Powering complex, intelligent networks.

Ciena accelerates creation of timely, high-quality product documentation with Adobe Experience Manager Guides.

Established

1992

Employees: 8,000

Hanover, Maryland

www.ciena.com

147%

Content reuse across flagship product line

Products:

Adobe Experience Manager Guides

Adobe FrameMaker

Objectives

Centralize and modernize documentation processes

Optimize content reuse

Accelerate flow of content to global audiences

Results

Manages 31,000 assets across three product lines

Enables reuse of topics, maps, and graphics within multiple publications

Increases speed and efficiency of writing team

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Expecting the unexpected

Today’s data and communications service providers plan for any eventuality by ensuring their networks are flexible, open, and sustainable. At any given time, they must meet evolving customer requirements, accommodate shifts and breakthroughs in technology, and manage unexpected geopolitical events. Adaptability is the name of the game, which is why 85% of the world’s largest data and communications service providers rely on adaptive networking solutions from Ciena.

Ciena’s Global Product Documentation team is dedicated to helping customers anticipate what’s to come and harness their Ciena solutions accordingly. The team has developed 31,000 assets spanning three product lines – Manage, Control, and Plan; Converged Packet Optical; and Routing and Switching – including planning guides, installation guides, troubleshooting guides, and quick start guides. Overall, the assets encompass 18,769 topics, 1,273 maps, and 10,958 graphics spread over multiple libraries.

In recent years, the Global Product Documentation team has used Adobe FrameMaker as its primary DITA authoring and publishing tool, together with Adobe Acrobat to create PDF files. However, to keep up with the pace of market change, they wanted to centralize and optimize authoring and asset management.

“We needed a component content management system that could resolve the longstanding complexity of our processes, where content resided on different systems that were not DITA-aware,” explains Susanna Carlisi, Senior Content Strategist, Global Product Documentation at Ciena. “We wanted one digital asset management system from which to initiate all documentation workflows to enable our writers to spend more time creating great content while ensuring compliance with our documentation standards.”

Unifying the publishing process

Carlisi’s wish list included the capability to reuse content and manage dependencies, track the large volume of modular content, and search for content. She also sought a way to streamline versions and releases, integrate release management into the translation workflow, and use reports to track file errors and version comments.

“For practical reasons we wanted to retain FrameMaker because it’s a tool many of our writers are familiar with,” says Carlisi. “This meant that any new solution had to work seamlessly alongside it.”

Adobe Experience Manager Guides, a component content management system (CCMS), was the ideal choice. The Adobe CCMS offered the dependency, version release, translation, and search capabilities Ciena was looking for, as well as native integration with FrameMaker.

“We evaluated other solutions, but they didn’t measure up to the functionality and extensibility of Experience Manager Guides,” says Carlisi. “Furthermore, our management team wanted a tier one vendor.”

Improving oversight and control

With the decision made, Experience Manager Guides was customized to Ciena’s specifications, then integrated with FrameMaker to allow baseline DITA maps to be published and existing file settings and publishing templates to be retained.

Once that was completed, the team got to work addressing key priorities: optimizing reuse and managing dependencies and enhancing file management and search capabilities.

Since the Adobe CCMS tracks dependencies, referenced files are automatically downloaded when a DITA map or a topic file in FrameMaker is opened. Without the need to manually track dependencies, the team can organize files to optimize reuse.

Meanwhile, a full-text dynamic search capability resolves the longstanding challenge of sifting through thousands of topics to locate specific content. The team appreciates the ‘smart collection’ feature for checked-out content that enables users to configure search parameters once and bookmark them for future use.

To manage file versions and releases, the team uses baseline snapshots of DITA maps in Experience Manager Guides. A label configured for files included in the baseline helps identify the version of a file being used, or that will be used, in a baseline. Baselines – together with version labels, branch, and merge – can also be used to create or modify content without interfering with upcoming releases.

Another benefit of the system is that it allows files to be moved and renamed while retaining references, versions, and baseline information.

“The opportunities for content reuse have significantly increased our speed and efficiency as a team.”

Susanna Carlisi

Senior Content Strategist, Global Product Documentation, Ciena

Governance drives speed and efficiency

Adobe reporting enables users to track and view statistics related to content reuse; pinpoint errors, missing topics, and broken references in files; and check version comments and labels, collectively improving oversight and control of the process.

“Experience Manager Guides provides governance for how we store and organize our content, facilitating compliance,” says Carlisi. “With everything consolidated in one place, our writers can see, search, and reuse material more easily than before and increase their output.”

In fact, Carlisi reports that content reuse has risen by 147% in one of Ciena’s three flagship product lines, with one version of a topic, map, or graphic reused across a single or multiple publications.

“The opportunities for content reuse have significantly increased our speed and efficiency as a team,” says Carlisi.

The team also uses the CCMS to develop process and style guides in DITA, such as: Ciena DITA Authoring, Ciena Documentation Style Guide, DITA Conversion Guide, and Translation Procedures.

“With Experience Manager Guides and the wealth of resources and expertise from Adobe, our goals are always in sight.”

Susanna Carlisi

Senior Content Strategist, Global Product Documentation, Ciena

Accommodating the needs of global audiences

Once a document is finalized by an author, it is converted into a PDF and published to the web and mobile devices via HTML5, which automatically adjusts the content to the size of the screen, improving accessibility and navigation for customers.

With over one-third of Ciena’s revenue generated outside the U.S., the Global Product Documentation team strives to tailor content to the needs of customers globally. Carlisi plans to embed the translation workflow in the CCMS to support business requirements. The translation workflow is configured to use baselines to identify updates or changes to existing documents and filter out anything out-of-date, then send just that material to Ciena’s translation vendor. This will save time and money on translations and speed up the release of fresh, topical content in local languages.

Beyond translations, Carlisi would like to reduce the steps involved in the authoring process further and harness the power of the cloud to achieve one-click publishing in multiple formats.

“With Experience Manager Guides and the wealth of resources and expertise from Adobe, our goals are always in sight,” Carlisi says. “There’s no limit to what we can achieve.”