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A successful content system migration hinges on one thing: a great implementation plan. As a Customer Success Manager, I've guided many teams through their move to Heretto. Some are adopting DITA for the first time; others are migrating from an existing system. While every project is unique, the foundation is always the same. This process involves establishing clear project goals, outlining the plan, and then following a path of continuous refinement. It's the key to a smooth transition and setting your team up for long-term success.
First, What Are Your Project Goals?
I recently worked with a customer, let’s call them Acme, that was implementing DITA for the first time and moving all their legacy content from Word documents and other formats into Heretto. Acme was very excited to move into DITA and had several goals in mind:
- Break down content silos so different groups within the organization could leverage their content library to reuse content and find information
- Prepare for localization requirements as the company expanded into international markets
- Publish the same content in their manuals, their website, their learning and training materials, and their customer support resources
Aligning Content with Business Strategy
Acme’s goals are a great starting point because they connect directly to larger business objectives. Breaking down content silos isn’t just an internal efficiency play; it’s about creating a single source of truth that ensures customers get consistent, trustworthy information everywhere. Preparing for localization is a clear step toward international market expansion and revenue growth. And publishing the same content across different channels supports a unified customer experience, which builds brand loyalty. This is where a content strategy becomes a business strategy. Gaining control over your content operations gives you a much clearer understanding of all your content assets and how they contribute to the bottom line.
Defining Success with Key Metrics
With the strategy set, the next step was to define what success would look like in measurable terms. Vague goals don’t help anyone, so we attached key performance indicators (KPIs) to each objective. For Acme, this meant tracking metrics that demonstrated real business impact. For example, by centralizing their content, they could measure cost savings from reuse, which can cut content costs by up to 90%. To validate their multichannel publishing efforts, they could track time-to-publish, which often becomes up to 60% faster. Finally, a key indicator of improved customer resources is a reduction in support tickets—we’ve seen this drop by up to 40% for companies that implement a customer-facing content portal. These are the kinds of concrete results that prove the value of the project. You can see more examples of these metrics in action with other teams.
Creating Your Step-by-Step Plan
The customer-defined goals provided a good basis for formulating a plan. Acme had some key goals in mind, but we found that they were unaware of some of the other aspects of DITA Content Management that could affect their plan. To ensure that our customers go into an implementation with a well thought out plan, we use an Implementation Plan Template to begin outlining key considerations.At the beginning of a new customer engagement, like that of Acme, we first set up a goal-setting meeting to determine any project goals and timelines. During this meeting, we prioritize each of the items in the Implementation Plan, determine who will be responsible for each item, and identify any blockers. For some items, we set target dates and add any questions that need to be answered.
Choosing the Right Content Operations Platform
Once you have your goals and a high-level plan, the next step is to evaluate the technology that will support your strategy. The right platform isn’t just a repository for files; it’s the engine that powers your entire content operation. For a team like Acme, whose goals included breaking down silos, preparing for localization, and multichannel publishing, a fragmented system of disconnected tools would only create more friction. Choosing a platform that unifies the content lifecycle—from creation to delivery—is essential for achieving the kind of efficiency and consistency they needed for their project to succeed.
The All-in-One Heretto Stack
An integrated platform simplifies your technology stack and streamlines workflows. Heretto is an all-in-one tool for managing and publishing technical documentation, designed to handle the entire content process within a single environment. Instead of juggling separate tools for writing, reviewing, managing, and publishing, your team can work from a single source of truth. This approach eliminates the version control headaches and integration challenges that often slow down content teams, allowing them to focus on creating high-quality, impactful documentation that meets both business and customer needs.
Core Components: CCMS, Deploy API, and Portal
The Heretto platform is built on three core components that work together seamlessly. The Heretto CCMS is where your writers create and manage structured content. It helps them work smarter by making it easy to reuse content, track changes, and collaborate in real-time. Next, the Heretto Deploy API allows you to publish your content to many different places—like websites, PDFs, or customer portals—with just one click. Finally, the Heretto Portal creates a central, easy-to-search website for your customers to find the documentation they need, ensuring a consistent and helpful end-user experience.
Using an Evaluation Checklist
Making a decision on a content platform is a significant commitment, and it’s important to get it right. A structured evaluation process ensures you’re making an objective choice based on your team’s specific requirements rather than just a flashy demo. Using a comprehensive checklist helps you compare different solutions fairly and ensures that all key stakeholders—from writers and editors to IT and localization managers—have their needs considered. It forces you to think through every aspect of the content lifecycle, from authoring and review workflows to translation management and publishing outputs.
For teams looking for a new documentation solution, a great starting point is a detailed evaluation guide. We’ve developed a Documentation Software Evaluation Checklist to help you through this process. This resource guides you in asking the right questions and weighing the features that matter most for achieving your project goals. By systematically assessing each potential platform against your predefined criteria, you can confidently select a tool that not only solves your immediate problems but also scales with your organization as it grows.
Is Your Implementation Plan Ready?
The outlined Implementation Plan is a good starting point, but I’ve found this process involves a lot of training as well. As a Heretto CSM, it’s my job to guide customers as they strategize and refine their implementation plan.For example, when I sat down with Acme to go over their Implementation Plan, I asked, “Do you reuse any content now and where do you see opportunities for greater reuse?”They said, “Well, as you know, we want to use the same content for multiple deliverables that cross many departments. Many of our products are similar, and all the support information is the same. We also publish content specifically for internal audiences and similar content for our customers. Many of our procedures are similar or just slightly changed depending on the platform a customer is using. We’d also like to standardize the language of any legal disclaimers to ensure we’re well protected.”This is a pretty common scenario but brings up many other questions about the implementation for this customer, such as:
- Would conditional processing work for tagging content for different audiences?
- At what level do you want to reuse content? Maps, topics, block elements, inline elements?
- Where should reusable content be stored?
- Do you want to use variables so you can reuse the same content for similar products and just change the product name or small details?
- What are the localization implications of using variables or reusing elements?
It’s important to consider all these questions as early as possible and develop a strong, comprehensive, and scalable reuse strategy during the planning phase. Because DITA is a powerful and comprehensive structured content standard, it’s designed to handle these scenarios in a number of ways, which means there can be many considerations beyond the obvious.With Acme, this process first involved several hours of training the lead contacts about each of the reuse mechanisms before they could make specific decisions about their implementation plan. Once everyone felt comfortable with their subject knowledge, we made some decisions and drafted a reuse strategy. Then, we trained all the writers on it, so everyone was on the same page. Because we were well prepared, Acme was able to begin authoring content using their well-thought-out reuse strategy on Day One.Acme was a fairly simple case. If you have a lot of content or complex requirements, you should strongly consider a DITA consultant. Many of our customers work closely with a consultant on their information architecture. This enables them to come to the table with a well-defined strategy based on the recommendations of their consultant. Working with a consultant can be an excellent investment, as they’ll help you define your content requirements and develop the strategies you’ll use to implement your DITA project. For more information on investing in a consultant, see When do you need a DITA consultant, and why?
Leveraging Self-Service Resources
Whether you’re working with a consultant or our internal team, empowering your own writers with knowledge is a critical step in the implementation process. While a CSM can guide you through the big decisions, your team will benefit from having resources they can turn to for quick answers and deeper learning. This self-education helps your team ask more strategic questions during planning sessions and builds their confidence in the new system. Getting familiar with the available tools early on ensures everyone feels prepared to contribute to the project’s success and can find information independently once the implementation is complete.
The Heretto Documentation Portal
Think of the Heretto Documentation Portal as your go-to technical guide. It’s the place to find specific help and information about Heretto’s products, including our CCMS, Deploy API, and the Portal itself. When your team has questions about how a particular feature works or needs to follow a step-by-step process within the platform, this is their first stop. Using the portal helps your writers get comfortable with the platform’s architecture and terminology. It’s an essential tool for answering the "how-to" questions that come up during day-to-day work, allowing your team to solve minor issues on their own and keep the project moving forward.
The Heretto Resource Library
While the documentation portal covers the technical details, our Resource Library is designed for strategic learning. This collection of helpful materials is focused on helping teams improve their content management practices and understand the bigger picture. Here, you’ll find blog articles, customer success stories, webinars, and detailed guides that explore DITA best practices and content strategy. It’s a great place to see how other companies have tackled similar challenges and to find inspiration for your own content goals. This library helps answer the "why" behind your implementation, connecting your plan to proven strategies for success.
Gaining Insights from Industry Reports
A successful implementation plan looks beyond internal goals to consider broader industry trends. Understanding how customers find information and use self-service tools can help you refine your content strategy and prove the value of your DITA project. For instance, our 2024 State of Customer Self-Service Report shares key data on customer expectations and behaviors. For a company like Acme, which wanted to improve its customer support resources, these insights are invaluable. They help connect the dots between creating structured content and achieving business outcomes like lower support costs and higher customer satisfaction, ensuring your implementation plan is aligned with real-world results.
Putting Your Plan into Practice
The bottom line is this: it’s great to go into a DITA project with goals in mind, but ultimately you need a well thought out plan as well. The planning process often opens up many questions, and it’s important to try to consider all the implications of any specific course of action. Of course, it helps to have some experts on your side! Whether this is an employee with a lot of DITA experience, a consultant, or your Heretto Customer Success Manager, having someone who can ask the right questions and provide the information you need is integral to deciding on the plan!The Heretto Journey: This blog post series focuses on how DITA users can work through the process of implementing Heretto in their organizations.
Streamlining Content Creation with AI
Once your plan is in place, the real work of authoring begins. Even with a solid reuse strategy, creating and refining content takes significant time and effort. This is where modern tools can lighten the load for your team, allowing writers to focus more on strategy and information architecture rather than getting bogged down in repetitive drafting and editing tasks. AI, when integrated thoughtfully into your workflow, can act as a copilot for your writers, helping them produce clear, consistent content more efficiently and maintain focus on the bigger picture of your content ecosystem.
Meet Etto, the Heretto Copilot
Inside Heretto, our AI helper is named Etto. Think of Etto as a partner that helps accelerate the process of creating structured content. Instead of staring at a blank page, your writers can use Etto to generate a first draft of a new topic, summarize a complex procedure, or rephrase a paragraph to make it easier for your audience to understand. It can also suggest improvements to existing content, helping you maintain quality and consistency across your entire documentation set. By handling some of the initial legwork, Etto frees up your team to concentrate on the high-value work that requires their deep expertise.
Delivering a Unified User Experience
Your content strategy isn't just about how you create content; it's also about how your customers experience it. When documentation is scattered across different sites—one for product manuals, another for developer APIs, and a third for support articles—it creates a fragmented and frustrating journey for users. The goal is to present a single, authoritative source of information where customers can find everything they need without having to hunt for it. This unified approach builds trust and makes your documentation a true asset for customer success, rather than a point of friction.
Combining Product and API Documentation
A key part of a successful implementation is planning your final output. Heretto’s platform is designed to break down content silos by enabling you to publish all of your technical information to a single, easy-to-search customer portal. This means your detailed product guides can live right alongside your interactive API documentation, creating a seamless experience for every type of user. By centralizing your content, you ensure that everyone—from new customers to seasoned developers—receives consistent, accurate information from one place, strengthening their confidence in your product and your brand.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the most important first step in planning our content migration? Before you get into the technical details, you need to define your project goals and connect them directly to your company's business strategy. For instance, instead of just saying you want to "break down content silos," frame it as creating a single source of truth to deliver a consistent customer experience, which in turn builds brand loyalty and supports revenue growth. This strategic alignment is what gives your project purpose and makes it easier to get buy-in from leadership.
How can we make sure our plan is detailed enough, especially if we're new to DITA? A detailed plan comes from asking the right questions early. Start with a template to outline key considerations, but then dig deeper into your specific needs. A critical area to define is your content reuse strategy. You should decide how you'll handle content for different audiences, where reusable components will be stored, and if you'll use variables for things like product names. Thinking through these scenarios upfront prevents major roadblocks later.
How do we prove the value of this migration to our leadership? You prove its value by defining success with measurable results. Attach key performance indicators (KPIs) to each of your goals. Instead of vague objectives, you can present concrete metrics. For example, track cost savings from content reuse, measure how much faster your team can publish documentation, or monitor the reduction in customer support tickets after launching a new content portal. These numbers demonstrate a clear return on investment.
Why is an integrated platform so crucial for a successful migration? An integrated platform is essential because it eliminates the friction caused by using a patchwork of disconnected tools. When your authoring, management, and publishing processes all happen in one place, you create a true single source of truth. This streamlines workflows, prevents version control problems, and allows your team to focus on creating high-quality content instead of managing complex, fragile toolchains.
What kind of support is available if our team gets stuck during the planning process? You are never on your own. As a customer, you work directly with a Customer Success Manager who guides you through the strategic decisions of your implementation. For self-starters, we offer a comprehensive documentation portal for technical questions and a resource library for strategic learning. If your project has very complex requirements, you can also work with a DITA consultant to help define your information architecture and content strategy.
Key Takeaways
- Connect your content plan to clear business goals: A successful migration starts with defining what success looks like in measurable terms, such as reduced support tickets or faster time-to-publish. This ensures your content strategy directly supports larger company objectives.
- Choose a unified platform to break down content silos: Using a single system for creating, managing, and publishing content is essential for consistency. This approach creates one source of truth and streamlines workflows for your entire team.
- Invest in a detailed implementation and reuse strategy: A thorough plan goes beyond a simple checklist. It requires asking deep questions about your information architecture and training your team on key concepts to ensure your new system is scalable from the start.
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