Gilbane Group Blog: DITA Archives

March 27, 2006

DITA and DocBook

Sarah O'Keefe from Scriptorium noted and commented on a great discussion of DITA and DocBook by Norm Walsh, the guru of DocBook. Norm was a featured speaker at last week's DITA 2006 conference. Norm's discussion is readable and lucid, and if you have been wondering about this question for a while, Norm's post is required reading.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 8, 2006

Gilbane Editors on MyTechnologyLawyer.com

Some of you have likely listened to the excellent technology radio show at MyTechnologyLawyer.com. Gilbane Report Senior Editor Mary Laplante and I will be talking about the upcoming Gilbane San Francisco conferences on content management and digital rights management. The interview will be at 1:00 Eastern time tomorrow, Thursday, February 9, and you can listen live here.

UPDATE: If you missed the live broadcast, you can listen to recorded versions here (Real Media) or here (Windows Media). Among the topics discussed at some length were DITA and Enterprise DRM.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 25, 2006

New DITA White Paper

We have published our latest DITA white paper, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies: Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The paper focuses on the remarkable success Adobe and Autodesk have had in transforming their product documentation from unstructured content to DITA-structured content. In the process, they are saving money, developing better documentation and Help, and globalizing their content much more efficiently. Read all about it...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

DITA Webinar Recording Now Available

The recording of the DITA Webinar is now available online. Follow this link and then click on the link, "View All Recorded Events." You can access the full set of Webinar slides here (PDF).

One of the themes of the Webinar was the use of DITA in applications beyond technical documentation and product support content. Paul Wlodarczyk of Blast Radius discussed applications of other, customer-facing content that could be structured in DITA. These include product descriptions on the e-Commerce site, including user-authored product reviews, bulletins and best practices on the customer support site, and sources like fault trees in a contact center knowledge base. DITA makes sense in these applications because of the value of such content--and the likely need to localize it.

Are people seeing other applications of DITA beyond technical documentation per se? Feel free to comment here and let us know.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

DITA Webinar Slides

I am in the DITA webinar now, enjoying Bill Rabkin's demo of Idiom World Server. If you would like my slides (PDF form) please click here..

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 9, 2006

DITA Directions Webinar

So I will be participating in Wednesday's webinar with Idiom and Blast Radius, "DITA Directions: Topic-Oriented Single Source Publishing for the Web and Beyond." Most of my presentation will be based on our upcoming white paper, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies, which is subtitled, "Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)." The white paper focuses on two highly successful case studies of DITA in use at Adobe and Autodesk. Both of these companies have already produced tens of thousands of pages of documentation and Help using DITA. In both cases, the documentation is being simultaneously, or near simultaneously, released in more than 15 languages. The case studies are impressive and offer a lot of insight for other companies who are considering going down this path.

We continue to be struck by the rapid adoption of DITA across the product support marketplace, and are starting to see uses of DITA outside this specific application. We are hard pressed to come up with other document-management or content-management standards or technologies that have enjoyed such rapid adoption and widespread use. So one of my slides, sampled below, has a litle fun with Gartner's now classic Hype Cycle chart. Has DITA avoided the Hype Cycle, where the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" is followed necessarily by a steep drop to a "Trough of Disillusionment"? Here we are in the midst of the hype over DITA (indeed, the standard was only formally published in May 2005), and the case studies show productive work being done in advance of the approved standard. Impressive, don't you think?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2005

"DITA"Help

I had flashbacks as I sat in the DITA session at the Boston Gilbane Conference. True flashbacks. Back to the days of creating a complex automated compilation "system" to create context-sensitive help for a Windows-based manufacturing control application. Partnered with an object-oriented developer who had better things to do than "play nice" with a technical writer, we managed to build a routine based on Word macros, RTF, Excel, and DLLs to output coded Microsoft help files linked directly to RC files. Convoluted, but it made us proud.

The flashback was not about the coding, although I felt compelled to document the story. It was more about the writing methdology developed with my fellow technical writers. All about standard topics, we developed a core set of help panels based on chunking information into concepts, procedures, reference info (UI and dialog box help) and glossary items. We developed a simple hypertext strategy with non-negotiable rules for what should link to what -- and when. (Ended up with a nice triangle graphic for a cheatsheet.) It worked so well that I wrote and delivered a help standards paper for ACM in.... 1993. Still lives!

