The LavaCon Content Strategy Conference | 27–30 October 2024 | Portland, OR
George Lewis

As the Service Delivery Director at 3di, George and his team design and implement technical communications solutions for companies – and then build the teams who to deliver those solutions.

George began his career as a technical writer in Germany, before rounding his skills in project management and marketing communications. He went on to found doc-department, a company focused on automating and streamlining technical communications and user documentation processes. doc-department subsequently merged with 3di.

Outside of work George can be found cycling, reading books on business and psychology, as well as returning to Spain and Germany. He keeps his Spanish and German skills sharp by listening to Euro-Pop.

Changing the Wheels While Driving: Migrating Legacy CMSs to a Single Help Center

Can you implement a new content strategy and completely rebuild your content delivery platform all while keeping up with a release cadence of 3–5 releases… per week!? With a solid content model, robust workflow management, and MadCap Flare you can.

This session will cover the approach that 3di took to help a leading SaaS developer modernize and improve their user information. This required us to migrate existing content from several existing legacy systems to a single Help Center that was both aligned with their new branding, and integrated with their platform. And all this needed to be done while continuing to produce content for the on-going product development.

I will dive into some aspects of the content modeling used to set the framework for the teams, the development of the Help Center HTML, and the workflows & tools used to keep the regular content and the development prototypes separate.

 

In this session attendees will learn:

  • Key aspects of content models and how to use them to manage content migration projects.
  • How 3di coordinated the global team of technical writers working on the project.
  • How text based content authoring tools can be used in continuous deployment workflows.