Intelligent Content for Technical Documents

Ictect – the intelligent content company – is pleased to offer this cloud-based service for automation of DITA XML for technical documents. You simply upload Microsoft Word documents and our software (Intelligent Content Server) tags them. You receive a tagged Word document, and a DITA XML document.

We are also offering this as an on-premise service that you can run on your own.

With Ictect’s patented technology, Microsoft Word is enhanced to maintain tags (or XML structure) in the document. You can open a tagged Word document in Microsoft Word or in Office 365 as an ordinary document. With Ictect’s plug-in Intelligent Content Tools (icTools), you can view and edit document structure in Word.

We are offering this service to techpub departments, service providers, solution developers or anyone interested in converting their documents to DITA.

There is a setup fee, determined based on the complexity of your documents and your customizations of DITA. Then, there is per-document fee for conversion.

For larger volumes (100,000 pages or more), the setup fee is waived.

For on-premise installations, there is one-time licensing fee for software. In addition, there is fee for software configuration, and an annual maintenance fee.

We have several US-based customers using our software for DITA. We are happy to make introductions after a mutual non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is signed.

Ictect’s patented software (US patent #7,251,777) has the unique “schema-driven auto-tagging” capability. It handles formatting and content variations in the documents, and tags documents to the granular level (for example, deep tagging in concept or tasks). It also highlights any issues encountered in the documents (typically, content that does not conform to the spirit of the style guide). That makes correcting non-conforming documents easy in Microsoft Word.

We work closely with our customers. We update software configuration for specific customers for frequently encountered issues in the documents. This improves the degree of automation. The more you use the software, the higher the degree of automation.

For a full discussion of this, we suggest you sign up for a demonstration with your sample documents.

Intelligent Content Server handles unstructured documents as well as styled documents.

All that you have to do is to apply styles to the headings of Concepts, References and Tasks. This document preparation step takes just a couple minutes for a typical 50 page document. After this, all the tagging is automated by Intelligent Content Server.

Yes, as part of setup, we configure the software to deliver you DITA with your customizations.

There are two primary factors that determine the setup time:

• The complexity of your documents (how consistent they are, how conforming they are to the style guide, etc.).
• The degree of customization your organization has for DITA

Depending upon these, the setup time may be days to weeks.

Once the software is configured, tagging a document takes less than a minute!

Intelligent Content Server will highlight issues encountered in the documents in the tagged Word document. You can make corrections and re-submit the document. Or, you can use Ictect’s Microsoft Word plug-in icTools for editing content and structure.

This service is for both types of documents.

You can use a good PDF to Word converter before submitting documents. Some clean-up will be necessary. If you would like, Ictect can provide a quote to do this.

Yes, we invite solution developers to embed this in their solutions. This is a cloud-based system, and can be integrated in your cloud-based offering. Currently, our system is based on Microsoft Azure cloud.