Not only is content king, but it is also the vision of Juniper Network’s topic-based content publishing system. Presented by Rajal Shah, director of document engineering in the Foundation Technologies group at Juniper Networks, the “Content is King” webinar took place Oct. 24. DMB’s Contel Bradford attended the webcast to get some insight on dynamic content creation and a closer look at Juniper’s unique publishing strategy.
Scope of the Event
Content is King was centered around the concept of creating and delivering content more effectively for technical product documentation. Rajal begins by shedding light on the early days, a time when Juniper used the traditional delivery method of serving content in the form of books. While this paradigm served its purpose in the past, it was only a matter of time before the traditional method was no longer enough.
“When the Web showed up, we had to figure out: how do we serve this information on the Web.” The obvious step for Juniper was to make these books available online in hundreds of static HTML documents. Roughly 200 pages, these books were large, yet sufficient as visitors could view them directly through their Web browsers and turn the pages with the next and previous buttons. Though a good first step, Shah notes that problems quickly arose from this method.
“The Web had fundamentally changed the way people consume content,” Shah says. “People were no longer consuming content the way they did with books.” Rajal touched on how the rapid evolution of the Web changed the demands of Internet users and how they interact with content - factors that have become evident across various segments. “People wanted a book with content that is organized differently than the way we had organized when we published our books. So the question really is: how can I create a book for our customers where all the content is there, but it’s distributed across our books?” That was a real hard challenge for us.”
Realizing that people were increasingly searching the Web, Juniper and many other companies were forced to come up with a different way to serve content. Shah admitted, “We need to cater to the Web as our primary paradigm for consuming content.” The solution Juniper came up with for delivering its technical product documentation online was a topic-based, dynamic book system, a revolutionary publishing system based on XML. Instead of solely using the traditional book structure, Juniper began using XML to publish content in the form of topics. Keeping the same basic structure, these individual topics served as alternative books and eventually the foundation used to build all of its subsequent books. By applying the topic-based approach to the website design, Juniper succeeded at making content easier to manage for content authors and easier to find for the user. This method works because it makes the documentation far more valuable to the user only interested in a particular topic opposed to the entire contents of the book.
All in all, Content is King was a worthwhile event that exposed some golden nuggets on how to publish and deliver content more efficiently. Although Raja’s presentation was based solely on technical product documentation, the topic-based XML-authoring approach can be applied to various types of content. Many other companies have employed a similar strategy and appear to be reaping positive results.