So, back to the DITA session, which was excellent -- CM4 featuring IBM and Autodesk -- two real-life and useful stories of implementers from the documentation trenches. Bill wrote about DITA in practice back in October, noting that Adobe techdoc"ers" are also DITA users.

And finally, back to the point of writing methdologies (aka content strategy component,) which I believe is one of the key drivers of the rapid adoption of DITA. DITA = topics = chunking. It is as much a methodology as it is a technology. Information Mapping, Inc., well-known to techdoc folks as a longtime proponent of information organization = usability, clearly agrees. They have rolled their methodology quite nicely into Content Mapper, blending DITA in as well. Their entry into the authoring software market, full of vendors with equally strong heritage, is a good sign for those following the pulse of ECM as strategy (more on that later.)

Takeaways? Information architecture is hot. Technical writer with online help expertise = DITA fan. Getting information from those in the trenches is key -- check out What's New at Gilbane.com and register for a discussion on real-world DITA adoption on January 11th.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 9:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 4, 2005

DITA and the Beatles

CM Professionals founding director and all-around great guy Bob Doyle has a cute take on DITA in the current EContent Magazine newsletter. Bob makes a lot of very good points, and also offers perhaps the best plain-English explanation of DITA's value to implementers I have read:

While it is doubtful that out of the box DITA will find widespread use without customization (called specialization in DITA speak), the ready-made generic topic, and three "information-typed" specializations called concept, task, and reference, will get documentation teams producing very quickly. These documents will also be easily exchangeable with others. Because specializations inherit (thus the Darwinian name) properties from the general topics, their default behaviors--like printing, conversion to PDF, or XHTML Web pages--will produce decent results when transformed by default DITA XSLT style sheets.

One detail deserves mention though in Bob's writeup. He refers to a "rumor" that Adobe recently used DITA to produce documentation. We know this rumor to be true, and have written about how Adobe used DITA to produce localized documentation for the recent release of Creative Suite 2. And, to all of Bob's positive points we can add this one--at least two major companies (Adobe and Autodesk) have already used DITA to produce major documentation releases. Interestlingly, both Adobe and Autodesk used the same core technology to work with DITA--FrameMaker on the authoring side and Idiom World Server for content management and localization.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 23, 2005

OASIS DITA Technical Committee Seeks your Input

Passing this along from Don Day, Chair of the OASIS DITA Techical Committee:

The OASIS DITA Technical Committee seeks your input on the list of known requirements/enhancements for upcoming DITA TC activity. Your help in ranking this list (or suggesting additional new requirements) will help the TC prioritize the most urgent issues for upcoming DITA 1.1 design work, and beyond.

I have posted a list osf the issues currently known to the TC at this
location: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=12814&wg_abbrev=dita

Please assess what you consider to be your top 5 requirements and submit those Issue numbers to the DITA TC via the comment form:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/form.php?wg_abbrev=dita .

If you have a new issue or requirement not included in this list, please enter it as a separate comment via the comment form. We still need your "top 5" from this list, so read it carefully--most of the known hot issues are in there in one way or another, possibly including yours. There is no need to include more than 5 items in your list at this time; all of the 48 items are candidates for work, but we need to know which are MOST critical for initial work going into DITA 1.1.

This review period opens on May 23 2005 and closes end of day on June 6 2005 (2 weeks).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2005

DITA 1.0 Committee Draft Open for Public Review

Via Mary McRae at OASIS and Don Day, Chair of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee:

The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC has recently approved DITA 1.0 as a Committee Draft and approved it for public review. The public review starts today, 15 February 2005 and ends 15 March 2005.

Public review from potential users, developers and stakeholders is an important part of the OASIS process to assure interoperability and quality. Comments are solicited from all interested parties. Please feel free to forward this message to other appropriate lists and/or post this information on your organization's web site. Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person via a web form found on the TC's web page. Click the button for "Send A Comment" at the top of the page.

We have a white paper on DITA in general and its potential role in globalization. I am also exploring DITA on behalf of a client, so will stay abreast of this.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 19, 2005

Slides from Idiom DITA Webinar

I have posted a PDF copy of my slides from the Idiom webinar. If you haven't read our white paper on DITA, you can download it here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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