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PatrickDLR
March 25, 2025
Question

Is Content Reuse Effective?

  • March 25, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 958 views

Hi community,

 

A colleague of mine recently returned from the Adobe conference and shared that they spoke with several users who advocated against using content reuse. I attended the conference the year prior, and my experience was quite the opposite. I met many users who were using content reuse effectively and shared great success stories.

 

So I wanted to bring the question here: Are there other organizations (especially in highly regulated or complex industries) effectively using content reuse in Adobe Experience Manager?

 

Thanks in advance for your insights!

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3 replies

Adobe-Chad
Adobe Employee
Adobe-ChadAdobe Employee
Adobe Employee
April 2, 2025

Hello Patrick, 

 

You do not mention AEM Guides specifically in your question, but this is an AEM Guides forum so I will assume you're asking specifically about Guides. Briefly, content reuse is often one of the primary business drivers for any organization adopting DITA (and therefore AEM Guides).

 

When thinking about content reuse, a lot of people just consider the ability to reuse topics in different maps (topicref) and, at a more granular level, reuse elements below the topic level (notes are an easy example). These are common and I would guess that nearly all Guides customers use these basic content reuse mechanisms at some level of sophistication.

 

I would suggest, however, that the concept of "content reuse" includes other mechanisms as well:

  • Supporting different audiences (end user, administrator, etc.), platforms (Windows, Linux, etc.), or products (different trim levels of a car model, for example) from a single source of truth via conditional processing
  • Multi-channel content delivery to AEM Sites, PDF, and so on.

It would be interesting to learn what your colleague heard from the conference attendees; my experience is that content reuse is a nearly universal use case for DITA and AEM Guides.

    P
    PatrickDLRAuthor
    April 2, 2025

    Hi Chad,

     

    Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. I appreciate it. You and I (and my team) are fully aligned on the value and benefits of content reuse. I've built a strong business case over the past year+, backed by plenty of public examples, case studies, and real-world use. However, I'm facing some headwinds. A few product owners recently returned from Vegas with anecdotal claims that content reuse is too hard to manage, which has created some resistance. I was hoping to get overwhelming support from the community to counter that narrative. 

     

    Nevertheless, I will continue advocating for the out-of-the box reuse capabilities that Guides provides. Thanks again!  

    DivrajSingh
    Adobe Employee
    DivrajSinghAdobe Employee
    Adobe Employee
    April 3, 2025

    @patrickdlr : I think with other responses you are aligned with advantages for reuse but to address your query and for clarity on this post about your thoughts from User conference conversations:

    AEM Guides as a product is used for multiple other advantages but not only reuse - and considering that users know that for some simple scenarios reuse is overwhelming and may seem complex when tradeoff between complexity and productivity is evaluated.

    Some examples where such content architecture(avoiding reuse) may hold true, mentioned below:

    - end user experience for content is foreseen only as marketing pages, knowledge base articles, standalone chunks of content etc. authored via Guides -  publish to not only AEM Sites but to PDF, JSON, Experience fragment etc. also => where you understand the need of structured but don't require reuse at granular level

    - Not needing to publish same content across multiple channels, formats or languages - hence content is authored only once and published to intended format/channel => again there is no hard need to reuse for different audience 

    - content is not authored directly in system or created from scratch and is rather fed into AEM only for publishing from one/different sources => hence reuse cannot be controlled in CCMS, rather managed by source/originating system

    - content that serves personalization or legal regulatory content; where reusing content without review can cause bad user experience or regulatory violations if reused content is presented in a different context => hence reuse is carefully introduced in such cases

     

    And above are few examples or reasons you will hear not only in Guides user conference but in general as well.

     

    I hope that gives more clarity and justification

      Abbey3
      Abbey3
      April 3, 2025

      Hi Patrick,

      We have recently gone down this rabbit hole ourselves. When we implemented Guides reuse was the primary use-case and target for streamlining the content we produce, but we are finding after creating more and more content in the system that there are so many nuances to content that it's become a nuisance! 

       

      There is one, clear benefit for us in our content reuse: reduction of translation costs. The more we can reuse content and not create a new topic, the faster and cheaper our translation costs stay. 

       

      And... I agree with your questioning about how many industries are using this feature in their content creation. We are in appliance manufacturing, so have many things (warnings, cautions, etc) that are regulated and standardized but we also struggle with this approach. 

       

      Would love to talk more about how you are devising a strategy on this topic!

      Thanks, Abbey

        P
        PatrickDLRAuthor
        April 3, 2025

        Hi Abbey, 

         

        Thanks so much for sharing your experience, I can definitely relate. I 've been down this rabbit hole for quite a while too. I've been able to implement reuse at a smaller scale using reusable components (snippets and topics) in our stage environment. It's been helpful in driving efficiency and consistency on a separate project.

         

        But unfortunately, we haven't been able to fully roll out the reuse strategy to production. The product owner isn't yet comfortable with it, which has been a blocker. We've done a couple rounds of content analysis and identified that about 20% of our content is redundant. Like you mentioned there are definitely nuances to similar content that make topic reuse not a viable solution. However, templates and advance reuse technics could potentially help streamline these content variants. 

         

        Translation is not an issue for me (one language), my primary focus is improving authoring efficiency and delivering a more consistent experience to end users. Most of what I work on is technical documentation, so consistency is key.

         

        Would love to talk more. I'll send you a direct message shortly. Thanks again! 

        kautuk_sahni
        Community Manager
        kautuk_sahniCommunity Manager
        Community Manager
        July 2, 2025

        @patrickdlr Just checking in — were you able to resolve your issue?
        We’d love to hear how things worked out. If the suggestions above helped, marking a response as correct can guide others with similar questions. And if you found another solution, feel free to share it — your insights could really benefit the community. Thanks again for being part of the conversation!

        Kautuk Sahni
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