Single-sourcing between outputs of the same type is supposed to be, in the words of British chef Jamie Oliver, easy-peasy. The work on DITA started by IBM and eventually donated to the OASIS standards organization in 2004 made content more and more portable. The wide adoption of XML - DocBook, and then DITA - and custom DTDs, removed much of the pain of moving content between manuals.

The component content management system (CMS) vendors quickly got on board with the newer standards, and today, virtually all component CMSes support XML in at least the DocBook and DITA flavors. The number of case studies grew as organizations wanted to share their successes.

However, the situation on the training side isn’t as advanced. The authoring tools aren’t standardized, the learning systems often don’t support XML, and the end media may not take accept the outputs from content management system. What’s an organization to do when training deliverables are part of the content mix? Linda Urban, a long-time content development consultant, has worked on many a project where training has been one of the components, and has had to find ways of handling this as part of the documentation suite. Linda tells you what many vendors won’t, and helps you work around some of the technology limitations you’ll have to live with until the training industry catches up to the documentation side.

Linda shares her insights and strategies at Documentation and Training West in a case study on Modular Training Content.