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JoshHonomichl
October 16, 2015
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Plugin/module for technical document management?

  • October 16, 2015
  • 4 replies
  • 1432 views

Does anyone know of any plugin/module that has been developed for CQ to manage and deliver technical content (multi-chapter user documents)? 

I'm part of a technical writing group who are interested in delivering our technical content through CQ (user guides, protocols, inserts, etc.). We already deliver PDFs, but we see significant opportunity to add value by delivering our documentation in HTML, which will enable us to do a lot more with our content. From what we've seen, the OOB CQ product does not have any default functionality that would suit our needs, so we are currently exploring ways to augment our existing instance to provide an option for technical document delivery.

Just to be clear, we are soley focused on delivery of the content at this point. We are not interested in authoring in CQ as we will author and import our content from another CMS. 

Thanks in advance for any help.

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Best answer by smacdonald2008

At some point, your team should look at authoring content in CQ. We at Adobe do and it is very efficient once you set up everything like work flows,  etc. What is nice IS when you need to update a topic, you open that page, modify it, and publish. Gone are the days of rebuilding and deplying  an entire help system for a few changes.

4 replies

G
Adobe Employee
gopalKaAdobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 16, 2015

Please provide an example. Is there already something you deliver on this front that I can have a look at?

Lokesh_Shivalingaiah
Lokesh_Shivalingaiah
Level 10
October 16, 2015

Hi Josh,

If you just want to use it for delivery, then you can just pull all the documents which you create in another CMS on to the author and publish it to the delivery system from there.

However, as kalyan asked if you can give us an example or an usecase it would be much better for us to guide!

smacdonald2008
smacdonald2008Accepted solution
Level 10
October 16, 2015

At some point, your team should look at authoring content in CQ. We at Adobe do and it is very efficient once you set up everything like work flows,  etc. What is nice IS when you need to update a topic, you open that page, modify it, and publish. Gone are the days of rebuilding and deplying  an entire help system for a few changes.

J
JoshHonomichlAuthor
October 16, 2015

Thanks for the quick replies.

Good example of our deliverables can be found here, here, and here. As you can see, we generate all sorts of documentation -- from 300-page user guides on down to 2-page inserts.

Authoring directly into CQ is really not an option. Our business (biotechnology, et.al.) must comply with strict regulatory requirements -- one of which is that all documentation must be vaulted in a validated repository prior to distribution. Medical device manufacturers, financial institutions, and other government-regulated businesses all must comply with this standard or be prohibited from selling to the applicable country. There are only a handful of these validated, enterprise-class systems (SAP, Documentum, etc) on the market and, to my knowledge, CQ is not one of them. 

We were hoping to import content into CQ from our existing CMS using a scripted import or an API-mediated push. We are planning to transform our CMS output using an XSLT, vault the CQ/HTML content in our repository, then upload to CQ for web delivery. The question right now is how to store and display the content in CQ, especially the really large documents. From the way our group has deployed CQ, it seems really good at handling small topics/content, but I can see this solution working for multi-page chapters or workflows.

Aside from displaying the content, we are also hoping to get two additional key pieces of functionality from CQ (or a plugin/module). First, we need some sort of method to aggregate collections of content into publications. Our larger user docs come in multi-page workflows or chapters/appendixes, and we need some way to keep the content collections together for presentation (persisting order and hierarchy). Secondly, we need to provide some way for the user to navigate through the content of each publication. I suspect that these functions are not native to CQ, which is why we we are interested in modules/plugins. In short, we were hoping that someone else has already confronted this kind of problem and devised a packed solution.

Thanks again for any advice you've got.

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