Twenty-five years ago, armed with a computer science degree, Nick applied for a developer position at SAS. He was surprised when SAS invited him to interview—not for a traditional development role, but for one in the Technical Publishing department. At the time, he knew little about technical documentation but recognized SAS as a great software company to work for and eagerly accepted the opportunity.

Today, Nick leads the Tech-Pub Engineering Team, which develops and maintains the tools that power SAS product documentation. His team built the structured XML publishing system that has been the backbone of SAS documentation for over two decades. Designed by software developers to treat documentation like code, this system has continually evolved —most recently integrating GitHub repos for storage in 2024.

Do You Need a CCMS to Deliver Enterprise Content With Quality and Velocity?

Co-presented with: Edward Porter

At SAS, a team of globally distributed content creators use a custom Docs-like-Code publishing system to manage the documentation for around 250 software products. The system delivers around 1000 English “docsets” in multiple formats monthly—100s of which are translated into 20+ languages.

Unlike a traditional CCMS, the SAS CI/CD publishing system leverages GitHub and CVS for versioning and maintaining structured XML and other source files, while still affording content creators extensive modularity and enabling reuse.

Organically evolving for the past twenty years, SAS documentation infrastructure represents an alternative to the typical DITA-based CCMS solution. This case study explores the features, feasibility, strengths, and weaknesses of a content management strategy built on software development CI/CD tooling and practices. Does leveraging open-source software development tooling to build and maintain documentation stack up against the CCMS? Is it right for you?

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Maybe you don’t need a CCMS. There is an alternative to the component content management system that could be leveraged for an agile, low-cost content management strategy.
  
• Your content could be “code.” Software engineers have built robust systems for high-velocity development. Those tools could be your pathway to lightning-fast content delivery.
  
• Nothing comes for free. Rolling your own content publishing pipeline is flexible and can reach enterprise-scale, but there are tradeoffs.