Michael Boses loves the idea of structured authoring. He has a deep understanding of the business benefits of having content that is portable, interchangeable between systems, and highly adaptive to new business requirements. He also understands the motivation of users. He understand that they like to be productive, and to be productive is to think about what they’re producing and not about how to use their software - and certainly not about working around awkwardly-designed software.

Boses makes it his business to listens closely to both business executives and end users, and to bring together the two sets of needs into a single, elegant solution. In some circles, he would be called a marriage broker; at In.vision Research (now part of Quark, Inc.), he’s called a Chief Technology Officer. One of the most successful matches Boses made was in marrying structured authoring with the world’s most widely-used authoring tool, Microsoft Word. The chances of getting a myriad of Word uses to give up their familiar software and work routines to adopt a complex structured authoring tool was, frankly, highly unlikely. So Boses did the next best thing - he brought the structured authoring to Word.

The users were able to keep their familiar tools and the bulk of their processes, and the businesses were able to reap the benefits derived from the processing of structured content. The idea brought together the best of both worlds - a match, as the saying goes, made in heaven.

Read more about DITA for Enterprise Business Documents in this standards proposal by Michael Boses and Ann Rockley.

Boses presents DITA and XML Authoring the Natural Way: XML Authoring for Microsoft Word and SharePoint at DocTrain 2008.