Vancouver BC May 6 - 9, 2008DocTrain WEST 2008

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Activities

Blogs and Wikis

Collaboration

Component Content Management

Content Reuse

DITA, DITA, DITA

Keynote

Localization and Translation

Pre-Conference Workshops

Post-Conference Workshops

Software Demonstrations

Training

User Assistance


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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 Authoring

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

Content Management Successes

DITA for Business Documents

DocBook vs. DITA

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

Extreme Content Makeover

From Novice to Geek

From Planning to Publishing

How an Author and Editor Used a Wiki to Write a Book

How Do You Grow Wiki Use?

Innovate, Collaborate, Create

Living Multiple Lives: The New Technical Communicator

MadCap Software

Making XML Technology Accessible

Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assisted Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse

Mapping the Entire Global Content Supply Chain

Meet the Bloggers

On the Road to Modular Training Content

Once Content is in XML. Now what?

Putting Everything Back Together Again

See Dynamic Publishing in Action!

Social Media 101

Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level

The Business of Experience

The In.vision DITA Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Word and SharePoint

The Many-Armed Starfish

The Single Sourcing House

Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML and DITA

Understanding Component Content Management

Using Collaborative Tools for Virtual Team Management

Using DITA for Online Help

Using Task Modeler to Streamline DITA Content Development

Velocity Translation Portal

What Technical Communicators Need to Know about Flash

When Words Are Not Enough

Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information

Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models

XML in the Wilderness

[Workshop] Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML

[Workshop] Adobe Captivate

[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

[Workshop] The Business of Experience Workshop

[Workshop] Writing for Reuse

Session Details

Using DITA for Online Help

Speaker: Alan Houser
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM   Date: May 7
Track: User Assistance

Experience level: All levels
Room: Shaughnessy II Room

DITA provides an end-to-end architecture for authoring, managing, and publishing topic-oriented technical information. DITA may appear to be an ideal solution for authoring and maintaining online help systems. However, the DITA specification does not directly accommodate many of the customary and expected features provided by conventional help authoring tools. Learn how you can use DITA today to deliver online help, and learn what the DITA Technical Committee is doing to make DITA more directly usable for online help in the future.

Attendees will learn the following:

  • How features of the DITA architecture map to the structure of conventional online help systems
  • Why DITA can provide an ideal solution for authoring, maintaining, and delivering online help
  • Current issues and limitations when using DITA for online help
  • Common features of help authoring tools and how they map to (or don’t map to) DITA
  • Approaches for maintaining and delivering DITA-based context-sensitive help