This session should help anyone who is considering using DITA, especially if resources are limited. Maybe you’ve researched DITA, maybe not. Maybe it all seems intimidating. In this session you’ll hear how one company went about adopting DITA through a small, pilot project that became a successful business case. What were the tasks that had to be done? What were the problems? And what were the solutions?

Hughes launched a pilot project using XMetaL and DITA to produce four similar but different PDF manuals using the same set of topic and graphics files. The primary tools that made this project a success: XMetaL, ditamaps, and conditional content.

Writing topics, creating content using DITA is probably very different than what you are used to. You have to think differently and work differently.

The presenter, who did most of the work for the pilot project and wore several different functional hats, described the effort as follows:

I am proof that an old dog can learn new tricks. When we started out, I really wondered if I could learn XML and DITA. Could we make it work for us?

DITA fell into my lap after one of our writers left the company. She had done initial research on XML and DITA. When she left, I was asked to take over the pilot project.

Here’s the problem we faced: We used Adobe FrameMaker to create an Installation Guide and a User Guide for our satellite modem product. These two manuals shared a lot of common content. When the company developed new, similar products, we created new, similar manuals. All were “knock-offs” of the original, with differences and similarities. Eventually we ended up with at least 10-12 manuals (about 120 pages each) that had a high percentage of common content. It was hard to know what should be different in each manual and exactly where to apply new information and revisions. Eventually we knew we were doing far more work than we really had to, and we knew that we couldn’’t always know if the content in each specific variant document was really what it should be. If you produce multiple documents with common and similar content, you’’ll want to attend this session.

We began to realize that we needed to implement single-sourcing. We needed a way to write the common information once and apply differences where needed. Eventually we found that DITA was a viable solution for accomplishing this. The specific DITA tools that helped accomplish our goals were ditamaps, submaps, and bookmaps; and conditional content.

After one year, we’ve released two DITA documents and plan to release two more soon. We’’ve learned a lot in a short time, but we realize we have much more to learn. Come to this session and hear how we did it and what we learned.

Making the move to modular content involves more than repeatedly chanting “DITA”. It’s a change in approach and a new way of thinking about, creating, managing, and publishing content. And, as you would expect, change brings issues, challenges, and even surprises. In this session, Steve Manning will compare two specific DITA projects he has participated in and describe the issues and challenges faced, from dealing with vendors to wrangling legacy content.

All the written content we create must have some sort of structure. Whether it’s straightforward data like population or crop production statistics, or more semantically rich information such as a corporate handbook or a biography, selecting an appropriate framework increases the odds that people will find it useful. Structure also imposes limits on how information can be used and viewed.

This presentation describes the five basic information structures, and explores ways that we can combine multiple structures to make information useful in more ways, and to open up new viewpoints for seeing the information.

This session is appropriate for documentation project managers, editors, and technical writers.

Creating documentation for mobile devices isn’t like creating documentation for desktop applications. There are a unique set of challenges associated with mobile devices that stretch current technical writing approaches and tools past their limits.

The challenges that will be presented include:

1. Lack of external resources, examples and information
2. The growing number of operating systems that the documentation potentially has to support
3. The need to design to the smallest screen size
4. Authoring templates that are not appropriate for mobile devices
5. Having to go outside of the tools and back to the basics to meet deadlines
6. No search capability for the help
7. PDF distribution issues for free mobile software

Anyone who is interested in working for a mobile software company will find that this presentation is a good place to start collecting information. Also, anyone who is interested in examining the limitations of current technical writing tools and approaches may want to attend this presentation.