The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is rapidly becoming well established in Technical Documentation with many groups adopting it or considering the adoption of DITA. However, many other areas in the organization are looking at the use of structured content to improve consistency, publish to multiple channels, and make it possible to manage content in the same way as they manage data. For the most part these organizations have created custom DTDs or schemas, but now they are beginning to focus on DITA as a possibility. Organizations that want to share content between such areas as Tech Doc, Marketing, Sales and Customer Support are looking for guidance on how to share DITA content with new DITA-adopters outside of Tech Doc. Recognizing this need and the exciting prospect of enterprise reusable content, OASIS has formed the DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee.

This session will focus on:

• Identifying the “nuts-and-bolts” of narrative business documents
• The developing DITA standard
• The role of technical communicators as information architects in the organization

Over a decade ago DocBook became the standard for those forging ahead in XML publications. DocBook offered a cheaper and more efficient way to publish to multiple formats. Single-sourcing became a reality for hardware and software companies. However, in recent years, many in technical documentation publications have proclaimed the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) as standard for XML documentation. DITA offered an architecture in which to create and publish structured content. Makers of XML editors advertise seamless integration with DITA. Does this leave DocBook on the shelf? Are these two seemingly rival standards really that different? This presentation answers these questions with comparative examples, allowing the audience to decide for themselves.

Migrating content to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an interesting proposition. For the last 20 years, the prospect of migrating content into a non-proprietary markup standard (SGML or XML) proved difficult enough. With DITA, the migration target becomes more exacting. For one, there is an impetus towards changing content away from a fundamental orientation towards single-purpose monolithic publishing artefacts and towards a topic-based modularity that is optimized for reuse. There are other challenges away, many arising from the need, or desire, to align with some of the best practices distilled within DITA.

A successful migration of content to DITA can be a harrowing experience. It should be stated up front that there is no magic solution that will eliminate all the pain of migration. It should also be stated, as a counterpoint, that there are tools and techniques that have been developed that can minimize the pain of migration substantially. This presentation reviews the lessons learned from over 20 years of experience migrating content to open markup standards and to modular structures geared to optimized content reuse. Among the key lessons learned is how automation can be intelligently leveraged to achieve very high levels of quality in the resulting content while keeping the cost of the migration under control and within acceptable limits.

Following a cost-effective strategy for content migration to DITA will be one of the most important determining factors of the success of a DITA implementation. A migration strategy that proves too expensive, or too painful, or that fails to deliver the level of quality necessary, will undermine any DITA initiative, sometimes fatally. But past experiences have shown that success is fully achievable and that what originally appeared to be an insurmountable mountain of legacy content can become the most durable part of a successful renovation project.

Mark E. Wallis of IBM Internet Security Systems will demonstrate the primary development tools that IBM uses for DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. The tools include Task Modeler (a free tool), Arbortext Editor (which requires licensing), and compiler (an open source tool).

If you expect to be working with DITA, this is a great opportunity to get a feel for the process and learn how to streamline your work effort.

Task Modeler is a powerful tool for prototyping and development. Come see a demonstration of how you can use Task Modeler to:

• Develop and manage ditamaps
• Develop what we call Task Support Clusters (a group of topics that provides critical conceptual, task, and reference info about a particular application page)
• Build relationship tables that determine what related links appear in a DITA topic
• Generate stubbed (skeleton) DITA topics

You’ll also learn how to use a DITA-compliant editor such as Arbortext Editor to develop your content and you’ll see the compile process in action.