Astoria Content Management Features

We deliver the industry's most comprehensive platform for building, curating and delivering product and service information. Whether you write content using the popular DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) XML standard, or you’re working in non-DITA XML, when you use Astoria you’re getting a blindingly fast XML content engine, proven and supported integration with the tools you need, and the most complete experience end-to-end for all the people who interact with your content: in-house writers, translation coordinators, stakeholder reviewers, and end-users who read and comment on what you’ve produced.

Content Creation

You have several contributors in your documentation ecosystem, each one focused on creating a more ordered arrangement of information. Astoria enables in-house contributors to create source material easily and from any authorized location. That material may be XML authored through one of the industry-leading XML authoring tools: oXygen XML Author, XMetaL Author Enterprise, or Arbortext Editor. It could be artists creating graphics in Adobe Illustrator; engineers creating specifications in Microsoft Word; marketers writing copy in Adobe InDesign; all can easily find, edit, and store their work in Astoria. What’s more, subject-matter experts working through a tablet or desktop browser can create source material in a simplified interface that hides the complexity of XML-based content encoding. Your co-workers want to create; Astoria enables their contribution.

Content Curation: Workflow and Link Management

Workflow: to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation. Without scalable, intuitively implemented tools and review processes, even the best-built content can miss the mark. That’s where Astoria’s content curation tools help you to maintain a continuous flow of correct, reviewed, and approved content delivered into multiple languages and to every channel where your customers encounter your information. Astoria lets you select the content to be reviewed, lets you design and execute the review processes that work best for your organization, and gives you control over the which content is released to customers. Your selected reviewers see the content through a secure, browser-based and collaborative environment. You easily track content assets through any review cycle with reporting and drill-down capabilities to inspect the status of any task or job.

Link Management: curation also means ensuring that content linkages are intact, and this is where Astoria takes away a burdensome and tedious task. Astoria’s DNA is “referential integrity”, which means link management is a core function within Astoria’s XML engine. Complementing link management is the Astoria Wastebasket, a place where creators and curators can retrieve accidentally deleted content. In fact, the Astoria Wastebasket is so fully integral to curation that it’s impossible to translate, publish, export, or even archive content that sits in the Wastebasket; you have to unlink the content deliberately, and that’s what a good curation system should do for you.

Translation Packaging

Your organization’s localization coordinator is arguably the most organized but perhaps the most distressed person in the content-creation pipeline. Which content is approved for translation? Which graphics? Oh, a writer corrected a major flaw in the source-language content that went out yesterday? These are just a few of the myriad tasks, decisions, and challenges that assault a localization coordinator every day.

Astoria automates the tedium and detail that make life so difficult for localization coordinators. When it’s time to send source-language material for translation, you select one file and Astoria figures out the rest. Need approved content belonging to a specific release? No problem; Astoria shows you the approved tags that belong to the content; you select the correct one. Should graphics be included? Easy answer: Astoria lets you choose graphics marked for translation OR include non-translatable graphics as an aid to translators OR don’t include any graphics. Need to update a package that’s already being translated? Simple; just tell Astoria to create an “update” package to be sent to the translator. Astoria can do all of this and more because it tracks changes to each XML component, so it knows which content has been translated and which content needs to be translated for every target language you support.

Localization coordinators don’t need to worry about the relationships between source- and target-language content. Astoria keeps track of that automatically. And, Astoria comes pre-integrated with TransPerfect’s market-leading GlobalLink Globalization platform plus other translation solutions, too.

Astoria Portal

Your customers push you to do more with your content. They want it on time, in their language, on any mobile device — AND they want to select only the information that’s interesting; no wading through pages of PDF files to get the three paragraphs of interest.

You have your own ideas about delivering content. What the user sees should be linked with the products and services they buy from you. You want faceted search so your customers can search and drill down at the same time to find what they need. You want to reduce support costs and increase customer satisfaction at the same time.

The solution is the Astoria Portal, an “interaction experience” that replicates the look and feel of your organization’s Web site while integrating with your customer database. You select the content to push to the Astoria Portal; the Portal handles user authentication, search, and dynamic content assembly. It also lets your customers collaborate in communities and with you, where comments and suggestions they make about your content flow back to the core Astoria platform for consideration and further action.

Astoria also lets you produce complex, customized documents on the fly for even the most highly configurable products in formats such as HTML5, ePUB, WebHelp, and PDF. All of the formats available through the DITA Open Toolkit are available in Astoria.

