There was once a time when an organization’s Technical Documentation function was generally perceived as being a low profile, necessary overhead. Today, technical publishing is no longer considered a superfluous undertaking. Indeed, many technical documentation departments within the manufacturing, repair and overhaul, health sciences and commercial publishing industries, are being redefined as revenue generating business units in their own right.

The adoption of markup technologies, such as SGML and XML, has allowed these entities to move beyond the traditional, manually-intensive, desktop publishing process, and has transformed “Tech Docs” to a more systems-based paradigm. Markup technologies have significantly furthered the concept of multi-channel and multi-lingual publishing, formed the foundation for complex interactive applications and, combined with the Internet, are the foundation for delivering online documentation that is tailored to its audience, routinely accurate, and always fresh.

Additionally, more and more enterprises are adopting resource planning technologies, extranets, and peer-to-peer applications that extend the overall business process and tangibly link the technical documentation sphere with the engineering and/or source data feed. This, coupled with the automated publishing and data reuse capabilities inherent in markup technologies, has shortened publishing cycles and accelerated revision services. Where once staid, predictable, paper-based customer offerings were the norm, there is now a genuine focus on dynamic innovation, rapid time-to-market and fierce competition.

Technical documentation organizations now play a much more prominent and critical role within the enterprise.

With this enhanced role comes new challenges.

Today’s Business Challenges
Technical documentation organizations need to successfully resolve:

• The escalating complexity of the technical publishing process
• Customer demand for increasingly sophisticated, multi-distribution, multi-lingual forms of information delivery at an accelerated rate
• The challenge of allocating time and dedicating resources for product and application development activities within the context of multiple concurrent publishing cycles
• The business shift away from an operational support entity to a revenue and profit oriented model
• The requirement to maintain regulatory compliance, which may not be synchronized with the pace of customer demand and newly adopted technologies
• The requirement to comply with regulatory provisions that are based on dedicated functional and operational specifications, which impose their own technical challenges (e.g. CALS, DEF-STAN-00-60)
• The migration of paper-based legacy documentation and systems to an electronic platform
• The challenge of acquiring and retaining the necessary skilled resources

Newbook’s Technical Publishing Solutions
To assist organizations in meeting today’s technical documentation business challenges, Newbook has established the Technical Publishing Solutions (TPS) practice.

“To provide flexible, innovative, responsive and cost-effective technical information products and solutions, crafted to realize our customer’s business aims.”

Our People
The TPS practice is a talented and experienced core of individuals who not only possess the technical acumen prevalent in today’s Tech Docs arena, but who are also technical publishing veterans. TPS personnel understand your business, your needs, and your objectives.

Our Services
TPS works together with organizations to mutually define service and development offerings that will provide maximum return on investment, tempered by the practical realities and constraints of production cycles and budgets. Be it application development, solution design, project management, turnkey solutions, or even complete publications management, TPS is ready to assist.

Our Competencies
TPS personnel offer intimate knowledge of the aerospace, transportation, defence, regulatory, and government sectors, to name a few. This knowledge extends into such specific industry standards as ATA, CALS, and AECMA. Open-source technologies such as SGML, XML, XSL-FO, and SVG form the core components found in many of our customer offerings and adapted solutions.

Industry Focused

Aerospace and Defence
TPS personnel possess valuable hands-on experience, from a data modelling, solution design, application development and publishing standpoint, as it relates to Job Card Applications, Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs) and electronic Illustrated Parts Lists containing intelligent graphics. We have a profound knowledge of the complete ATA manual set (AMM, FIM, FRM, IPC, WDM etc.), as well as Flight Manual/Airworthiness documentation.

Health Sciences
Health care organizations that are charged with disseminating accurate and timely information, be it statistical, analysis, or report based, need to have a dependable means to rapidly aggregate source data from various databases and text feeds and bind this information together into one coherent document. TPS has successfully deployed solutions that do just that, along with the added capability to concurrently publish this information in print, CD-ROM, or via the Internet.

Commercial Publishing
Within the ‘information provider’ spectrum, industry convergence is putting pressure on commercial publishers to establish new revenue streams cost effectively. Adopting a cross-media publishing capability and prudently integrating disparate information sources, whereby XML is the common denominator, is a key focus for TPS expertise.

Scientific and Journal Publishing
Publishing scientific journals is an exacting undertaking. Print composition rules are stringent and the logic deployed to achieve the desired format, complex. Despite this complexity, maximum throughput is a prerequisite, along with the establishment of an intuitive and efficient editing capability. TPS has successfully translated sophisticated rendering specifications into effective and performant paper publishing solutions to the scientific community.