Global Help System

An old online help system with a 2.6-million-word count, translated into 6 languages, was completely unstructured and the team of four tech writers couldn’t keep up with the volume of content. They needed to improve their search results as well as clean up decades of extraneous verbiage. Everything I did had to be executed within the Sitecore CMS. I built a plan to move the team to structured content and modify Sitecore to handle complex technical content.

Analysis

I began with a content audit to determine what we were dealing with. Everything was based on word count and topics, which are the best measurements for content project scoping.

Moving to Structured Content

No one on the team, including developers, had XML experience, This required politics and a long learning curve for everyone. I trained the writers on structured authoring along with writing in international English to prep the content for translation.

Embedded CMS

Sitecore was never meant to be a technical documentation platform. I designed what was essentially a nested CMS that would make up for Sitecore’s shortcomings.