from: abelsp 1 year ago

A presentation by Scott Abel, TheContentWrangler.com, to technical communication professionals at the Documentation and Training Conference Boston 2006.

Tags: rss xml blogging blogs wikis

from: abelsp 9 months ago

Presented at DocTrain East 2007 by Bob Doyle, DITA Users -- This introduction to XML Authoring will acquaint you with over fifty tools aimed at structuring content with DITA. They are not just DITA-compliant authoring tools (editors) for writers. They also include content management systems (CMS), translation management systems (TMS), and dynamic publishing engines that fully support DITA. You will also need to know about tools that convert legacy documents to DITA and help to design stylesheets for DITA deliverables. The best DITA tools for technical communicators implement the DITA standard while hiding all the complexity of the underlying XML (eXtensible Markup Language). As a tech writer and not a tech, you should be able to forget about XML - except to know that you are using it (DITA is XML) and that it consists of named content elements (or components) with attributes. You need to know enough about the content elements so you can reference (conref) them for reuse. You need to know about their attributes so you can filter on them for conditional processing. And you should appreciate that because components are uniquely identifiable they lend themselves perfectly to automated dynamic assembly using a publishing engine. We will describe how you can get started with structured writing without knowing XML or installing anything. The promise of topic-based structured authoring is not simply better documentation. It is the creation of mission-critical information for your organization, written with a deep understanding of your most important audiences, that can be repurposed to multiple delivery channels and localized for multilingual global markets. You are not just writing content, you are preparing the information deliverables that enhance the value of your organization in all its markets. To do that well, you must understand the latest tools in structured writing that are revolutionizing corporate information systems - today in documentation but tomorrow throughout the enterprise, from external marketing to internal human resources. Whether you are trying to push a new product into a new market or are “onboarding” a new employee, the need for high quality information to educate the customer or train the new salesperson is a challenge for technical communicators. You need to think outside the docs! The key idea behind Darwin Information Typing Architecture is to create content in small chunks or modules called topics. A topic is the right size when it can stand alone as meaningful information. Topics are then assembled into documents using DITA maps, which are hierarchical lists of pointers or links to topics. The pointers are called “topicrefs” (for topic references). Think of documents as assembled from single-source component parts. Assembly can be conditional, dependent on properties or metadata “tags” you attach to a topic. For example, the “audience” property might be “beginner” or “advanced.” At a still finer level of granularity, individual elements of a topic can also be assigned property tags for conditional assembly. More importantly, a topic element can be assigned a unique ID that makes it a content component reusable in other topics. As you will learn, DITA is a leading technology for “component content management,” which multiplies the value of your work. You need to leverage DITA and structured content to multiply your income.

Tags: technical xml dita communication authoring

from: abelsp 9 months ago

You already know that XML and DITA for documentation and publishing boast extreme productivity and cost-savings, as well as revenue opportunities. But how can you build your case to the executives to get the green light? Come to this session to discover your potential financial returns. Learn how to calculate the cost of your current processes, and calculate the potential savings with new technology for authoring, re-use automation, localization, review, and publishing. You can then use these ROI calculations for budget requests and business cases to senior executives, to set expectations with the team and stakeholders, and track project success. You’ll learn how to: * Quantify and calculate savings in authoring, localization, reviewing, and publishing * Build your business case for DITA including sample scenarios and calculations * Communicate your proposed savings to senior executives * Save 20 - 40% on authoring, 25-50% on localization costs, and over 50% on your existing publishing costs.

Tags: xml dita financial impact

from: abelsp 9 months ago

Presented at DocTrain East 2007 Conference by Alan Houser, Group Wellesley -- Through effective task analysis and information modeling, organizations can maximize the usability of their technical documentation while minimizing the required development and maintenance effort. During this interactive workshop, students will learn the principles of minimalist documentation, how to perform an effective task and topic analysis, approaches to migrating legacy documentation to DITA or other information models, and methods for mapping content to pre-defined information types. We will also use software tools to assist in performing topic analysis. While this workshop will use DITA information models as examples, the workshop will provide value for anybody who needs to move to a structured authoring environment and improve the usability and maintainability of their technical documentation. In many organizations, writers are judged by the volume of content that they produce. The larger the manual or help system, the more effective the writer. A fatter manual is considered to be a better manual. From the users perspective, however, fatter does not mean better. There is no positive correlation between page or topic count and usability. Large documentation sets may be intimidating and are likely to present usability issues. Furthermore, higher page or topic counts mean higher maintenance, translation, and production costs. The minimalist documentation strategy provides a way to design and deliver highly usable documentation while minimizing the amount of content that must be developed, maintained, and produced to support a product or service. The increasingly-popular DITA information architecture is based on the concepts of minimalist documentation. During this workshop, we will learn the principles of minimalist documentation, and how minimalist documentation strategies meet both user needs and business needs. We will learn how to design minimalist documentation using the DITA information architecture. We will interactively experience the important prerequisite of task and topic analysis for creating well-designed, highly usable minimalist documentation sets. We will also demonstrate the use of software tools to support topic analysis. In an interactive session, we will use the IBM Task Modeler to develop a task analysis for a product or service. The instructor will demonstrate how to use the IBM Task Modeler to automatically generate DITA map files and prototype DITA-based output.

