DCL's DITA Test Drive
August 31, 2007
Over at The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel shares his enthusiasm for the “DITA Test Drive” offering from Data Conversion Labs.
Sometimes the sheer volume of information on the internet is overwhelming. Even with the help of Google Alerts and RSS feeds, it’s easy to miss interesting news. That’s likely the reason we failed to notice this especially interesting offer from the folks at Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL). It’s called the DITA Test Drive Challenge, a program that allows content-heavy organizations a shortcut to DITA. For $3000 (okay, $2995, technically), DCL will convert 500 pages of legacy content to DITA and perform a Content Reuse Analysis on 2500 pages of legacy content. Wow! That’s quite an offer. Why would you want to take advantage of this offer? Because there’s a dirty little secret in XML authoring land. It’s next to impossible to evaluate an XML authoring tool without actually using some of your own content in it. Testing an XML editor with your own content will help you avoid selecting the wrong authoring tool for your organization. Those who skip this step generally purchase software based on the opinions of others and sometimes after having downloaded a free trial version of the software (which is pretty useless without your own DTD and some real content).
Posted by Bill Trippe at August 31, 2007 8:39 PM
