Stilo International - presentation at the 2014 LavaCon Conference in Portland, Oregon. Scheduled for Tuesday, Oct 14, 10.15-11.15am. There has been much debate as to the merits of using Word, or Word-like editors, by occasional content contributors to author DITA. Some may argue that it doesn’t make for a practical proposition, as there is inevitably a trade-off between ease-of-use and the support of a meaningful DITA tagset. Others might be concerned that Word-like editors cannot be sufficiently constrained for use by the occasional contributor who has no knowledge of DITA or its complexities, while template approaches can often prove to be too inflexible for use at the enterprise level. Drawing on the results of customer research recently undertaken by Stilo, as well as demonstrating latest product developments including AuthorBridge, this presentation will seek to explain how the gatekeepers of enterprise content management systems can ensure that only high-quality DITA is submitted by SMEs, as they continue to use their everyday authoring tools.

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DITA authoring foroccasional content contributors
Les BurnhamCEO
Patrick BakerVP Development & Professional Services

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Stilo International (LSE:STL)

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HR
Legal
Marketing
Other
LIKELY CANDIDATES FOR DITA ADOPTION?
CustomerSupport
Training
Engineering
Supply chain
Partners
Customers
Other
TechDocs

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Who? How many? How often? How much? Curated? Tools? Knowledge of DITA?

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Why adopt DITA? –top answers
►Content reuse very important, especially to engineering, training and customer support
►Publication tool chaincan be leveraged

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Impediments to enterprise adoption of DITA
►Management support is generally high, but some are more sensitive to cost implications
►In large organizations, there is concern that SMEs may resist change, in smaller organizations this appears to be less of an issue
►Benefits accrue to reusing team, not to author
►Some engineers don’t care much about docs(e.g. they go to social media when they need help)
►Authoring tools must be very easy to use and robust(and very low-cost)

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Possible drivers for curation by tech docs team
►General editing (spelling, grammar, style)
►Refine DITA markup
►Localization
►Apply metadata
►Manage links
►Manage content reuse
►CCMS access (roles, licenses)

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Current authoring tools –some observations
►Conversations and email with tech docs team are another way of “authoring”
►Open Office sometimes used in placeof Word, but not too often
►Internal web tools are oftenhome grown
►Illustration and movieprograms important totraining

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Occasional contributors prefer to use familiar toolsEDIT & TOPIC CREATION
Browser-based, WYSIWYG
Full DITA configurability
Server-based conversion and validation
CCMS integrationIMPORT
Template library
Central rules configuration
Server-based conversion and validation
Cloud service, workflow integration
DITACustom XML

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ckeditor.com
Open Source
Fully customizable
Multilingual support
Plugin architecture

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►An enterprise solution for users with no knowledge of DITA
►Enables web-based contributions at very low cost
►NOT meant to compete with generic XML editors
►Work-in-progress, Q4 pilot with significant enterprise customer
►Initial release planned early 2015

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Initial Release –general capabilities
►Check in / out
►Browse CMS
►Insert graphics
►Edit –3 topic types (concept, task, reference)
►Create new topic from a template

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Comprehensive DITA support under-the-hood
►Core Module
►~200 elements
►DITA/XSD driven context-sensitivity inside an XML structure
►Generates compliant, valid DITA every time
►Fully customizable & configurable (per user, per department)
►Conrefs, Conditions, Reltables
►Specializations
►Attributes

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FUTURE support for selected CK Editor plug-ins
►http://ckeditor.com/addons/plugins/allchoose from 230+
e.g. Google Docs viewer, LoopIndexTrack Changes, Templates, Tables, Form elements, Paste from Word, Equation editor, Math editor, Youtubeembedding, List, Formulae, Spellchecker, Floating Tool-Bar …

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www.stilo.com/authorbridge
contact@stilo.com