Kaplan Professional Education is a premier provider of licensing exam prep and continuing education for businesses and individuals in the financial planning, insurance, securities, real estate, and accounting industries. Through classroom instruction and online courses, they help customers comply with regulatory requirements and earn advanced professional designations to help them progress in their careers.

The Kaplan Professional Education team created content for each deliverable in separate tools, which resulted in multiple, inconsistent instances of the same content. Updating the content was a manual, costly process that impacted the product release schedule.

In the Discovery Workshop, Amber and team determined that DITA was right architecture for the content. Amber collaborated with the team throughout the pilot project and deployment to develop the appropriate information architecture and technology requirements, mentored members of the team for their new roles, and designed the specialization plugin.

"Amber helped our Kaplan Professional Education team in our first unified content strategy using DITA. DITA has allowed us to use a single-source of content for a variety of outputs, saving us countless hours of work. With Amber’s guidance, we successfully deployed an information architecture and developed complex XSLT transformations. Additionally, Amber helped us demonstrate the return on investment to the organization and provided training to ensure that our team gained the skills and knowledge to further develop and manage the model ourselves."

-Kimberlee Adam, DITA Systems Manager

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) sets industry-specific standards for corporate sustainability disclosure, with a view towards ensuring that disclosure is material, comparable, and decision-useful for investors.

The SASB research team created and managed their content in multiple source formats and struggled to support multi-channel publishing. In addition, they needed a strategy to track their research and associate with the affected standards.

Amber helped the team optimize their data model, designed a corresponding content model and developed a DITA specialization that integrated them. In addition, she led the team through developing new processes, assisted in technology selection, and mentored an internal resource to become an Information Architect.

"The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board engaged Amber to help solve our content storage and publishing challenges. She not only helped us address those challenges, but helped us standardize how we create, store, and publish our Standards and research material. This project centralized our research and Standards management, and leveraged our Agile process to implement a technology solution quickly and iteratively."

-Jessi Lawrence & Madhu Mathew

The U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) is a scientific nonprofit organization that sets standards for the identity, strength, quality, and purity of medicines, food ingredients, and dietary supplements manufactured, distributed and consumed worldwide. USP’s drug standards are enforceable in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration, and these standards are used in more than 140 countries.

To support their specific requirements, USP had implemented a specialization for their content. As the team extended the DITA implementation, the Information Architect needed to update their DITA specialization plugin.

Amber led the Information Architect (IA) through the process of documenting the plugin, collaborated with the IA to create a strategy for the USP DITA support, and mentored the IA to successfully maintain the plugin.

"The US Pharmacopeial Convention implemented specialized DITA support to standardize the content model for our publications. When we needed to extend the support and update the specialization, the company engaged Amber to mentor me. She was great! We immediately started to put together a toolkit that I still use when I explain our specializations to users. Whenever I had a need for a new specialization or function, Amber would say ‘Let’s pull up the spec online.’ I hear her voice every time I need to add to the DTD as I navigate to the spec. Not only is Amber knowledgeable on the DITA spec, but she is able to convey this knowledge in an easy to understand manner. This empowered me to not only make necessary changes, but also to describe the DITA to others within my organization. It was a pleasure working with Amber, and I thank her for her mentorship."

-Kate Mullen

McAfee provides software that protects customers’ digital devices and computers from threats. Because they serve a both business and consumer customers around the globe, they need to provide customers the right content for their device and location in the right language for the right product.

During the Technical Publications team component content management system (CCMS) implementation, Amber designed the information architecture, assisted with CCMS configuration decisions, defined the conversion requirements and worked with the team to document content model usage, analyze custom delivery requirements, and write specification for implementation. Amber coached the information architect (IA), tools specialist, and editor resources to maintain DITA implementation.

The McAfee Technical Publications team successfully uses DITA to create and deliver customized content, effectively reuses content across deliverables, and efficiently localizes content into 28 languages. Their successful DITA implementation provides the foundation for delivering content to customers in new ways as delivery technology and customer expectations change.

Tektronix is the premier supplier of test and measurement equipment. Because inconsistent content was affecting product sales, the team needed to share content between the marketing materials, user manuals, e-commerce site content and DRUPAL content. The challenge was to convert content authored in proprietary XML to DITA to single-source content for multiple authoring teams and multiple delivery systems and implement a CCMS.

Amber led a discovery workshop for stakeholders to determine the effort to migrate to DITA. Amber’s services included analyzing content and deliverable structure and identifying content model requirements. Amber helped the team develop DITA topics for specific purposes, such as data specifications. She mentored IA resources to own and maintain the content model and supporting systems, and helped to define the conversion process for legacy content. Finally, Amber worked with the team to develop and deliver initial user training, and assist with metadata strategy development.

"I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Amber in a professional setting. I’ve attended workshops led by Amber where she ‘threads-the-needle’ with amazing skill and precision. What I mean by that is she is able to assess the differing levels of knowledge and understanding of DITA, topic-based authoring, and tools, within the mix of attendees, and skillfully match her level of detail and emphasis to exactly match the needs of the group. She has an amazingly broad and deep understanding of DITA and Component Content Management. My team greatly benefited from her ability to help us design a new technical strategy for our content architecture and reuse. We look forward to the continuing partnership from Amber. And I expect our success is greatly enhanced from the benefit of Amber’s precise guidance."

-Bryan Schnabel, Content Management