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The deadline for proposals for panel participation or presentations for:
Gilbane San Francisco 2008 at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008 is January 15.

Visit http://gilbanesf.com/ to see the topic areas we are focusing and then see how to submit a proposal.

If you've never been to one of our events and want see what we have been covering in our conference programs you can view the programs from Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

If you have additional questions about speaking, send them to speaking@gilbane.com.

On Wednesday, June 13 at 1:00 EST, Senior Analyst Bill Trippe will be doing a Webinar with Medtronic and the XMetal folks at JustSystems.

While documentation is a necessary deliverable for all companies, its value and contribution to bottom-line business results is often underestimated and overlooked. For Medtronic, one of the world's most innovative medical device manufacturers, documentation is much more than a checkbox on a product release timeline - it is a direct link to customer satisfaction and patient well-being. Medtronic's Rob Kimm will discuss Medtronic's approach to delivering a better customer experience while also ensuring compliance with regulations that impact technical documentation.

Prior to using DITA, Medtronic had a decentralized, heterogeneous environment that slowed production and resulted in redundant workflows. Seven project deliverables were developed in 5 different tools, and the mutually-exclusive tools allowed for little to no ability to achieve true reuse of common content. They now can reuse common content across deliverable types, which has led to great efficiency, accuracy, and consistency.

To register for the Webinar, please visit here.

As our readers know, we are long-time advocates of open-document formats. Over the past couple of years, we have written a great deal about DITA and formats like ODF, but we also have a lot of experience and interest in DocBook and vertical DTDs such as J2008 for the automotive industry and the various DOD standards. We are clearly reaching a point where interoperability among these standards has become an issue. Organizations are more diverse, more likely to be sharing content between operating groups and with other organizations, and more likely to be sourcing content from a variety of partners, customers, and suppliers. Needless to say, not all of these sources of content will be using the same XML vocabulary; indeed, even two organizations using DITA, for example, will likely have specialized DITA differently.

With this need for interoperability in mind, OASIS has announced a new discussion list, regarding a possible new OASIS Document Standards Interoperability Technical Committee (TC). Details on the list, including how to subscribe, can be found here.

Bob Doyle alerts us to the next meeting of the Boston Area DITA Users Group. On Tuesday February 13 at 6:30 pm, Judy Kessler will present, "How Sybase Made the Business Case for DITA."

The meeting starts with light snacks and networking at 6:30 and the presentation starts at 7:00. The meeting will be at the Information Mapping headquarters in Waltham. For directions, click here. Bob asks that if you are planning to attend, please RSVP to Judy Kessler.

For more information on this and future Boston meetings, check the User Group homepage.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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..

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?