The document discusses the content and tools strategy planning at Automation Anywhere. It describes how the documentation team assembled top talent, adopted DITA and tools like Oxygen and Zoomin for authoring and publishing, converted content to DITA, developed processes using JIRA, and established localization workflows to support 13 languages. The team overcame challenges related to content, tools, people and process. Now the documentation portal supports over 100 automated build jobs, localized content, and a self-support model. Future goals include enhanced information design, metrics, search and reporting.

1. Planning our End Game at Automation Anywhere
A Story of Content and Tools Strategy

2. About your presenters
Kathy Clemens Joe Zucker
Senior Manager,
Documentation Infrastructure
An experienced Documentation Tools
Architect, Joe has been a driver for many
XML-based documentation departments and
tool initiatives.
A huge advocate for implementing open
source solutions, Joe strives to provide
solutions for evolving business needs, while
striving for an excellent customer experience.
Director,
Documentation
Kathy likes to create order and find balance
where there is none, and an organization that
lacks content strategy, people, process, or
tools is her muse.
From her work at companies like SAP and
ServiceNow, she’s developed an extensive
bag of tricks to deliver content solutions that
improve the user experience.
A little about our company…

3. World’s most widely deployed Digital Workforce platform
Leader in the Forrester Wave for RPA Leader in RPA FIT Matrix Leader in RPA Customer Experience
3,100+
Enterprise customers
800+
Partners
worldwide
1.5M+
Bots
Deployed
90+
Countries with
customers
2,100+
Headcount*
#AutomationAnywhereEverywhere
*Regular employees and full-time contingent workers

4. • Uses systems like a person
• Rules-based
• Front office
• Back office
• Structured data
Acts like a person
Enterprise RPA
Thinks like a person
IQ Bot
Analyzes like a person
Bot Insight
• Unsupervised learning
• Supervised learning
• Semi-structured data
• Neuro-linguistic programming
(NLP)
• Fuzzy logic
• Real-time and actionable
• Mine across 1000s of apps
• Zero effort
• Data visualization
• ML identified trends
Automation Anywhere Digital Workforce
And now…

5. Planning our End Game at Automation Anywhere
A Story of Content and Tools Strategy

6. The mission: Quest for Infinity stones
PROCESSPEOPLE GLOBALIZATIONCONTENT SCHEDULINGPLATFORM
MIND REALITYPOWERSPACE TIMESOUL

7. The SNAP!…Automation Anywhere docs, June 2018
• 2 writers supporting 170+ engineers
• Microsoft Word, Madcap Flare, and
(gasp!) “copy/paste” Zendesk authoring
• Multiple storage locations
• Undefined delivery channels
• High-touch support = high cost
• Impatient customers
• Process
• Publishing strategy
• Templates
• Version control
• Consistency
• Tools
• Taxonomy

8. Avengers assemble!

9. SOUL (People)
Hiring strategy: plan for long-term growth and assemble top talent
• Planned headcount based on company growth targets and
project estimates
• Recruited our own networks of successful avengers
• Relied heavily on the Avengers initiative recruiting team
• Screened and interviewed candidates locally and
in India for months
• Involved all docs team members in interview
process, sometimes up to 3 candidates each week
• Assembled a powerful team in a single business quarter

10. SPACE (Platform)
Decide on a new toolset, version control and dynamic publishing strategy
• There was no question that DITA was right for our
organization since we needed to:
• Increase productivity
• Enforce structure
• Reuse content
• Re-purpose delivery channels
• Future-proof content
• Localize into many different languages
• Support versioning
• Automate documentation delivery and support
nightly builds
Authoring strategy – so many choices Authoring tool of choice
Oxygen XML Author

11. SPACE (Platform)
Dynamic documentation delivery
Zoomin provides enterprise-level support, met
all initial requirements, and positions us to
meet future ones easily:
• Excellent user experience, search and SEO
optimization capabilities
• Is highly customizable
• Offers permission-based content
• Integrates SSO into other platforms easily
• Automatically includes features developed
for other customers
• Supports easy publishing of DITA XML
• Unmatched reliability and support based on
our own history of working with them
• Engages with companies that have similar
goals, and has track record of exceeding
their needs
• We defined our requirements
and presented them to
leadership
• We produced a feature analysis
of the top 4 industry platforms
that provide dynamic publishing
experiences
Goal: to create a dynamic documentation
“experience” for our customers

12. POWER (Content)
Convert content to DITA, begin architecture/taxonomy
• Flare content was easy to convert using Oxygen’s HTML to DITA batch
conversion plugin
• Regular expression scripts were applied to clean up content by finding
patterns in the source and applying standards
• A department style guide and DITA information model was created
• Schematron rules were created to enforce style guide standards
• Content was organized by domain and function
• Built a corporate taxonomy for content classification
• Continuous improvement project

