SDL Trisoft, the leading provider of Component Content Management (CCM) systems for technical writing organizations, announced today that ESRI has selected SDL Trisoft™ as the platform to support the company’s move to a new structured authoring process using DITA, the XML standard for technical writing.  The move to structured authoring with DITA is part of a key strategic initiative at ESRI to address the growing demand for products and technical documentation in global markets.

ESRI designs and develops the world's leading geographic information system (GIS) technology.  A GIS is used to capture, manage, analyze, and display all forms of geographically referenced information in ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends that are not necessarily apparent when using other types of systems.

As a growing, global company with offices and distributors in more than 150 countries, ESRI needed the ability to issue software releases more frequently to its global customers as well as to meet the growing demand to support more languages.  To meet these requirements, the ESRI product documentation team made a strategic decision to adopt DITA as a standard for its structured writing and to move to a common methodology across the various development teams that include more than 120 writers.

The need for a robust system that could support content reuse, sharing, versioning and multilingual management made the decision to move to a standardized schema, methodology and management system a necessity. The previously used home-grown content management system and multiple publication workflows were no longer capable of supporting ESRI’s need to achieve economies of scale required by evolving market conditions. After several years of investigation and vision development, the team settled on the methodology of DITA, combined with the SDL Trisoft Component Content Management system.

“Based on market feedback and consultant recommendations, SDL Trisoft was among the top three contenders for our Component Content Management system,” said Catherine Jones, Program Manager, ArcGIS Documentation. “All three were good products but after exhaustive testing, SDL Trisoft emerged as the clear technology winner, due to the rich out-of-the-box DITA support, the powerful integration with JustSystem’s XMetaL Enterprise Author and the robust and extensible handling of multilingual content. Within 6 months we have managed to customize DITA, migrate more than 7 million words of content and more than 30,000 graphics and started to produce output for our next software release, all with very minimal customization of SDL Trisoft. The SDL Trisoft staff has been exemplary in its support and accessibility.”

“The ESRI team is visionary in understanding the power of DITA to scale content development for global markets,” said Howard Schwartz, VP Content Management at SDL Trisoft. “We are delighted to be working with such a forward-looking company for this strategic initiative. “

For more information on SDL Trisoft please go to http://sdltrisoft.com/white-papers