Service Patch 1 brings impressive publishing performance gains, gives reviewers more control, and lets authors act on user feedback more easily.

Tridion Docs's flexibility in versioning, reuse, and language fallback makes for a complex backend publishing process. Before words are ever put on a page, the correct objects need selected, their links and references checked and resolved, and their structure modified for processing. That takes time. In SP1, it's a lot quicker: up to 50% faster.

Publishing is quicker because processes run in parallel, on multiple threads. Also, just the needed CMS objects are exported – just the objects in the map, after conditions have been applied, rather than all the objects in the baseline. And more code is compiled, not scripted (.NET rather than VB), again boosting the speed. As part of this refactoring, it is now much easier to modify the publishing configuration, for example integrating custom pre-processing steps. It is also easier to upgrade because customizations are managed separately from the main publishing script and adhere to a fixed interface.

Reviewers checking content in Collaborative Review (previously Reach Internal) can now take more direct actions on the content. There is a convenient list view of all the topics they should check, and once viewing a topic, they can click through to the next or previous topic to be reviewed. They now also have the ability to change the metadata directly without going to the CMS, for example to quickly transfer a topic to a new reviewer. And when they are finished with a topic, they can move it to the next workflow stage.

Reviewers don’t only need to comment and approve, of course – they often need to add new topics or tweak the structure of a document. Collaborative Review now lets them add a new topic directly in the table of contents and go straight to Content Editor to draft it. They can also move topics around in the table of contents (the map) for a better flow. And they can add images or replace existing ones directly rather than having to send them separately to a “power author” to include in the publication.

Publishing content to the web via DXA for Dynamic Delivery means that end users can add their own feedback to it – to point out what’s missing or just say how it helped them. They naturally expect that this feedback should make its way back to the original authors of the content. Now, authors can see them in a dedicated customer feedback dashboard within Content Manager’s Web Client.

Other enhancements in SP1 include:

• The latest versions of third party XML authoring tools are supported: oXygen 20.0 (64 bit), Arbortext Editor 7.1 (64 bit), and XMetaL 12 / 12J (64 bit).
• Comments from Collaborative Review displayed in Publication Manager are now live links – click a topic title in the comment list to select and view the topic.
• The same metadata dialogs (Properties) everywhere. All levels (logical, version, language) are displayed in the same view for convenience, and there is a single central configuration for properties.
• Further improvements to DXA for Dynamic Delivery, including the ability to play videos and to tweak the sequence and categorization of product families on the front page.
• Taxonomy connector to SDL Tridion Sites, paving the way for marketing/technical content mashups as previewed in this video.

Tridion Docs 13 SP1 is due out later this month. To take advantage of its performance benefits, review enhancements, and customer feedback dashboard, contact SDL or your implementation partner to discuss upgrade options.