Re: Use of passthrough

[Dawn Stevens <dawn.stevens@Comtech-serv.com>]

Here is the description of the reason behind the use of passthrough from Skyward:

 

Skyward provides administrative software for school districts across multiple states. Because each of the states we serve has its own rules around what data needs to be reported and in what form, we have to be able to provide users in different states with instructions on how to track and report the data their state requires. Our challenge was to be able to create one set of content that would include all the common instructions as well as all of state-specific ones, and then be able to publish that content once to a single platform where all of our users could access it and see only the content relevant to them.

 

The team at Comtech worked with us to create a DITA specialization which allows us to tag content for inclusion or exclusion by state. This enables us to create and maintain one set of content which can then be published to our support site with the conditionalization included in each topic as needed. When users from a state for which conditional content exists view the topics, they see the information intended for them along with all of the common content. They do not see information for any of the other states that might also have conditional content within a topic.

 

The ability to maintain and publish a single set of content while still providing our customers with information specific to their needs, is one of the main reasons we moved to DITA based content development.

 

 

 

From: dita@lists.oasis-open.org <dita@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of Dawn Stevens <dawn.stevens@Comtech-serv.com>
Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2022 at 4:14 PM
To: dita <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: [dita] Use of passthrough

Hello,

Per my action item I followed up with a couple of clients who I thought might be using passthrough. One was and one wasn’t.

 

Skyward uses passthrough to send conditions related audience and product to MindTouch, which then dynamically filters content based on the user’s login information. I’ve asked them to provide a quick summary, which I’ll forward.

 

You may recall I mentioned Ingeniux and that I thought it was using this information for another client. However, this is a “wish list” item only. That functionality has not been built at this time in their Ingeniux implementation.

 

Dawn