The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. is the world's largest exchange company. It delivers trading, exchange technology and public company services across six continents, with approximately 3,700 listed companies. NASDAQ OMX offers multiple capital raising solutions to companies around the globe. NASDAQ OMX technology supports the operations of over 70 exchanges, clearing organizations and central securities depositories in more than 50 countries (http://nasdaqomx.com).

The Global Software Development section, a business unit of Nasdaq OMX, is located in Stockholm. They specialize in the development of the systems, technologies and solutions for stock exchanges and marketplaces, clearing organizations and central securities depositories. The technical documentation provided with these services are produced by this business unit. Sometimes a system solution includes up to 30 manuals, with each manual containing anywhere from 30 to 1 000 pages. Every manual is also tailored for the specific user, for example, share traders, system operators, or maintenance managers, and all manuals are published in English.

From fifteen different systems to ONE documentation solution

The OMX market is extremely complex and in the last few years the company had acquired several companies that were using a variety of in-house systems to manage their technical documentation. The merging of these acquisitions resulted in a fragmented publishing environment for the Global Software Development section. Around 15 software solutions were being used, including Exconf, a precursor to Skribenta.

A decision was made to streamline the technical documentation by moving towards a single software publishing solution. During this lengthy transition, the technical documentation department moved from using the 15 different software systems to only using Excosoft Skribenta. During this process, Excosoft Skribenta had a number of features customized specifically for OMX to ensure it met their individual requirements.

Patrik Bredin of OMX is the system manager for Skribenta and also works as a technical writer Patrik remembers when the documentation production was done with a large number of systems.

"In the end it was almost impossible to control all the system environments, and it was also difficult to find time to hire and train new staff to understand all the systems and the various functions and structure. When systems did not allow a direct reuse of information and customization of the manuals, we would work with a so-called core manual that all customers received and then we added customer-specific sections. This did not result in the best quality manuals. This was also a major reason why we needed to find one documentation solution, " said Patrik.

Better control and fewer employees that supports more

Patrik Bredin describes the benefits of using Skribenta. "The biggest advantage is that we are working more effectively. Fewer people are able to produce more because of the automation and reuse of information. We also have a completely different way of handling document versions. An example of how we have saved time is when part of a manual needs to be updated. The section requiring changes may occur in many different documents. With Skribenta, we only need to make the change once for all documents instead of where previously we had to manually edit each document.”

Another benefit experienced by Patrick and his team is when customer specific changes to a manual needed to be made at different times. For example, a section of Customer A's user manual needs to be updated immediately but Customer B does not need the change until later. Previously there was a risk that the change would be forgotten for Customer B. Using Skribenta eliminates the risk although there are parameters that must be entered into the software database to manage customer-specific changes.

Patrik pointed out another advantage of using Excosoft Skribenta. "The improved control over everything we produce ensure that the document quality is maintained. We have significantly more time to work with the actual content of each document. We simply create better manuals with Skribenta."