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Tridion Docs 15.1 well and truly released!

Joe Pairman
Tridion Docs 15.1 well and truly released!

Today we officially launched Tridion Docs 15.1, with many new capabilities, and enhancements for all our customers

We have been talking about the new features for a while, and some customers have already seen demos! But today was the official go-live, with PR, social media, and a gorgeous new web page. Here on the community page, I wanted to collate some more detailed info on the new release, including writeups and presentations by the product team.

Starting with the editorial side of the product, the big new capabilities are:

Reuse and productivity metrics, in the core product

As a content team manager, would you like to see what proportion of content you’re reusing, maybe to reuse more? The new dashboard shows you how you’ve been doing over time. It also estimates how much you’ve actually saved! That can be useful to show upper management or other teams. And it also gives you a view of publication outputs over time.

See how reuse is calculated in A guide how to understand Tridion Docs’ new Reuse Metrics .

Help to polish your writing

The AI-assisted Draft Companion feature acts as a second pair of eyes, to improve your content’s readability score, help you summarize (great for DITA shortdescs!) and more.

Not sure about AI help for your writing? See  Help! My coworker is an AI for how it can help rather than challenge your work.

For more about how Draft Companion works, see  Draft Space in Tridion Docs 15.1: Confidence and Power with GenAI (where you’ll also see the new condition builder in Draft Space, which brings a beautiful simplicity to conditionalizing content).

A hub for your work on publications

Do you remember when there’d be a whiteboard in the tech pubs office, listening the ongoing projects, and who were the key people on them? We’d check off our respective jobs as they were done, and the person in charge of the publication as a whole could see at a glance how things were going.

That experience is the starting point for the new Publication Hub in Organize Space. Key users can see their ongoing publications and jump straight from there into the tools to author, to review, or to kick off translation. The workflow is flexible as you’d expect, to fit the real-life complexity our customers face. And the API behind Publication Hub is also a great integration point for external tools.

Learn more here:  Let's Make Your Work Easier: Meet Publication Hub! 

The new REST API — friendly, quick, and ready to try

Since the launch of Organize Space in Tridion Docs 15 last year, we’ve been using the new API internally and gradually extending it. In Tridion Docs 15.1, we cover many of the key cases that customers have used with the previous SOAP web service over the years. And we welcome customers to start using it!

Start diving in here:  Does Tridion Docs have a RESTful API?  

And more…

On the content manager side of Tridion Docs, we’ve also enhanced many areas in response to customer requests (such as on the  Tridion Docs Ideas  board.) Here are some of them:

  • Friendly display names in all tools​
  • Where Used dialog in desktop client tools​
  • Full testing against oXygen Author/Editor 28 and XMetaL 18​

Publication Manager:​

  • Sorting resources alphabetically​
  • Selecting output format dialog – list view​
  • Enabling Draft / Review Space copy link ​
  • Smart Tagging ​

IT / admins:​

  • Easier upgrades: XML Settings​ get updated automatically
  • Platform support: .NET 8, Java 21, and Solr 9.4.1​

Tridion Docs Genius: something really new for the users of your content…

Are any of these true for you?

  • You need to deliver content to a certain audience but don’t want to build a portal yourselves (or can’t face maintaining it, at least?)
  • You’ve looked at existing portal options but feel they’re just like scrolling manuals on the web (with a search on top)
  • You’ve looked at AI chatbots but aren’t sure you can rely on them for your mission-critical information?
  • You’ve taken time to structure your content nicely and tag it up, and feel there must be a way for end users to get more value from that careful tagging?

Tridion Docs Genius is a polished content delivery portal with a trustable AI chat and a new way to get users to their goals. It’s configurable with your branding and is a cloud service, so updates with added functionality are frequent and painless.

Here’s a piece about the thinking behind Genius: Where Content Clicks. And here’s a blog post with a feature list and a video that shows more detail: Introducing Tridion Docs Genius: The AI-Powered Knowledge Hub . 

Next steps: webinar and demo, and “get in touch!”

