Asseco Poland S. A. is a Polish information technology company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The company is a part of the Asseco Group, a federation of enterprises delivering IT products and services. It operates in over 50 countries worldwide and employs over 20.900 personnel. The Asseco Group is also listed on stock exchanges in Tel-Aviv and American NASDAQ.
Challenges and needs
Asseco Poland S.A. is planning an expansion of its IT system AUMS towards international markets. The AUMS system is designed for companies from the energy and gas sectors. It is a modern IT solution allowing comprehensive support of companies in the free-trade energy and gas markets. The functional consistency and completeness of the system targets it at the most demanding and active users of the aforementioned markets. Implementation of the expansion plan requires a swift and effective system’s technical documentation design, management, translation and publication processes. The IT solution is continuously developed with new language versions being created. As the software is maturing, there is a requirement for a correlated process of development of the technical documentation of the product. It is a complex process which has to efficiently support the process of implementation and delivery of the AUMS software. Constant changes of the style of created documentation corresponding to marketing changes in the visual identification system of the company pose an additional complication. Thus, the challenge is to maintain a single, uniform, always up-to-date style of documentation for multiple versions of a product. Asseco Poland S.A. needed a solution which would allow authors to focus on their substantial work and assuring that appropriate and uniform content is automatically published to all output media and formats. First of all this would cover web page and PDF files formats.
Applied solution
Asseco Poland S.A. decided to invest in standardization with the usage of world-leading standards of a “Desktop Publishing” process, including the XML DocBook standard. The XML technology allows separation of content from the look-and-feel, thus resulting in a significant simplification in content creation and insertion of information into a hierarchical structure for authors, which in turn greatly simplifies the processes of documentation management and translation. In addition, the DocBook documentation standard is the most popular and mature in development terms, containing the richest catalogue of rules and elements, and is successfully applied in most professional publications using XML technology. Software from the PTC portfolio was chosen in order to implement such a solution, namely PTC Arbortext Editor and Styler. These form a group of application dedicated towards simple information management and effective publication for creation of documentation. Transition Technologies PSC’s experts implemented customized styles for PDF and webpage formats in order to fulfil Asseco S.A.’s requirements. The web-based style consisted of multiple highly complicated elements in particular, for instance a querying mechanism with keyword indexing. The implementation has enabled automatic generation of multilingual publications which were ready for online publishing.
Achieved results
The project has been implemented and delivered according to strict requirements towards timetables and schedules as well as high flexibility in solving problems related to technological limitations of used software products. As an effect, starting from the beginning of year 2017, Asseco Poland S.A. has begun using the delivered solution for creation, publication and delivery of technical documentation. It has also declared readiness and willingness for taking further steps towards implementing further technical documentation management and content translation solutions. The standards which were adopted allowed proper arrangement of existing content and preparation of processes supporting software development.