In episode 95 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kris Eberlein (chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee) discuss the upcoming release of 2.0. What can you expect if you are currently in DITA? And what do you need to know if you are considering DITA?
“If you’ve been shoehorning diagnostic information into troubleshooting topics, you’re going to have a good semantic place to put that content with DITA 2.0.”
–Kris Eberlein
We’ve worked on a few DITA-to-PowerPoint projects. In some cases, the project sounded like a natural fit. In other cases, the fit was less than compelling. Even in projects that seemed to have a natural fit, we encountered bumps in the road with the DITA content, the design of the slide masters, or both.
There are many good reasons to create a DITA-to-PowerPoint conversion. It’s an attractive idea to use the same material for slides and student materials (such as handouts). A DITA-to-PowerPoint conversion also allows you to create slides by reusing content from your existing topics.
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
In episode 89 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow talk about strategies for avoiding the misuse of metadata and DITA XML-based content.
“The more you fine-tune how your content model needs to operate, the easier it’s going to be to move it forward over time. The more you start taking shortcuts and using metadata for purposes other than what it was intended for, the more problems you’re going to have.”
– Bill Swallow
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 is presenting Leveraging DITA for enterprise content needs on Wednesday, October 7th at 7:00 p.m. ET. She will explore different ways to exchange DITA content with marketing, e-learning, support, software development, and others across the enterprise.
In episode 79 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow continue their discussion and talk about solutions to quick fixes.
“A big part of your content strategy should be how requests come in, how the timelines are built, and what you’re responding to and how you’re responding to them in the first place.”
—Bill Swallow
In episode 78 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow talk about the true cost of quick fixes in your content strategy.
“Even if a quick fix might save you some time or a little bit of upfront cost or upfront effort on planning, it’s almost always going to add costs in the long run.”
—Gretyl Kinsey
An organization’s first foray in DITA and structured content is most often driven by one of the following:
Jake Campbell talks about how you can utilize automated processes in a high-design environment.
“When we’re looking at high-design, we have a focus on form. When we’re looking at automated workflows, we’re looking at a focus on the content itself.”
—Jake Campbell
