The documentation for Avaloq’s banking software was spread across hundreds of PDFs, and there was no good way for customers to search across these. Additionally, for technical writers, the content management system was old, slow, and unreliable.
To modernise the documentation, and to offer both online and PDF content, the technical communication team decided to migrate to MadCap Flare.
A major problem quickly became apparent, however, namely that Avaloq’s documentation used a heavily customised version of DITA (an XML documentation standard). Due to this customisation, Flare’s DITA import tool simply wasn’t able to process Avaloq’s documentation.
This is where I stepped in! Using my knowledge of XSLT, I created a tool called “ST42Flare”, which automatically transformed Avaloq’s non-standard DITA content to XHTML-based MadCap Flare projects. This tool made the entire migration project possible.
MadCap actually created a case study about the migration project, which you can read on their website.