Avalara, a Leading Tax Compliance Services Company, Leveraged IXIA CCMS to Unify Their Internal and External Content On a Single Platform

When I joined Avalara just over 2 years ago, I was tasked with replacing an aging help system that the company had outgrown and in December of 2022, that’s what we did, but we delivered so much more.

We absolutely want reusable and componentized content to be managed in the DITA format, and with all the authoring tools being used across the organization, we needed a system that offered both scalability and flexibility. That’s where IXIA CCMS came in.

Once the content for our project-targeted departments was imported, we were able to take advantage of all the benefits that the IXIA CCMS has to offer.

What we built can be referred to as an Intelligent Content Supply Chain” responded Michael. “Our overall goal is to unify internal and external-facing content using a single system. In order to achieve that, we needed to replace the existing online Help system, the client portal, and other disjointed content sources.

By building a standardized semantic architecture based on intelligent content, we were able to provide a single-sourced knowledge center for internal and external content, integration with our Salesforce support portals for agents and customers, and in-product contextual user assistance for our customers. We delivered that, on schedule, this past December, due in large part to selecting best-of-breed technology.

So far, we deployed what I like to call our publishing trifecta: by organizing and storing the content in IXIA CCMS, our Support agents have access to the information through their portal, and our customers get the same content through our online knowledge center, as well as in-product contextual user assistance.

From a useability and simplicity perspective, we were enamored with the IXIA CCMS authoring and workflow management interface. It is visual and well laid-out, virtually eliminating the painful XML debugging issues we had experienced with other tools in the past.

We appreciate the content workflows offered with IXIA CCMS; not only are they highly configurable, they provide the necessary information to bring many automated processes and governance to fruition.

Being a huge proponent of collaboration between writers, engineers, and other subject matter experts, the team makes good use of the collaborative review feature. It provides a well-designed view of annotations, and a details panel with information like last modified date and review status.

The fact that there are connectors for publishing and localization tools was a huge attraction for us. Building our own solution was going to be much too complex, so having these connectors supports our philosophy of a “build and extend” platform strategy.

We leveraged the IXIA CCMS APIs to build an automated pipeline for converting product application strings. The UI strings are provided in JSON format, automatically converted to DITA, and imported into the CCMS with no human intervention. Content professionals can then optimize user interface text and collaborate with application developers using IXIA CCMS's collaborative review workflow.

Doing so also allows us to automate the localization of Avalara application UI strings using the very same workflow we use for localizing technical content – expanding the global footprint for Avalara products into new markets and growing revenue. The same pipeline automatically converts the localized DITA strings back to .JSON for re-consumption by product applications.

We can easily script and automate global content changes, and we intend to integrate advanced semantic technologies such as PoolParty from Semantic Web Company with the IXIA CCMS for taxonomy autoclassification, change management, and the fast-approaching era of knowledge graphs – which will open up whole new worlds of advanced content applications for Big Content, especially for those that follow the unique semantic and algorithmic capabilities of DITA and structured content that no other format can match.

We needed to consider the bigger picture, so when designing a world-class content architecture and platform, it simply made sense to go with IXIA CCMS, especially since your partners represent some of the best in their respective industries, both from a business and an integration perspective. For example, we implemented Acrolinx to establish a terminology database and content governance, XTM for localization, as well as ZoomIn for dynamic publishing, all of whom are partners of IXIASOFT, we also use Videate for automated robotic video production at scale.

When it comes to ensuring success on a large scale, strong project management and cross-functional collaboration is key. Hire the best writers, and don’t try to build a content supply chain from scratch using tools and systems that were not designed to manage intelligent, componentized content.

Our approach with this project is similar to that of our customer-facing products – we are building the best solution for each identifiable audience within the organization, whether that audience is comprised of a group of subject matter experts or represents a department. Providing all the necessary tools, combined with just-in-time instructions, is key to getting engagement from end users.