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Workday Goes DITA with Bluestream XDocs

Bluestream Database Software, a provider of XML storage and content management technologies, announced recently that publisher Workday has finished their implementation of online documentation and application help system leveraging DITA processes and Bluestream’s XDocs XML CMS.

“Workday’s choice of DITA as our documentation schema was the deciding factor in our selection of XDocs” said Stan Swete,VP, Products & Technology, Workday. “Their support of the DITA Open Toolkit processes made our content publishable right out the box. And their configurable transformation pipelines have allowed us to deliver our DITA-based documentation and help content with a Workday look and feel.”

XDocs is a standards-compliant single-sourcing solution that lets users create, manage and store large volumes of both XML and non-XML content. By working with the XStreamDB Native XML database, XDocs is, the company asserts, an “out-of-the-box DITA-ready” content management system.

Not familiar with DITA? IBM puts it like this, “The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information. This architecture consists of a set of design principles for creating “information-typed” modules at a topic level and for using that content in delivery modes such as online help and product support portals on the Web. This document is a roadmap for DITA: what it is and how it applies to technical documentation.”

Mark Fletcher, Workday’s Information Architect, said, “Aside from the DITA support, what impresses me about XDocs is the power of the underlying native XML database. We’re taking full advantage of features such as an XPath-sensitive full text search and XQuery-computed resources. Our writers are also seeing productivity benefits through the content reusability that DITA and XDocs provide, and from the WebDAV interface, which allows them to interact with the CMS directly through our XML editing tool.

With the implementation of the Bluestream’s XDocs XML CMS, Workday will benefit from cost savings and will be able to further enhance users’ online experience.

“We are very pleased to be working with such a technology progressive company” commented Jim Tivy, CTO Bluestream. “Workday’s decision to adopt DITA as their content standard puts them among today’s bleeding edge technology organizations.”