Building a compelling case for migration to structured content with Stilo's Analyzer

Tridion’s partner Stilo conducted a session introducing its solutions to the Tridion team recently. Stilo provides tools for organizations to implement structured content using XML. It supports Word, FrameMaker, and HTML content. With offices in UK and Canada, it supports commercial publishers, technology companies and government agencies across the globe.

From Stilo, we had Bryan Tipper (CEO), Jackson Klien (CTO), and Jacob Brenan (Technical Sales Specialist) present different Stilo solutions, especially Analyzer, as a pre-sales tool, its applications, and a brief demonstration.

Stilo’s solution set

Bryan briefly introduced Stilo’s solution map, which includes the following:

• OmniMark: A specialist programming language for developing XML/SGML content processing applications
• Analyzer: A tool that helps users to identify content reuse across multiple formats, estimate potential cost savings (through reuse), and generate detailed graphical reports. This helps users with the information they need to build a case for structured content (XML) with their management.
• Migrate: A cloud service tool for technical authoring teams to automate content conversion to DITA and custom XML.
• Optimizer: Automatic tool to identify content reuse potential across DITA content and publish more consistent content in less time. It performs deduplication of the content after it’s converted to DITA.

Stilo has been doing content conversion for 30+ years; it started with OmniMark programming language, which serves as a foundation for the remaining three solutions/tools:

How Analyzer works?

Analyzer provides different tools that help pinpoint content reuse opportunities and quantify the benefits (of structured content) to the organization’s management:

• Interactive sequence browser to understand reuse opportunities
• Savings calculator and detailed reporting to management to justify migration benefits in total and at each stage of the content cycle from review to storage

Analyzer works across all different sizes of data sets (with AWS scalability at the backend) and across different languages.

Analyzer’s browser and reports to build case for structured content

It provides customization tools to bring in the flexibility end users want while calculating the potential cost savings that content reuse can deliver in their specific scenario/requirements. E.g., there are filters such as including content that are an exact match and near match. For a near match, the users can define the minimum percentage match requirement/threshold for it to be included in the calculation.

Customization tools in Analyzer

Analyzer in action

Jacob took us through the Analyzer, an intuitive and user-friendly demonstration. The first step is to create a collection, which can be initiated by simply clicking the folder icon at the top of LHS. When clicked, a pop-up window opens where the user can specify the collection name and various parameters of the data set.

Specifying collection parameters in Analyzer

Next, the user can initiate document upload by clicking the ‘Upload Documents’ button at the top of RHS and choosing the file types to include. Once uploaded, the analyzer runs analytics and displays all the information in a dashboard that users need to make a case for migration to structured content:

Results of analytics performed on the content collection uploaded

The results include statistics on the percent content reduced, number of documents, disk size of the collection, character count, estimated cost savings (savings calculator), etc. Also, data on matches in terms of paragraphs, tables, spans, and images. These match stats are also displayed in chart format for ease of interpretation.

Also, the analyzer displays the cost saving at each stage of the content value cycle from review to storage. Hence, the customer will know what percent of savings is expected to come from where, whether it is review, translation, publishing, support, or storage. 

The savings calculator offers flexibility for users to edit parameters such as task weight and task cost. It also provides an option to add or remove tasks:

Analyzer’s flexible savings calculator

Thus, users can customize the calculator per their specific content scenario and goals to estimate potential cost savings.

The above views are from the summary tab. There are two other different tabs also available for users that provide finer details for the users:

Sequence browser:

It highlights the areas (paragraphs, tables, etc.) in the documents where it has found matches. Users can select any document and find statistics such as a number of matches (sequences) across other documents and also the percent of match.

Sequence browser view in Analyzer

Document report:

This report, at a high level, shows the potential content reuse ‘percentage’ per document. Then it shares all the details about the reusability of the content in each document so that they user knows whether it is a paragraph, table, image, or span within the document and how often it is used. It also shows the context of the content, duplicate count, and the list of document matches for paragraphs and spans.

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