Most of the DITA work that we do at Scriptorium is “full-on” implementation. That is, our customer decides to move their content from [something that is not DITA] to a DITA-based system. There are variations on the theme, of course, but nearly all of our customers are concerned about managing localization costs and increasing content reuse.
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides an XML architecture for technical communication. Although implementing DITA is likely to be faster and easier than building your own XML architecture from the ground up, DITA is not suitable for everyone.
Getting attractive PDF output out of XML is a serious technical challenge. But in some organizations, the PDF requirement is being used to prevent to unwanted workflow changes.
Technical communication and technical support should be allies. After all, tech support needs the information that tech comm produces. Tech comm often has only limited customer contact; tech support has oodles of daily customer contact.
And yet, there is a common organizational pattern where tech comm and tech support are in conflict.
This article was originally published in STC Intercom in March of 2011.
A standards-based workflow is challenging. This article discusses the issues with DITA (an XML standard for technical communication content) and XSL-FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects, a standard used to create PDF from XML (http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/publishing).
Social media is inexorably coalescing our personal and professional identities. What happens when baby pictures, political views, drinking habits, and hobbies collide with your corporate persona?
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe discusses the challenges of getting attractive output from DITA and demonstrates Scriptorium’s approach to web-based help and PDF.
At the 2011 North Carolina Technology Association annual meeting, Gartner analyst Michael Smith discussed how IT needs to show business value or risk being marginalized within an organization.
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe discusses how to calculate the return on investment of an XML/DITA implementation for technical content.
If you are considering XML and DITA, but are trying to figure out whether you can justify the cost and effort, this session is for you.
Predictions time! First, let’s review the 2010 post: cloud-based authoring begins to replace desktop authoring, increased adoption of XML alongside more sophisticated justifications, social media, collaboration, important new terms (content strategy [yes!] and decision engine [huh?]).
I’m not sure why I thought “decision engine” was going to take off, because it didn’t. Onward to 2011…
