October 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

The sessions that I have been organizing on enterprise publishing technology have been coming together. For the session on DITA and related standards like S1000D, we have Bob Doyle of the Boston DITA Group and Don Bridges of Data Conversion Labs. We have another speaker from industry who will be talking about S1000D, but he is still awaiting the go-ahead from his corporate communications folks.

For the session on multi-channel publishing, John Parsons, Editorial Director of The Seybold Report will be moderating, and two speakers are on board, again with a third likely to be joining soon. Rich Pasewark, a former colleague of mine from XyEnterprise and more recently with Quark, is working independently now on some very interesting projects. The second speaker is Mark Laroche, who is Director of Production for Digital Media at Random House. He is going to be talking about some very forward-thinking work they have been doing withe the Fodor's travel guides.

Finally, for the metadata session we have two speakers, with a third to be announced shortly. We were very happy to talk our client Richard Ferrie from Pearson into speaking. Rick is Senior Vice President, Publishing Operations and Content Management for all of Pearson, and has some top-level lessons learned on what works and what doesn't in bringing metadata into publishing workflows and systems. Gilbane analyst Bill Rosenblatt will also be speaking, bringing his perspective on metadata efforts at some of the largest publishers and media companies out there.

Keep an eye on the conference session descriptions page and the Gilbane events blog as we add new speakers and elements to the conference.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:05 AM

August 31, 2007

DCL's DITA Test Drive

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 8:39 PM

August 25, 2007

Calling all DITA Tutorials

Bob Doyle is organizing a DITA Tutorial Project.

Will you help us to develop tutorials for DITA Users? Have you prepared a presentation or written an article on DITA that could be the basis for a tutorial? Have you recorded a webinar (vendor webinars are welcome - if they teach DITA using their product). Read more

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:23 AM

May 26, 2007

DITA for Small Groups

Are you a sole proprietor, sole documentation person, or part of a small doc group? Check out Lone-DITA.

Speaking of DITA, if you haven't already, you should check out DITA Storm, a browser-based DITA editor.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:59 PM

May 21, 2007

Thinking about DITA vs S1000D?

Over at TheContentWrangler.com, Joel Amoussou has some thoughts:

The subject of interoperability between S1000D and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has received significant attention within the technical documentation community recently. This article discusses the following issues:

--Shall we create DITA specializations for S1000D data modules?
--How can we facilitate interoperability between DITA and S1000D, to enable round-tripping transforms for example?
--Is the DITA specialization mechanism the best way to make S1000D extensible?
--How can users leverage the strengths of both DITA and S1000D without introducing complexity?

As they say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:31 PM

March 21, 2007

And a Busy Year it Was

The 2006 Year in Review for DITA

by Don Day, Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect

The OASIS DITA standard:
The current standard is at DITA 1.0.  During 2006, committee work was focused on developing the proposed DITA 1.1 features (see "Roadmap for DITA development.). Just last month, the committee released a Public Review draft for DITA 1.1, which is expected to be approved later this year.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:35 PM

September 29, 2006

Speaking of DITA

I wrote an article about DITA for the magazine, Multilingual Computing. Unfortunately, the article is available by subscription only. (Also, unfortunately, I am having trouble reaching their site right now...) But I have four certificates entitling readers to a one-year subscription to the magazine. It's an excellent magazine. Email me with your contact information, and I will mail you one of the certificates. First come, first served.

UPDATE: Corrected "one-ear subscription" to "one-year subscription." No one wonder they have been going slowly! I still have a couple left, so e-mail me if you are interested.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:12 AM

DITA Open Toolkit Release 1.3

Release 1.3 of the DITA Open Toolkit is now available. I have written about the rapid adoption of DITA (for example, here and here). One of the big reasons for the rapid adoption is the toolkit, which provides users with, among other things, a ready means of publishing DITA-encoded content in common formats such as PDF and Help.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:51 AM

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