Tags: information dita modeling content information

from: abelsp 9 months ago

Presented at DocTrain East 2007 Conference by Harvey Greenberg, XyEnterprise -- Just one of DITA’s many amazing attributes is how much power it provides, while at its core remaining quite simple. Simple though it is, DITA still requires good planning, good execution, and good project management to bring it all together. This is one area where technology—specifically content management technology—can add enormous value. Does every organization using DITA need a CMS? Certainly not. But this presentation discusses indicators for when you do, and offers some best practices surrounding acquisition and implementation.

Tags: dita content management cms xml

from: abelsp 9 months ago

Presented at DocTrain East 2007 Conference by Joe Gollner, Stilo International -- As every author knows, working with content has always been challenging. Now that we need to develop content that can be used in multiple ways, some we do not expect, makes this task even more demanding. The early experiences of working with structured XML markup have been difficult and not just because it is new. As the technology stabilized and practices were worked out, authors not only had to master new writing techniques but they often could not see a compelling benefit being returned on this effort. Least of all, their customers, the users of the documentation products, did not seem to be benefiting in any material way. At times, it even seemed that the move to structure resulted in less effective publications. But now that the technology is being worked out and as new technologies are thrusting structured content into the limelight, authors are entering a time when several things will change for the better. On one hand the challenges of working with structured markup have largely been addressed and on the other the content they produce can now be moved, rapidly into people's hands whether that be a high quality book or a blackberry. XML was hard. DITA has emerged as a technique that makes XML much easier to work with. And the wired marketplace is ready to consume structured content as soon as you hit save. This is in fact where the history of markup has been heading.

Tags: technical communication dita darwin information

from: abelsp 9 months ago

Presented at DocTrain East 2007 Conference by Sarah O'Keefe, Scriptorium -- This session is intended for current unstructured FrameMaker users who are considering a move to structured authoring and structured FrameMaker. Participants will learn how to assess problems in their current authoring environment, analyze whether XML and structure can help or not, plan for a structured authoring implementation, build conversion rules tables to migrate content from unstructured to structured FrameMaker, and more.

Tags: xml dita structured authoring writing

from: abelsp 9 months ago

Presented at DocTrain East 2007 Conference by Brian Buehling, Dakota Systems -- Since its inception, DITA has rapidly gained acceptance as a standard document structure used in many XML-based content management and publishing systems. DITA is an XML schema developed primarily to support technical documentation for a wide array of applications. This session will cover the commonly used element, attribute and entity constructs that are defined in the schema. More importantly, recommendations concerning how best to implement DITA solutions will be given. Special attention is given to developing practical DITA applications since, in many cases, some DITA elements will have to be extended through a mechanism called specialization to produce a robust XML-based publishing system.

Tags: dita documentation technical publishing architecture

from: manyukeh 8 months ago

fotos de Dita von teese

Tags: nude vintage retro glamour erotica

from: day 7 months ago

Tags: None

from: annegentle 6 months ago

Panel presentation at the January 2008 Central Texas DITA User Group meeting discussing wikis and structured authoring for technical documentation.

Tags: dita wiki ibm webworks quadralay

from: webworks 5 months ago

Presented at Central Texas DITA Users Group - 2/20/08

Tags: wiki dita wiki dita

from: guest47c1f1 4 months ago

Lisa Dyer's presentation at the CenTex DITA User Group panel on "What does DITA have to do with wikis?"

Tags: collaboration user-assistance dita2wiki wiki dita

from: lisa.dyer 4 months ago

Lisa Dyer's presentation at the CTDUG panel on the subject "What does DITA have to do with wikis?"

Tags: documentation collaboration user-assistance dita2wiki wiki

from: jgollner 4 months ago

This presentation addresses how some of the challenges that have historically confronted implementers of markup technologies (SGML and XML) and how DITA, together with some of the usability innovations associated with Web 2.0, can be used to address them. Presented at Content Convergence and Integration in Vancouver (12 March 2008).

Tags: usability xml web2.0 dita cci2008

from: mpriestley 4 months ago

DITA XML and Web 2.0: making Web 2.0 content portable and mashable using open standards for content and collections

Tags: dita cci2008 web2.0 dita cci2008

from: abelsp 2 months ago

Presented by Dave Holmes at Documentation and Training West May 6-9, 2008 in Vancouver, BC In 2006, Business Objects faced a major challenge. How to migrate over 50,000 pages of unstructured non-topic based documentation it had acquired through rapid growth and acquisitions. The answer was to use DITA to standardize content creation, management, translation and publishing processes company-wide. In this session, you will learn how they went from planning to publishing using an iterative approach, and how you can use this method to see the results of a content migration sooner in your project cycle.

Tags: communication technical darwin businessobjects dita