were able to bring that all together and just flip a toggle and push a button and get a different version of the content out. 

David Turner

When you're dealing with a certification, there's a stress level to managing that in multiple places. You've got a certification and it has to have these components in it. And so did I change it in all 27 places? Did I change it in every place? Did I cover everything? This really takes that and I guess we can add to the benefits piece, get some serenity out of this whole thing. Anyway, let's talk – finally, just I'll ask this. Would you call the project a success? 

Becky Mann

Without a doubt. I would say definitely, definitely a success. I would say we definitely had a rough start, but as it is with moving to any new system, kind of understanding and learning what we can and what we can't do. But we're now into our – let's see, I'm trying to think through this – our fourth certification-based learning product that we have delivered. The team is getting more efficient all the time. Everyone's understanding things a little bit better, and I feel like we're also, we're unified as a team. We know what we need to be working on and how to do it and how to onboard new people into our system as well, which is always critical as well. 

David Turner

Bill, what did you see were the biggest successes about this project? What are you most proud of? 

Bill Swallow

Well, I want to actually call out Becky's team here because her core team that we have been working with really took it upon themselves to learn the ins and outs of pretty much everything, how everything worked. I was commenting to someone else on my side of Scriptorium that we were in a call earlier this week with Becky's team, and just on the fly one them opened up a text box and just started writing pseudocode to show us exactly what they were looking for in some structural changes that they were thinking about. And we don't get that with every client we work with to that depth where they're actually thinking essentially in the same code language as we are. That's really, really helped move things forward. 

David Turner

Yeah. Yeah. I think my own feeling on some of the successes that I felt, there was a – I felt like there was not just a camaraderie within the CompTIA team, but that extended to the vendors. We met very regularly and there was an atmosphere that was created where we made sure that we were on top of things and we were all working towards the same goal. DCL was there, Scriptorium was there, Heretto was there. And I think actually also, we should probably say this, Heretto was not part of this webinar today, but I think certainly the functionality that their tool provided as well as the expertise that the people on their team provided really contributed to that success as well. 

Bill Swallow

Absolutely. 

Becky Mann

Yeah, totally agree. 

David Turner

All right, so we've got a couple minutes here. Just any final thoughts, suggestions, things like that? I'll throw that out to both of you and then we'll move over into our questions time. 

52:07

Becky Mann

I don't know. I'm glad to be on the other side of this process, I have to say. I'm excited to see – I think now is when we're actually going to start seeing the true benefits of working in DITA, which is what I'm most excited about, that we can maintain our content easily, that we can start on revisions and really focus in on where things are changing versus converting something or rearranging things or recopying things. I think I'm excited to see how our efficiencies gain as we move into our refresh cycle. 

Bill Swallow

Mm-hm. Yeah, you're also on the other side of the implementation wall, so you got everything stood up and publishing and working and functioning just the way you needed it. And now you're already talking about, okay, now that we can do this, let's look at this thing over here and see if we can get that in here too. 

Becky Mann

Exactly. 

Bill Swallow

So now we're actually starting to make iterative improvements and advancements in what they have. 

Becky Mann

Excellent. We can get back to the fun stuff of actually creating content. 

Bill Swallow

That's right. 

Becky Mann

That's the part that I have to say I've been talking with my team about I'm really excited about. We're not converting anymore, we're creating new, and that's where it's really exciting. 

David Turner

But if you make another acquisition, I know a conversion vendor. 

Bill Swallow

I know a guy. 

David Turner

Marianne, what questions do we have? I think we got another good five minutes or so for questions. 

Marianne Calilhanna

Yeah. Yeah. Becky, one question for you. How much time in the project plan did you allow for system users? How much time did you allocate for system users to get used to this new way of working and how long did it actually take? 

Becky Mann

That's a really good question. We kind of took it as a phased approach depending on who was working on what. So depending on if you were in one of those targeted projects, you had an earlier start and you probably had a little bit longer of a training going on because my team was just learning the system. We were building it all at the same time and getting our knowledge in there. But then we also kind of did continuous updates and trainings almost weekly with our team, and then also bringing in Heretto or Scriptorium too and we're like, "Wait, how do we do this? This is what I'm trying to do, how do we actually do this?" So I think that's where we try to allow as much time, which is why we targeted products that we're launching in Q4 versus a Q3 or even Q2. That's too soon. Let's give ourselves as much time as we can so that we can bring people along on this journey. 

Marianne Calilhanna

All right. When you discussed, there are two companies, two sets of content from two different companies coming together. How did you evaluate where there were redundancies or where content might be reused, you could consolidate and make one definitive version? How did you go through that process? 

Becky Mann

Yeah, so actually we're picking it on a case by case basis. So we're only doing it when we are refreshing a certification. For instance, we are going to be working on our new – actually, we're just releasing our Linux Plus product, which TestOut also had a Linux Pro product that covered the same objectives that our certification does. What we did is rather than trying to consolidate and release that all at once, we waited for the refresh, so we knew, okay, these are exam objectives, our changes.

55:54

And then we had our new learning progression, our instructional design model, and then we kind of built it from there going, "Okay, well, what material do we have from the TestOut side that we can use? What stuff do we have from the CompTIA side?" And then we kind of built it together from scratch there versus trying to merge that all together while we're doing the conversion. Instead, what we did is we said, "Okay, we've got our Linux Plus old product, we have our Linux Pro old product, we'll have that in the system, and then from there we're going to build the other two." So we're taking it as a case-by-case basis with each certification. 

Marianne Calilhanna

All right. David, do you think we have time for one more question? 

David Turner

Yeah, let's do another one.

 

Marianne Calilhanna

All right. Bill, you touched on the capabilities to extend DITA. How did you determine that threshold of specialization with some of the unique nature of the CompTIA content? 

Bill Swallow

Yeah, it's a delicate balance of you have to make sure that you're adding just enough specialization for a very specific need because it's really easy to go overboard and let's just rewrite the whole thing. And as David mentioned, yeah, you're essentially creating your own standard at that point. So we were very mindful of leveraging what was there, making sure that we were tying back to the same core elements so we weren't breaking the standard in any way. The way you usually specialize in DITA is everything has a fallback to a very specific, I guess, parent element and you could specialize outward from there, but it always relates back to that same one element. So we were very mindful about that, but in CompTIA's case, they had different assessment types, different types of questions that they needed to use in their LMS and they just didn't exist. So we really had to build a wrapper around it and we had to change fundamentally how objectives were being handled in their content because they had very specific business-driven needs for how they organized and it just wasn't that way in the model. So, we had to make some judgment calls, but lean on the side of less is more change when absolutely needed. 

Marianne Calilhanna

All right. 

David Turner

Well, Marianne, I'm going to let you close this out. I will say we've listed a few resources here. One thing I'll mention that I've found helpful is on Scriptorium's website, they have a podcast, and the last several episodes have actually all been about learning content or many of them have been and so I'd recommend you spend some time on that. But Marianne, I'll let you finish and take us out. 

 

Marianne Calilhanna

All right. Well, thank you so much for the three of you sharing your time, and absolutely to everyone who joined us today. Our colleague did push out links to those resources [LearningDITA; Content Transformation; The Scriptorium approach to content strategy], so grab them before we shut down the webinar. And I just want to remind everyone quickly, the DCL Learning Series comprises webinars. We have a monthly newsletter and a blog. You can access other webinars related to content structure and XML standards, AI, and more from the on-demand webinar section of our website at dataconversionlaboratory.com. We hope to see you in future webinars and if you have an idea for one, reach out. We'd love to hear from you. Have a great day. And this concludes today's broadcast.