Program by Day
Program by Track
Program Titles
“Wiki Roundtripping? Structured Authoring? How Do They Co-Exist?”
24 Ways to Shut Down The Application and Other Apocryphal Stories
A Comparison of Three Visual Help Authoring Tools
Beyond L10N and G11N—Communicating with Everybody
Breathing Life into your Technical Documents using Adobe AIR and the Technical Communication Suite
Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
Changing the Rules of the Game for the Benefit of the User
Document Engineering in User Experience Design
Documentation Planning and Library Design in a Web 2.0 World
Extending the Value of Content in Enterprise Systems with Web Content Management
How an Author and Editor Used a Wiki to Write a Book
Living Multiple Lives: The New Technical Communicator
Making XML Technology Accessible
Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assisted Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse
Mapping the Entire Global Content Supply Chain
On the Road to Modular Training Content
Once Content is in XML. Now what?
Putting Everything Back Together Again
See Dynamic Publishing in Action!
Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level
The In.vision DITA Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Word and SharePoint
Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML and DITA
Understanding Component Content Management
Using Collaborative Tools for Virtual Team Management
Using Task Modeler to Streamline DITA Content Development
What Technical Communicators Need to Know about Flash
Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information
Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models
[Workshop] Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML
[Workshop] An Overview of RoboHelp 7
[Workshop] Content Engineering
[Workshop] DITA Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL
[Workshop] Introduction to XSL
[Workshop] Making DITA Work For Your Data
[Workshop] Simplified Technical English
[Workshop] Single Sourcing with the Technical Communication Suite
Session Details
Extreme Content Makeover: Migrating Content to DITA
Speaker: Joseph GollnerTime: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM Date: May 8
Track: DITA, DITA, DITA
Experience level: All levels
Room: Pinnacle Ballroom 3
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.