In a launch webinar for Tridion Docs 15.1 Chip did a great demo, and I introduced the various features — sign up to see the recording here: What’s New In Tridion Docs 15.1. On that page you’ll see also a “Get in touch” button to find out more, or if it’s easier, contact your account manager or RWS Professional Services to discuss your upgrade.

  • in reply to Elizabeth Gschwind

    Hi  , adding to  earlier comments, we have seen customers have good success integrating both Elovirta (https://github.com/jelovirt/com.elovirta.ooxml) and Aspose (https://metrics.aspose.com/) as DITA OT plugins into their Tridion Docs system, so I thought I'd share those options with you.  

  • in reply to Elizabeth Gschwind

    Hi Elizabeth, no, we haven’t added any print/DTP oriented outputs. Generally for print-oriented outputs, most customers are using some variant of the DITA-OT XSL-FO transforms. For those few who aren’t, the needs are very varied — InDesign here, Word there, and all with differences in the specific requirements. That’s where we might recommend a partner solution, using our robust pluggable publishing chain. (You probably remember that the architecture around it was significantly improved around Tridion Docs 13 — the SP2 release if I remember rightly.)

    Some personal experiences and opinions of mine around plugins:

    For Word outputs (from which it’s not too much of a jump to convert to RTF, even automatable via Word I guess), there is this one that might be a good start:

    https://www.antennahouse.com/news/dita-to-word-plug-in

    I remember Precision Content had quite a nice productized one too, and it worked quite well with Word or Open Office’s templating system, so you wouldn’t have to bake end formats into the OT transform itself. It used Office native styles. Still, from a quick search on their site I didn’t see it, so perhaps enquiring with them would be best.

    As a general principle for DITA to DTP types of outputs, I'd always suggest something that uses the named styles capabilities of the DTP tool itself. For example I have seen InDesign outputs done both ways, and the approach that uses proper InDesign styles is way more powerful and less hassle. It lets people easily modify styles, for example, and you can sometimes tweak styles and then re-pipe modified content back into the document without breaking anything.

    One final thought: RTF is not a very pleasant format technically to work with if you can avoid it. DocX is more predictable and fits better into XML publishing chains, being XML itself.

  •  do you know if an RTF/Word format is available OOTB with 15.1? Considering adding support for RTF as part of our upgrade.

  • in reply to Alvin Reyes

    Thanks, Alvin! Glad you like the new capabilities.

    On the version numbering question: with Tridion Docs releases, the first number refers to one thing only: the number goes up when there is a breaking change to extensibility, for example the change to the new React-based web client in TD15.0.

    The “major” number doesn’t refer to number of features, or time that went into the features. And it certainly doesn’t refer to stability. Years ago, there used to be a sense that a “point release” would be more polished than a bare number one. That hasn’t been the case for a long while, since the features and also their API / business logic / DB underpinnings are tested in many ways and often in real internal use. (See for example the recent post by  , publicizing Open API methods that we have been using many of internally since Tridion Docs 15.0! Does Tridion Docs have a RESTful API?  ). Hope that helps clarify the numbering – it is a good question that has come up a couple of times.

    Regarding Genius, I’m not sure I’d limit it to just a service portal? It’s designed to support “information foraging” in many domains and use cases. The common denominator is that it is content that people are using to get something done, whether that be following policies, diagnosing, getting unstuck, or indeed installing and maintaining products large and small! With these use cases, sometimes you need a quick answer (where Trustable Chat is a great place to start), and sometimes you need to follow a sensible path through various bits of info to complete your journey (a sticking point for many portals, but in Genius the AI-powered recommendations and Hexahops help trace a path through different sources of info). Did you get the chance to see this session that   and I presented to demo Genius and talk about the principles behind it? www.rws.com/.../

  • Congrats and the release and all the great features in Tridion Docs 15.1! With a Publication hub, AI-assisted Draft Companion, built-in metrics, and the new Content Manager API, I'm wondering why this was "just" a "x.1" release. Grinning Also, I'm still wrapping my head around Tridion Docs Genius as a cloud service portal. Open mouth