The fundamental element

Because water is fundamental to life, water systems are arguably one of the most important civil infrastructures. Drinking-water systems collect water from rivers and lakes, remove pollutants, and distribute clean water safely for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Wastewater systems collect used water and sewage, remove contaminants, and discharge clean water back into rivers and lakes for future use. Other systems prevent flooding, generate electricity, reclaim gray water for irrigation, and support industrial processes.

Properly managing these systems requires effective measurement. Since 1967, NIVUS has developed solutions for accurately measuring flows and levels through advanced sensor technologies, transmitters, data collection systems, and telecontrols.

In 2015, NIVUS entered the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) market with the launch of NICOS. The scalable, modular NICOS system allows organizations to locally and remotely monitor and control flows, collect and analyze real-time data, and access telemetry data from any web-enabled device.

“SCADA systems like NICOS are crucial for water and wastewater utilities, hydrologists, and industrial users,” says Karin Guttmann, Technical Editor, NIVUS GmbH. “They provide data to support public safety, improve process efficiency, assure product quality, and maintain system uptime.”

Starting from scratch

The NICOS telecontrol and software system is NIVUS’s first foray into software development. The solution’s modular design and cloud-based subscription options provide an extensive variety of choices for customization. It also includes the NICOS Studio engineering tool for customizing controls without requiring programming skills.

NIVUS needed to create NICOS product documentation from scratch but realized quickly that it would need more advanced tools due to its larger and more complex materials such as handbooks, training materials, and online help tools. The company originally developed technical documentation for its sensors and transmitters with Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word. NICOS documentation needed to be modular, created in XML, and publishable in PDF and HTML5.

NIVUS chose Adobe FrameMaker over MadCap Flare as its authoring and publishing solution because of its advanced XML/DITA capabilities, clear user menus, multi-format publishing, and content reusability.

“Adobe FrameMaker lets NIVUS create content in DITA without the need to develop our own document type definition,” says Guttmann. “It also lets us publish in all of our desired formats without requiring anyone to have any XSL formatting or XSLT programming experience.”

Adobe FrameMaker features such as conditional tags enable NIVUS to easily use single sources of content for multiple projects. For instance, NIVUS can create a PDF print version and an HTML Help version of a document from independent pieces of tagged content, such as anchored frames, images, tables, cross-references, footnotes, markers, and table rows and columns. Similarly, the Filter By Attribute simplifies the task of filtering content based on different output scenarios.

First PDF in six months

Neither NIVUS nor its lone technical editor, Guttmann, used XML for documentation until the company launched NICOS. So, NIVUS engaged Adobe partner practice innovation for a combination of Adobe FrameMaker training and XML/DITA concept building. Markus Wiedenmaier, Founder of practice innovation, conducted a two-day session focused on process optimization, adapting DITA to NIVUS’s internal requirements, and how to configure a PDF publication.

“After an initial introduction to Adobe FrameMaker, Karin quickly learned to make and maintain PDF templates on her own,” Wiedenmaier says. “This says a lot about Adobe FrameMaker and its out-of-the-box ability to support XML/DITA authoring.”

After training, Guttmann focused on editing structured templates and EDDs with the goal of rapidly publishing to PDF directly from Adobe FrameMaker. To complete the document in a short timeframe, Guttmann also relied on several features within Adobe FrameMaker, such as the Structure View that allows her to expand or collapse elements as needed to show or hide document outline details. The Element Catalog and Attribute Catalog also simplified document development with the one-click ease of identifying and applying elements and attributes available at any location.

“The documentation generation had top priority within NIVUS, which is why I only edited EDDs and templates for PDF publishing,” Guttmann says. “On my own, it took just six months to go from installing Adobe FrameMaker to the first PDF publication.”

Advancing NICOS documentation

With the PDF versions of the NICOS materials complete, NIVUS is preparing the content for publication to web and mobile devices, creating context-sensitive help files, and translating content into multiple languages. Because Adobe FrameMaker has HTML5 capabilities built-in, NIVUS will be able to publish responsive content for use on any device. By inserting context-sensitive Help markers into FrameMaker documents, NIVUS will be able to simplify the generation of links that instantly provide content based on the context of what the user is doing.

NIVUS is currently creating data modules, which are easy-to-manage documents designed for reuse. Adobe FrameMaker supports the S1000D international standard for creating, managing, and publishing data modules and publishing the modules through the intuitive, project-based Adobe FrameMaker interface.

“Because NIVUS’s content development is more complex than before, we’re delighted that Adobe FrameMaker has built-in connectors for leading systems,” Guttmann says. “Integrating content authoring, management, and translation engines will give NIVUS better version control and content reusability within more streamlined workflows.”

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