Content Management
While the difference between unstructured and unstructured content may not be immediately apparent to you, you are probably aware of the pains that unstructured content can bring if you are a part of a growing company that creates many documents in Word, Framemaker, or another word processor. Unstructured content has been created using software that may have used formatting tags, but did not have programmatic validation against a set of rules on how and where these tags could be used. The main difference between structured and unstructured content is that with structured content there are rule sets (i.e., DTD or schema) that define where certain pieces of content can go. The lack of content structure leads to inconsistency across documentation and the inability to reuse content in an effective way.
If you do not currently support online documentation or if you plan to migrate your content to a structured format such as XML, we recommend Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). DITA has been adopted across diverse industry domains because of its relatively low cost of entry and high versitility.
In DITA, tasks topics are the main building blocks of its user assistance architecture. Tasks provide step-by-step instructions by describing to users exactly what to do and the order in which to do them. If you are currently using MS Word, Framemaker, or another binary authoring format, DITA may be the first giant step toward a systematic approach to management of your content.
