Hoping to ease mounting market pressures on manufacturers, Astoria Software has gone into the advice industry with "Dynamic Product Documentation On-Demand," their latest brief on how on-demand (SaaS) DITA documentation management solutions can lower costs and reduce time to market. According to Astoria, Dynamic Product Documentation On-Demand is a process methodology emerging within the traditional enterprise content management landscape. It addresses process automation methods and tools that manage the creation and delivery of technical product information associated with complex products -- such as user and maintenance documentation, and customer support information. “Today, manufacturers face relentless pressure to quickly build and ship increased volumes of products to new global markets simultaneously,” lamented Alan Fraser, Astoria's president and CEO. “Dynamic Product Documentation On-Demand confronts the pressures of Information Age manufacturing by streamlining the documentation process.”And goodness knows streamlining is hot. Having thus dropped the most desirable buzzword on the streets, Astoria's SaaS approach to dynamic product documentation looks to realize process automation benefits across the entire documentation lifecycle: content creation and reuse, review and approval, multilingual translation and publication.The company's approach builds on a component content management design -- otherwise known as single-sourcing -- and format neutrality, which at heart is the separation of content from its output structure. This separation affords a greater degree of content re-purposing flexibility.The Astoria brief also educates readers on the OASIS-driven DITA standard and, here's the magic key, SaaS, or Software as a Service. Principal Analyst Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions assesses that manufacturers in competitive environments "must rely on value-adds such as high-quality product documentation to differentiate themselves in their markets.” The unique SaaS model for document creation and maintenance "offers a significant competitive advantage."This is because SaaS gives service providers on-demand authoring benefits and an automated multi-channel publishing and translation platform, lowering conversion times and improving the customer's experience across the board. Manufacturers aboard the good ship SaaS note:* Lower costs for producing, translating and disseminating product documentation worldwide.* Reduction in product and service delivery time to new markets.* A better customer experience, resulting in stronger loyalty and retention.A recent Astoria research effort found that the market for Dynamic Product Documentation On-Demand solutions currently hovers around US$ 4.4 billion per year. The study, conducted by Bold Stroke Consulting of San Diego, California, was confined to revenue from discrete manufacturing companies employing 250 or more. The numbers stems from projected annually recurring revenue from subscription-based SaaS solutions.San Mateo-based Astoria promotes dynamic product documentation efficiency and as-needed delivery of structured content management. Read more about their bonny deeds at www.astoriasoftware.com. And stay tuned here as Astoria's SaaS plans unfold.
About the Author
Angela Natividad is a compulsive communicator with thoughts on advertising, technology and life. Today she is VP-Marketing at hypios.com, in-house ad critic at Vanksen's Culture-Buzz.com, and co-hostess of AdVerve, a podcast about the culture of advertising. Connect with Angela Natividad:
