IBM Sterling Commerce successfully converted over 200 FrameMaker books (20,000 pages) to DITA over a 6-week period. Migrate enabled them to deliver high-quality content more rapidly than other approaches, while reducing conversion costs and ensuring product release schedules were met.
The chart is taken from IBM presented metrics that illustrate the average hours taken per FM book, per conversion method.
STMicroelectronics is a leading provider of semiconductor solutions and manages 650,000 pages of active technical documentation.
“Unlike conventional conversion services, Migrate gives technical authors hands-on control over how and when they convert their content. Documents can be converted in a matter of minutes, thus avoiding the traditional content freeze – a definite plus for ST which has a large quantity of content to convert.”
Sheila D’Annunzio Head of Technical Documentation
Extreme Networks, Inc. – a technology leader in high-performance Ethernet switching for cloud, data center and mobile networks – used Migrate for a small FrameMaker to DITA conversion project in which Stilo operated the service on their behalf.
“Our biggest challenge was time. We could not give up our files for several weeks during the ongoing product development process. When we learned about Migrate, it sounded too good to be true. Our previous conversions were not only incredibly long and expensive, they required several back-and-forth iterations to finalize output, which made the process even longer. In the end, we still ended up with quite a bit of manual clean-up to do. With Migrate, we delivered files and had them returned within 2 days. We found a few small tweaks so we ran them through the automated tool again and we have a finished XML delivery that works well with our CMS. We couldn’t be more pleased.”
Christina B. Brunk Manager, Information Development
Webtrends, Inc. – the global leader in mobile and social analytics – used Migrate for a small project in which Stilo operated the service on their behalf to convert an 800 page document from FrameMaker to DITA.
“The output we received was just beautiful – to get our content back so quickly and in such a polished state was fantastic, better than I ever thought possible.”
Julia Pond Information Architect
TOA Technologies – the leading provider of field service and mobile workforce management software solutions, chose to adopt DITA to reduce strain on internal resources, support localized documentation, and—most importantly—remove a major bottleneck in the product release process. From the outset, the resultant ROI from the move to DITA was clear, however, TOA were constrained by a limited number of resources who could support the content migration effort.
“We were only looking to convert a small number of user guides from Word format to DITA. We considered undertaking the conversion in-house, but the overall time and cost of performing the conversion would have been too high. So we approached Stilo to manage the conversion using their Migrate service. Stilo analyzed our documents, provided sample conversion results, and during a one hour review meeting, we were able to assess the output and specify our precise requirements. Stilo then reconfigured Migrate, converted our user guides, and provided us with our final DITA output in a matter of hours.
Having struggled ourselves for some two weeks, with much manual effort and frustration, to convert just one short Open Office document to DITA 1.2, we were only too aware of just how long the conversion would have taken, and how we would all have been affected, had we not gone with Stilo’s Migrate.”
Will Claxton Product Manager
GLOBALFOUNDRIES – the world’s first full-service semiconductor foundry with manufacturing centers in Germany, the United States and Singapore, and major facilities for research, development and design located across the US, Europe and Asia, selected Stilo as its conversion partner for a new enterprise publishing initiative. GLOBALFOUNDRIES needed to initially convert around 3,000 pages of legacy FrameMaker content into the DITA XML format.
“Stilo worked collaboratively with our technical documentation team in the United States and used its online Migrate tool to convert our documents for us. These documents were rich in terms of content, incorporating tables, images and equations. Stilo’s support has enabled us to begin our migration to a new authoring and production environment on schedule, helping us to resolve any technical issues that arose during the transition. We enjoyed working with the Stilo team and look forward to working with them again in the future.”
David Brown Technology Development Manager