Jo'lene and Bernard explore how important the ability to migrate content during a corporate acquisition is and how DITA can make that a reality.

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Lessons Learned...
...Migration to DITA During Corporate
Acquisitions

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In the world of corporate acquisitions...
... deals worth billions of dollars don’t always
hinge on what can be done with corporate
source content. However, for Broadcom, a major
consideration was how to migrate hundreds of
thousands of topics from multiple sources to
DITA. Not just migration to topics, but to
correctly structured, best-practices,
task/concept/reference, maps, elements, and
attributes. DITA, done right.
Discover how the process unfolded. Pitfalls,
challenges, successes (& failures) along the way.
Details on issues to think about during ANY
migration, big or small. Throw in a pandemic
mid-conversion and even further complicate the
process.
Net result: Quality DITA. How we got there?
That’s an entire conversation.
DITA, content migration, publishing, and the
good (and bad) of moving massive volumes of
content to best-practices DITA for use by
hundreds of writers and reviewers around the
world.
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Jo’lene Jernberg
Broadcom
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Broadcom: Senior Manager, Technical
Publications and Web Content Strategy
● People manager
● Content migration expertise
● 25+ Tech Pubs experience
● Content strategist
● Tech Pubs best practices
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Bernard
Aschwanden
Publishing Smarter
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Publishing Smarter: President
● Content strategist, publishing technologies expert,
author, and geek-enough
● Certified Technical Trainer
● Content management
● Topic-based writing
● Structured content (e.g. DITA)
Society for Technical Communications
● Past President
● STC Associate Fellow
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Key Takeaways
1. How to plan for content
migration
2. Lessons learned and how you
might apply them
3. Content analysis for more than
just conversion to topics and
maps
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The Acquisitions
Jo'lene
CA Technologies
● Pivot from hardware to
including software
Challenges
1. Finding a new way to
presenting content (HTML)
2. Moving 1.7M pieces of content
3. Building publishing and
authoring capabilities
4. Wanted platform for quick
migration, end-to-end
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The Acquisitions
Jo'lene
Symantec
● Smaller migration (~300K html
pages and ~700 PDF) to AEM
Good thing:
● Had an architecture in place
● Content had better structures
● Didn’t have to build everything
from ground-up
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Past Issues
Jo'lene
● Content migration from CA
Technologies filled database up
● Non-uniform and unstructured
content sources
● Output generation issues
● Lack of FrameMaker Publishing
Server for marketing, used OT
● Unproductive folder structures
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Source Content
Bernard
● Source files were a mix of
legacy CCMS, other tools, and
FrameMaker
● DITA serves as a standard for a
uniform content structure
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Why DITA?
Both Speakers
● Content versus output
● Enforces common and
consistent look and feel
● Content reuse
● Conditional content
● Shared content for both
hardware and software
● Security/Risk management
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The Plan;
The Reality
Jo’lene
When do you FREEZE content to move it to
a new system?
● Plan: Content inventory, move older content
first, then newer content
● Reality: have to schedule around ongoing
work → longer migration schedule
Advice:
● Build a migration schedule that considers
delivery dates
● Plan for training
● Consider possible errors in conversion
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The Plan;
The Reality
Bernard
● Plan: expect that source
structures would be uniform
● Reality: structures are different;
should we rewrite or clean up?
● Advice: get the most complex
content as a sample to test
scripts on
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Challenges
Overcome
Jo’lene
Training
● Used actual materials from the
database to speed up and ease
learning
Content cleanup
● Led to 66% decrease in time needed
to generate content
○ From 30 mins to 10 mins
○ Generate every two months
○ With 400 products
● Saving 266 hours annually (a month
and a half) just in publishing
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Challenges
Overcome
Bernard
Source content
● Broad mix of sources
● No “one size fits all” option
● Had to build repeatable processes
● Some content continued w/edits
Loss of “in-person”
● Had to stay flexible for meetings
● Tougher to point to “this” on a
screen
Tech issues
● Problems could be source,
conversion, AEM, etc… Tracing is
tough!
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Success
Both
● Consistent and reliable content
● Uniform DITA structure =
seamless content migration
● Migration to standard DITA
eliminated overrides in the way
of generations
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Lessons Learned
1. Preparation and Plan
2. People
3. Tend to details, but think Big
Picture
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Contact Info
Jo’lene Jernberg
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Bernard Aschwanden

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Key Takeaways
1. How to plan for content
migration
2. Lessons learned and how you
might apply them
3. Content analysis for more than
just conversion to topics and
maps
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Thanks
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