Response from MS docs person

[Mark Giffin <mark@markgiffin.com>]

Hello,

I said I'd contact a couple people at Microsoft who worked with their 
huge docs changeover project, which is converting from their old custom 
XML system to Markdown and GitHub.

One of them replied with some info. Here are the docs and tool downloads 
for their doc system called DocFX:

https://dotnet.github.io/docfx/

Here is the person's blog about this subject:

https://den.dev/blog/docs-in-cloud/

By the way, here is an audio talk given by someone on the project (Ralph 
Squillace) from a couple years ago, very interesting:

http://idratherbewriting.com/2016/11/15/recording-of-open-authoring-collaboration-ralph-squillace/

Here is my tl;dr from the above talk:
 - They have 8 million English topics and 42 million total. Moved them 
over from old XML system. Massive project.
 - Anybody can author now, no training. PMs, devs, tons. 1200 people 
contribute to azure.com docs.
 - They use acrolinx for helping with people's writing and QC.
 - They have high management support. They needed that to get the PMs 
etc writing.
 - The main idea seems to be that making it really easy to write and 
getting everyone to write, gives you lots of content you never had 
before, and you take it and QC it, help them get to be better writers. 
They have to write because they have the knowledge, not because they're 
writers.
 - The new doc system and site has a team of 18 devs and 6 PMs. Then 
just a few for maintenance when it's done.

Mark




Mark