13. MIND (Process)
Interim delivery method and strategy to track release work
Since the only “official” method of doc delivery was through Zendesk, we decided to:
• Update existing legacy content for previous release versions directly in
Zendesk – HTML KB articles
• Create a PDF for the latest release using newly-converted DITA and post it as a static document
• A DITA-OT PDF customization was created to support corporate branding guidelines
• For WebHelp, an Oxygen transformation was created, providing an HTML experience that was portable and
was portable and adhered to branding standards

14. MIND (Process)
Process Improvement
To align and integrate with product development, we adopted JIRA as our doc
tracking tool, helping to streamline the documentation development process:
• Prioritize work
• Track all doc tasks, by release or independent initiative
• Link to related tasks in engineering, or customer support
• Run reports
• Provide visibility to development and product teams
• Manage documentation workflow and adhere to Agile processes

15. Business required localized content for an initial 7 languages that grew into 13
languages. We had to develop an approach to support these continuous language
requests:
• Designed a localization workflow
• Created a system to track requests using JIRA
• Leveraged vendors and process that were already in place for other departments
• Created a delivery and validation process for localized content
• Translated our documentation portal into same languages product supports
REALITY (Globalization)
Localized content and access for everyone

16. • We coordinated our delivery process approach
to improve predictability of milestones that
could be scheduled for releases and non-
release requests
• We shortened our time-to-deliver by
implementing a new toolchain and process
• Writers can commit a late-breaking addition
to content, and it is available to customers
within minutes
TIME (Scheduling)
Release planning and shortened delivery time
• We invested time to build relationships
with future avengers (stakeholders),
establishing trust
• We found that some stakeholders
reached out to us to help define
additional requirements and consult
us as experts with other department
implementations

17. • Authors use Oxygen XML to create content
– Schematron is used to enforce department standards
• XML content is committed to Bitbucket (Git)
• Scripts run to validate content
• Jenkins builds XML content to doc-staging for daily for
review
• Build automation of content eliminates source variation
• Jenkins builds weekly to docs.automationanywhere.com
End game SNAP!
Content development infrastructure
docs.automationanywhere.com
XML
Open Toolkit
Jenkins
doc-staging.automationanywhere.com
schematron
Jenkins-powered QA builds/selenium tests

18. End game SNAP!
Localization infrastructure
docs.automationanywhere.com
Open Toolkit
Jenkins
doc-staging.automationanywhere.com
dev source fork of dev source
Bitbucket connector to TMS
(scheduled detection of deltas)
Translation vendor
delivery target

19. Challenges we encountered along the way
Content
• Newly-migrated content was unstructured and lacked
standardization
• Localization initiative launched simultaneously
• Content architecture changed often due to emerging
business needs
• Content authors needed education on DITA and creating
content that is localization-friendly
Tools
• Many new concepts to learn
• Licenses to buy and coordination of purchase approvals can
be lengthy
• Fast-paced environment required flexibility and evolving
authoring processes
People
• Explosive company growth impacted the hiring and
development process
• Too little onboarding time
• New employees in other company roles
Process
• Fire drills continued due to the lack of process, created
distractions from mission
• Introducing a new process into a company workflow is
accompanied by challenges
• Developed process on the fly
• Socialization of a new docs portal to other departments
and company employees

20. Where things stand now…Automation Anywhere Docs, October 2019
Content
• DITA standards & writing guidelines
• Editing and content architecture in full force
• Task-based taxonomy
• Localized content into 14 languages
• In-product context sensitive help
Tools
• DITA authoring templates and schematron-enforced standards
• End-to-end, SSO-enabled publishing toolchain
• 100+ automated Jenkins jobs
• Localization connector to TMS
• Source and version control in Git
• docs.automationanywhere.com
• SEO strategy and optimizations
People
• 15 writers
• 3 tools
• 1 content architect
• 1 editor
• 2 managers
Process
• Release and project management using JIRA
• Low-touch support model
• Role-based access to pre-released content
• Web analytics, data analysis and reporting
• Agile for content development
• Onboarding documentation on internal docs
portal

21. New missions await…
Automation Anywhere Docs 2019+
Content
• Restructure and enhanced task-based workflow
with new information design
• Continue quality efforts
• Additional language support
Process
• Advanced metrics and
KPIs to drive investment
and efficiency
• Self-support model
Tools
• Federated search across
docs, support, developer and partner
communities
• Enhanced reporting capabilities
• More automation!
People
• Continue to build
writing and editing teams
• + specialized roles

22. Questions?
Director of Documentation
Kathy Clemens
Senior Manager, Documentation Infrastructure
Joe Zucker
kathy.clemens@automationanywhere.com joe.zucker@automationanywhere.com
@AutomationAnywh