Right Hemisphere and Flatirons Solutions Bring Advanced 3D Capabilities to DITA-Based Technical Publishing

Companies to Demonstrate New 3D Technical Publishing Offering Next Week at the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2010 Conference.

SAN RAMON, Calif — Right Hemisphere today announced a new solution for incorporating 3D content into DITA-based technical documentation. The solution enables users to directly repurpose 3D engineering assets for use in technical documents. With this solution, organizations may insert 3D content into their documents either natively, or as links from 2D objects. This direct access to lightweight 3D engineering assets enables technical publishing teams to lower their costs, be more accurate in product depictions, and complete their document deliverables more quickly thanks to reuse of existing content.

"There's no denying the power of 3D as a communications tool," said Right Hemisphere CEO Michael Lynch. "Using a combination of rich 3D media and smart XML-based authoring makes technical content more usable and more effective for end users. Including more 3D in technical documentation also helps with some of the globalization challenges manufacturers face today."

The new 3D technical publishing offering from Flatirons Solutions and Right Hemisphere leverages the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. DITA is a modular XML-based architecture for authoring, describing, and delivering information through reusable "chunks" of content. The new 3D-enabled DITA offering, announced today is built on top of the EMC Documentum® content management platform and integrates the Flatirons DITA Framework with Right Hemisphere's Visual Enterprise software. The Flatirons DITA Framework is a set of powerful capabilities that allow technical publishing teams to adopt flexible, component-based content authoring processes that are increasingly critical to the timely delivery of multi-channel content. Flatirons DITA Framework modules include content authoring, workflow, rich media management, and content globalization and localization support.

Right Hemisphere's Visual Enterprise software brings 3D authoring, importing, exporting, sharing and engineering asset management functionality to this joint technical publishing offering. Through seamless integration with a wide array of enterprise systems, users of this integrated technical publishing offering enjoy direct access to lightweight representations of engineering models and related product information. This integration and content sharing helps ensure that content creators don't waste time re-creating an image that already exists in product engineering designs.

The combination of technologies from Right Hemisphere, Flatirons and EMC form a comprehensive, state-of-the-art solution for publishers of technical content. As Flatirons Solutions Chief Technical Officer Eric Severson noted, "Technical publishing teams have long faced the challenge of accurately conveying information from product developers. The ability to access 3D content from product design teams and leverage it in a wide array of publication output formats is incredibly powerful, and will be a tremendous benefit to our technical publishing customers."

Right Hemisphere and Flatirons Solutions will demonstrate the capabilities of their new joint offering for the first time April 19-21 at the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2010 conference at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, CA.