SDL Trisoft for DITA

SDL Trisoft is the world's leading Component Content Management solution designed specifically for technical publications organizations in global companies.

SDL Trisoft was selected from more than 800 products after comprehensive assessment by the KMWorld judging panel. All products selected demonstrate clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that serve the vendors’ full spectrum of constituencies, especially their customers.

Providing correct and up-to-date information on a range of products across global markets is a significant challenge in today’s competitive environment. The SDL Trisoft Component Content Management (CCM) system for DITA manages XML document components rather than complete documents or manuals. A component is a topic of one or two pages in which a particular procedure, process, principle or structure is described. These components are reused in different publications for different products, different audiences and different media. The SDL Trisoft CCM system works with standard off-the-shelf document structures like DITA or IMAP.

Among the many business benefits are faster time to deployment, higher levels of reuse, easier versioning capabilities and increased productivity. In fact, customers report on average a 30-50% efficiency gain in the overall content lifecycle, as well as 50-75% reduction in translation costs, resulting from content reuse and the elimination of desktop publishing.

Some of Trisoft's many capabilities include:

• Management of versioning and revisioning, and relationship of topics to one another
  
• Management of the publication object
  
• Link management
  
• Baselining
  
• Map management
  
• Workflow
  
• Condition and variable management
  
• Process review
  
• Multilingual content management
  
• Pre-translation capabilities
  
• Integrations to DITA Open Toolkit & SDL LiveContent - dynamic publishing
  

SDL Trisoft 2011 R2

The SDL Trisoft 2011 “R2” release extends the component content management system with the integration of SDL Xopus, an easy to use, browser-based XML editor. The integration makes it possible for casual contributors and SMEs to write content in structured form without technical knowledge of XML or DITA. In this way, the quality of content can be enriched by engineers, field service workers, and support staff.

For more advanced users, SDL is also releasing an updated bridge that connects SDL Trisoft to Adobe FrameMaker10. To address the growing number of roles and departments engaging with structured product content, the SDL Trisoft release expands enterprise readiness through the addition of centralized user authentication and user provisioning via LDAP and Active Directory.

In addition, SDL Trisoft adds the ability to load balance publishing processes across multiple servers, addressing the need for large global organizations with agile development processes to publish their entire content set on a nightly basis.

• Component-based storage
• XML-based repository with version control, security, taxonomy and search
• Off-the-shelf support for the OASIS DITA standard
  
• Integration with leading XML authoring tools and publishing engines
  
• Conditional text and variables increase reuse and customization of information
  
• Assembly of publications, with version control on included content
  
• Multilingual environment with translation management and in-context pre-translation
  
• Integrated workflow in a fully web-based environment
  
• Powerful dynamic delivery capabilities through integration with SDL LiveContent
  

SDL Trisoft Hosted Solutions

SDL Trisoft DITA is available as a flexible hosted solution for those who do not wish to bring a solution in-house.

SDL Trisoft can be run as a hosted service and managed off-premise. SDL manages over 500 enterprise systems in its tier 3 hosting center. The hosted solution includes service-level agreements, data backup and IT and Application Services that provide added flexibility for those who do not wish to bring a solution in-house.

Contact SDL to discuss the best method of deployment for your organization.

SDL Trisoft Multilingual Support

The SDL Trisoft DITA system helps drive down the cost of localization and translation with powerful translation management capabilities.

SDL Trisoft DITA is particularly strong in the way it handles multilingual content. With several key capabilities for managing translation and localization, companies can realize upwards of 50-75% reduction in their translation costs. Here's how:

• Stores both English and target language topics and their relationship to one another in the same repository
  
• Tracks the target languages needed for each topic and publication
• Inherits target languages automatically - tracking whether a topic into into two different publications with different target languages
• Full Unicode support
• Multilingual search
• Side by side preview of source and target content
• In-context perfect matching capability that prevents already translated content from going out to translation again
• Automation of xml-lang/locale and attribute renaming for target language topics

And because SDL Trisoft DITA is part of the SDL suite of Global Information Management solutions, there is a seamless integration with SDL's Translation Management System for out-of-the-box translation capabilities.

SDL Trisoft Technical Strengths

The SDL Trisoft DITA system solves the problem of moving technical and consumer information through the entire lifecycle - from content creation, through translation, and out to publishing.

SDL Trisoft DITA was designed for XML and DITA from the start. As a result, the software has one of the richest set of out-of-the-box DITA capabilities in the industry. Some of its technical strengths include:

• Component-based storage following IMAP, DITA or your own DTD
• Out-of-the-box support for DITA-based DTDs that can be used without the need for further customization
  
• Content storage of XML in a central repository with powerful version control, security, taxonomy and full-text search
  
• Off-the-shelf support for the OASIS DITA standards, including the latest specifications
  
• Integration with market-leading XML authoring tools
  
• Out-of-the-box integration with the DITA Open Toolkit and other publishing engines
  
• Readily available DITA style sheets for generating output formats such as PDF, HTML, HTMLHelp, JavaHelp, and Eclipse Help
  
• Robust support for the use of conditions and variables, enabling an increased level of reuse and customization of information
  
• Link integrity to ensure valid use of cross references, references to topics, and conrefs, independent of file naming
  
• Easy assembly of publications, with explicit version control on modules and illustrations
  
• Multilingual environment with powerful translation management and in-context pre-translation
  
• Integrated workflow that allows authors, reviewers and translators to collaborate in a fully web-based environment
  

Key Benefits

• Single Sourcing
  Write once and reuse your content, enabling you to lower costs and gain efficiency in managing your product information
  
  
• Personalization
  Improve customer satisfaction through richer, more complete and personalized documentation that’s made possible using metadata and XML-tagged content
  
  
• Business Agility
  Empower businesses to more easily respond to rapidly changing market conditions, competitors, and faster release cycles by reusing content and automating processes
  
  
• Global Information Management
  Drive down costs and accelerate time to global markets by leveraging SDL’s suite of translation and delivery
  
  
• Speed Time to Productivity
  Accelerate the move to DITA using SDL Trisoft’s out-of-the-box support for DITA 1.2 and the DITA Open Toolkit

Business Benefits

• Reduce content development costs by 30-50%
• Drive down translation costs by 30-50%
• Accelerate time to global markets
• Increase agility and responsiveness of business
• Produce technical content that is more accurate, up-to-date and tailored to the business needs of your customers