Calculate your DITA ROI
Will DITA bring enough value to your content operations to justify the investment costs? Calculate your DITA ROI to decide.
The PDF landscape for DITA content
I found this article in the 2010 (!!) archives and have updated it. Surprisingly, the general gist is still accurate.
There are numerous alternatives for producing PDF output from DITA content. The approach you choose will depend on your output requirements—do you need images floating in text, sidebars, and unique layouts on each page? How often do you republish content? How much content do you publish? Do you need to create variants for different audiences? Do you provide content in multiple languages?
DITA and learning content
One of our 2024 trends was an increased interest in structured content for learning—classroom training materials, e-learning, and more—and even DITA-based learning content.
With this in mind, we have some new initiatives for 2025.
Webinar: Discovering the Basics of DITA with LearningDITA
Join Sarah O’Keefe for “Discovering the Basics of DITA with LearningDITA” a free webinar tailored for technical writers who want to learn how to create content in accordance with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). You’ll discover the essentials of DITA—what it is, why it’s crucial for creating structured content, and how it revolutionizes consistency and efficiency in documentation.
By exploring core elements such as topics, maps, and metadata, along with DITA specializations like task, concept, and reference topics, you’ll learn why organizations around the globe use DITA to craft modular, reusable content and put it to work.
Attendees will be introduced to LearningDITA—a self-paced, online DITA training course. Lessons include exercises, links to additional resources and videos, and quizzes to test your knowledge.
The business value of DITA specialization
It’s hard to believe that the DITA standard needs additional tags. I tried counting them, but gave up at 150, when I had only reached the letter G. (Be my guest: https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/langRef/quick-reference/all-elements-a-to-z.html)
Adobe DITAWORLD 2024
June 11th-13th
Online (and free)
Have you registered for Adobe DITAWORLD 2024? Sarah O’Keefe will be part of a panel of experts called Navigating the AI Frontier on Wednesday, June 12th at 11:15 PDT. This event is free, online, and a great way to connect with leading innovators and experts in the content industry.
Want to connect?
Replatforming an early DITA implementation
Bill Swallow, Director of Operations at Scriptorium, and Emilie Herman, Director of Publishing at the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), shared lessons learned from a DITA implementation project.
What did we want to accomplish with our project? One was to develop a single source of truth for our content, a single system to host all of it. Secondly, we wanted to modernize our information architecture and our content models and document all of it clearly. Lastly, we wanted to futureproof our content operations and go to a digital-first workflow.
— Emilie Herman
CCMS
Change management
Content management
DITA
DITA workflow—managers
DITA XML—authors
Structured content
Succeeding with DITA adoption in your organization
When a DITA-based workflow is the best choice to support business requirements for your content, you may face the daunting task of convincing leadership to move forward with this enterprise-wide change. Sarah O’Keefe shared practical tips for overcoming common objections to DITA during her session at the AEM Guides user conference.
What’s next after LearningDITA? (podcast)
If you’ve taken the courses at LearningDITA.com and you’re interested in starting a DITA project, check out episode 163 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast where Bill Swallow and Sarah O’Keefe talk about the steps you can take to get funding.
“Showing up with cookies never hurts, but what is your executive’s motivation from a business point of view? What are they trying to accomplish in their goals for this next quarter or month or year, and so on? You need to show them, assuming that you can, that moving to structured content, moving to DITA, and changing tools is going to help achieve those business goals.”
— Sarah O’Keefe
Insights from MadWorld 2023—the move from Flare to DITA
Our team enjoyed meeting the passionate people we met during MadWorld 2023. Now that the MadCap Software family has acquired the IXIA CCMS, learn more about what it is, how it adds value to Flare users, and when you may consider transitioning to this powerful tool.
