Solutions

The world’s leading technology and manufacturing companies rely on Astoria to deliver solutions that leverage and extend XML-based Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) compliant content management for dynamic content delivery.

Our offering provides reduced time to market, more rapid expansion into global markets, a significant and rapid increase in top-line revenue growth, as well as enhanced information quality, reliability, accuracy and precision — in addition to the lowest total cost of ownership and the highest ROI of any on-demand content management system.

Content Management Solutions

The world’s leading technology and manufacturing companies build content in XML to deliver complex content to their customers. They’re building this content in the Astoria platform to address a variety of business problems:

  • Customers have asked for a way to combine search and drill-down (called “faceted search”) to locate information in a company’s support portal
  • Management expects to sell products and services into a new market and a new language in less than 90 days
  • Company A buys Company B, so all of Company B’s branding must be changed immediately
  • Field service teams need content that is aligned with their skill sets

They’re also using Astoria to deal with the challenges they face in producing products:

  • Building documentation for dozens of product varieties from a single content set
  • Working on three or four releases of a product at the same time, so documentation teams need to switch between product versions continually
  • Centralizing content that is used across a lot of documents so that an author can update the content in one place and have that change propagate automatically
  • Keeping the product message and feature descriptions consistent across Marketing, Customer Service, and Engineering

Whether your industry is high-tech or low-tech, hardware or software, regulated or emerging, if you have to produce something for people to read or view, the Astoria platform has a configuration that works for your business.
The Astoria Software team backs up these claims with an in-depth investigation of the return on investment (ROI) your organization would accrue by adopting Astoria. Our proof-points are customer-validated; every claimed benefit has a firm basis of estimate and a direct applicability to your business problem. That’s why customers who adopt Astoria achieve 100% ROI more quickly than with any competing solution.

Customer Engagement

Customers will always be an enterprise’s most valuable resource. In today’s business climate, your customers are willing to invest their own time and energy to help you make your products and services work better to meet their needs. All you have to do is open up the lines of communication. Here’s how you do that with Astoria.

DITA

DITA, the XML standard that IBM donated to the open­-source community, is the underlying encoding used by an increasing number of organizations in North America, Europe, Asia- Pacific, and India. When organizations choose to migrate their content and their processes to XML, they choose DITA for three key reasons:

1. Inventing a custom set of structural rules in XML is hard work that has been done in DITA already. Choosing DITA saves months and months of this kind of work.

2. There are a great many DITA­-qualified resources to bring to a project. These resources may be DITA­-aware XML editors (such as oXygen, XMetaL, or Arbortext) or DITA-trained technical writers, or DITA­-fluent information architects. Whatever the project requires, choosing DITA gives companies a wide choice of project resources at reasonable rates.

3. Use of DITA promotes the kind of focused, topic­-based authoring that leads to high levels of content reuse. When a concept or a task or even a reference item is refined to its most concise and correct form, it can be used in multiple documents because the item does not depend on what comes before or after it. That’s why companies who choose DITA tend to pay less for the content they create.

The Astoria system is the perfect complement to choosing DITA for your project. Astoria fully complies with each version of the DITA standard. Astoria is integrated with the leading DITA editors and the DITA Open Toolkit. And, Astoria’s features enable teams find and reuse content.

Non-DITA

In the years before DITA became a popular XML standard, companies could choose one of three ways to build structured content:

1. Use DocBook, a markup language spawned in 1991. DocBook was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software. DocBook markup can be expressed in SGML or in XML.

2. Use an SGML vocabulary, such as MIL­STD­38784, to build flight operations manuals, repair parts and lists of special tools, and technical bulletins, among many other kinds of printed and electronic output.

3. Build a customized XML or SGML vocabulary. It could be a DocBook variant or something completely new.

The Astoria platform was conceived, designed, implemented, and deployed to support all of the foregoing options. Astoria is the only enterprise­wide system to support any SGML or XML structure. No product configuration or other kinds of special adjustments are required. Whatever structural rules your project requires, Astoria can import and validate that content immediately.