We’ve had the pleasure of implementing DITA in many companies both large and small. Unfortunately, writers almost always have some trepidation about the move. At the same time, there’s a lot for writers to get excited about!
Here are some common remarks from writers—along with responses to encourage a positive outlook about the change.
In episode 116 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Patrick Bosek of Heretto talk about Content as a Service.
“Do we still have places where building a static site or a static set of help materials makes a lot of sense? Totally. But there’s a natural aspect of dynamic changing content. If that content is going to be a little bit different based on who or where or when you access it, then you can’t build it statically. That’s one of the things you’ll never get from a PDF.”
– Patrick Bosek
In this presentation, Divraj Singh of Adobe and Sarah O’Keefe explore the concept of Content as a Service and provide CaaS examples.
“In a Content as a Service model, content creators write the content and make it available. Then the consumer gets to format that content and read or consume it in whatever way they want. ”
– Sarah O’Keefe
In episode 103 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share some considerations for transitioning into a new component content management system or CCMS.
“You need to look at the requirements you have now. Are they being supported or not supported? Do you see this system helping you move forward with your content goals in three to five years?”
– Alan Pringle
In episode 101 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Sarah O’Keefe talk about what life is like with and without a content management system (CMS).
“You have to decide, by looking at your particular organization, whether you need what a CMS will give you. You will get improvements in consistency and automation for formatting and traceability. You can get improvements in translation because you have more consistent content and better workflows.”
– Sarah O’Keefe
In episode 94 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and David Turner of DCL take a look at content migration and discuss all of the players and parts involved.
“It’s not just about moving the content and loading it to the new system. You actually have to transform the content from the unstructured formats.”
–David Turner, DCL
In episode 93 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe talk about how to determine whether DITA XML is a good fit for smaller content requirements.
“Scalability or anticipated scale is actually a good reason to implement DITA for a small team.”
–Sarah O’Keefe
Good news: The technical problem of integrating marketing and technical content has been solved.
Bad news: The hard work is just starting.
The design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective need to co-exist and co-create.
In episode 83 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Jake Campbell talk about the next generation of DITA. What happens when you need to update your existing DITA structure?
“When you’re building everything out the first time around, you can do as much user acceptance testing as you want—but the best user acceptance testing is going to be live testing.”
—Jake Campbell
Sarah O’Keefe discusses general best practices for CCMS implementations, along with a specific focus on the AEM DITA CCMS.
“You then configure AEM XML to support your content model with specialization, constraints, and authoring experience. You can build authoring templates that give people a framework to work in and you can also customize the actual user experience.”
—Sarah O’Keefe
