If your Life Science content authors rely on desktop publishing applications like Microsoft Word for their documents, chances are high that they hit a wall trying to create, publish, and repurpose content efficiently. 

Structured component authoring helps Life Science authors overcome inefficiency hurdles, including the huge and unmanageable repositories of unstructured data that build up in formats like Word and PDF.

SCA requires content to be broken down into structured components or elements (e.g. references and headings). This data then needs to become structured and componentized so authors can leverage the content in a structure component authoring solution. 

To structure and componetize files, the data and files must be migrated to an authoring solution. Unfortunately, standard content migration solutions do not exist and customers are largely relegated to copying content by hand into the new structured format.

While migrating thousands of files into a structured format sounds daunting, it’s not impossible.

Entitech Solutions’ content migration add-on streamlines the process so you can reap the rewards of structured component authoring as fast as possible.

What is content migration for structured component authoring?

Content migration for structured component authoring takes existing unstructured documents, such as a Word or PDF document, and imports the content into the structured component authoring solution as reusable components and then organizes those components back into exportable documents matching the imported copy.

During content migration, content from an organization’s files is pulled apart and given a set of intelligent rules that are specific to that organization’s existing content style and standards. The rules are very flexible and handle many different situations, whether the content is text in a file, in a graph or table, or part of a reference citation.

Once the rules are implemented, there’s an iterative process to make sure the rules properly componentize the content. For example, this could be making sure a table caption is linked to the table itself or guaranteeing that a reference citation is properly inserted.

As your Life Science company finishes the content import of all or a majority of your documents, you can run analytics of the existing structured component authoring library and generate a report into tabs that help users identify reusability:

• Verbatim reuse — this means the a piece of content, for example text, is used 100% similarly across a certain number of documents
• 90-95% reuse — only a small part of the content is different (a small change like the use of a comma)
• 75% reuse — components are similar but there’s enough difference where the content may not be a candidate for reuse

Challenges with content migration

Content migration to structured component authoring is not without its challenges. However, solutions exist to help limit the barriers.

An example of a content migration challenge is variation in branding, styles, tables, footnotes or references. The more consistent the content before import, the neater the import outcome. Variations occur because the same author is likely not always writing the same documentation (especially in the case of a Life Science company that has thousands of documents or files).

Reference citation style may differ. Tables and charts are not always easy to pick up as textual content. 

IT specialists can hook various plugins to the structured component authoring tool’s import package. These plugins use code or establish “rules” to properly extract and format the aspects of content components that create challenges during import.

Entitech Solutions’ content migration process can help

The content migration process is never completely smooth and reuse is never 100%.

The goal is to get Life Science companies to as close 100% reuse as possible and ultimately to get authors into structured component authoring so they can develop new content and modify existing documents and components as quickly as possible.

Entitech Solutions has experience streamlining customers’ content migration to structured component authoring. One customer was able to achieve over 80% content reuse.

Learn how we can help you. Request a consultation today.