All too often — this blog included — articles and papers advocating tech writing teams to move to DITA are aimed at management. This makes sense since if the tech writing team is larger than one person there are change management issues to coordinate when moving from a previous toolchain to DITA, and if aRead More
JoAnn Hackos has published a good article in the recent edition of the Best Practices newsletter looking at where firms can anticipate cost savings when moving to using an XML-based documentation process. She makes a good case that companies that move to using XML in their production of their technical documentation can look to gainRead More
Though late to the party, Adobe finally got around to doing a full revamp of FrameMaker, bolting on DITA functionality starting with version 7.2, and then fully integrated by version 8 in 2007. Here are some resources for those looking to using FrameMaker with DITA: FrameMaker 8 Deep Dive: though it takes a while toRead More
Update October 1, 2018: for a good, fairly comprehensive and freely downloadable set of sample DITA documents, I highly recommend checking out the list on the OASIS DITA Adoption website, compiled by Stan Doherty. Depending on what you are looking for, these files are great for learning more about the practical aspects of using DITA.Read More
Here’s a book list I’ve compiled — from the most recent to the oldest — on all of the titles I can find that talk exclusively about DITA XML: Practical DITA by Julio Vazquez (October 6, 2009) 112 pages; also available in print or as downloadable PDF from Lulu.com (note that the version from Lulu.comRead More
An amusing presentation explaining the idea of content reuse in DITA with Soren Weimann showing how it is done using big lego blocks (which represent individual topics), paper outlines of lego blocks (maps), a bowl (to represent a CMS), and a camera (to illustrate output). Sound confusing? Hardly, and it’s a shame that there aren’t moreRead More
Here is a listing of online forums I have been able to track down about DITA: DITA Users Group on Yahoo: A very active group which has been around since mid-2004. Good both for the beginner as well as experienced writers, and is monitored by several very senior people in the DITA community, including manyRead More
This presentation was one of the highlights of the conference for me, as most of the people responsible for driving the new DITA 1.2 specification were there to talk about what they had come up with. Starting off the panel in the same way that he would normally be speaking with this group Don DayRead More
Day two of the Content Management Strategies Conference 2010 in Santa Clara. This morning I saw an interesting demo presentation by Kristen Eberlein (formerly of IBM, and now working as an independent consultant), who was showing off the capabilities of the most recent version of IBM Information Architecture Workbench. This is the program that usedRead More
It was an interesting opening keynote session for the Content Management Strategies 2010 conference that opened this morning at the Hyatt Regenecy in sunny Santa Clara. JoAnn Hackos opened the procedings shortly after 8am, and amongst other things announced the cancellation of a few speakers who were tied up in Europe and effectively grounded by theRead More