The Astoria Portal enables a tighter level of customer engagement than is possible with traditional one-way publishing systems. The Astoria Portal allows your customers to download an instance of a publication or topic, personalize a collection of topics into a PDF, eBook or other format, and consume that content offline on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop device. The underlying components of the Astoria Portal include:

• A RESTful API, which allows the Astoria Portal to be embedded and branded in virtually any web environment, allowing you to seamlessly deliver content into any platform.
• A fully customizable user interface to preserve and adhere to your corporate brand and user experience.
• Apache Solr (built on top of the Apache Lucene engine), which helps your customers find the information they need and be guided to any related content.
• A end-user-facing “workflow” capability, which allows communities of trusted customers to pre-approve content for distribution to your broader customer community.
• Detailed analytics reports show which resources your customers access the most.
• Linkage to Astoria Annotations so that customer comments can then be viewed in a writer’s authoring tool (if you’ve enabled this type of collaboration).

Scalable

The Astoria platform scales from small 2- and 4-person teams to hundreds of in-house writers building millions of XML content fragments at all levels of granularity. You might have 10,000 end-users or 10,000,000; the Astoria Portal handles their needs. The Astoria platform runs in the cloud or in your data center; your content is always accessible and protected, whether at rest or in transit. For these reasons and many others, the biggest names in discrete manufacturing, medical device manufacturing, and high-tech hardware and software manufacturing are engaging with their customers through the Astoria platform.

Search

Astoria Search, augmented by Apache Lucene, provides a powerful interface for locating content. You can search for content strings, for specific elements, for specific elements within a specific context (parent, child, sibling relationships), XML metadata, Astoria metadata, version notes, authors, dates and more.

Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can drag it into your editing environment, or perform other actions directly on the object.

You can run a “replace” operation on the items returned by an Astoria Search. Astoria Global Substitution gives you a starter-set of ten filter and replace operations, which cover the most common search-and-replace use-cases. Astoria Global Substitution also lets you run any operation in “trial” mode, so you can see what the results will be without making any permanent changes.

Workflow

Astoria Workflow allows you to model any business process in your organization. It also helps you keep your content production processes on schedule and on budget. Astoria Workflow requires no programming; a one-day training class is all you need to master the configuration options. These options include:

• Transitions: What is the starting state? What are the possible next-states for the current state? Should the system do something before the transition occurs? Should the system do something after the transition is complete?
• Notifications: Who should be notified? Does the notification go to a group of people or to one person? Who gets notified as each workflow task is completed?
• Tasking: Is this a job to be done by one person, by one person out of a pool of people, or by everyone in the pool? When the task is completed, does it need to be signed electronically?
• Escalations: Who takes the job if it is not done in time? Who can override the default behavior of the workflow?

21 CFR Part 11 Electronic Signature

Transitions in Astoria Workflow may be signed electronically in compliance with 21 CFR Part 11 statutes from the US Food and Drug Administration. A transition configured for electronic signature requires the user to provide credentials, which are immediately authenticated. The signed transition becomes a permanent record that the user completed the appointed task at a specific date and time.

User Collaboration and Astoria Annotations

The Astoria platform provides channels for users to work together on authoring and reviewing tasks. The core capability is the Astoria Annotation, which may be attached to any file, XML element, or non-XML object. Astoria Annotations are not inserted into your content; instead, they’re to your content.

Stakeholders and writers can collaborate internally through Astoria Annotations. Stakeholders, using the Astoria Reviewer mobile apps or browser apps, make suggestions about changes to content. These suggestions are stored as Astoria Annotations, and they are non-destructive linkages to your content. Writers can see these Astoria Annotations within the third-party XML editing tool itself, as they’re created. Writers can then respond to the comments immediately (which the Stakeholder sees), take action on each comment, and so on.

Your customers can collaborate through Astoria, too. The Astoria Portal allows your customers to add comments and ratings right next to the content they’re reading. Furthermore, if you configure customer comments to flow back to the Astoria platform, your writers can view this feedback in their authoring environment and take immediate action.

Enterprise Authentication and Single Sign-On

Identity management ensures that authorized users have access to necessary resources. It is a first line of defense against theft of an organization’s intellectual property. Identity management systems are usually the underlying technology behind a corporate single sign-on (SSO) capability that unifies identity management across every enterprise application.

The Astoria platform integrates with your organization’s identity management system through Astoria’s support of Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an XML standard that allows secure web domains to exchange user authentication and authorization data. Through SAML, Astoria contacts your organization’s identity management system to authenticate users who are trying to access secure content. If the user has already presented credentials to an SSO system, Astoria will honor SAML assertions about that user and grant access without requiring an additional name and password to be supplied to Astoria.