If you were an early adopter of structured content, there’s a good chance that you have a custom XML content model. This article describes the process Scriptorium uses to make a shift from custom XML into DITA.
In this presentation, Bill Swallow explores the weird yet effective applications of smart content in groups outside of techcomm.
“Moving to smart content or intelligent content has largely so far been driven by efficiency. But the places that are looking at using smarter content now are less interested in the efficiency of that content. They’re more interested in the value that it’s going to bring.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 98 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech continue their discussion about the pros and cons of markdown.
“If you want to make a website and you need to write the text in a fast way that does not involve adding a lot of the brackets that are in HTML syntax, I think that’s the main use for markdown.”
–Dr. Carlos Evia
In episode 97 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech discuss the pros and cons of markdown.
“I think markdown has a huge user base because most people need to develop content for the web. But there’s a set of people that need to be working in something more structured for a variety of reasons, and those are the ones who use DITA.”
–Dr. Carlos Evia
Buyers are looking at your technical content and marketing content prior to the sale. To provide a unified customer experience, you need to integrate the two. Here are some resources to help you get started:
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 87 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Nenad Furtula of Bluestream talk about finding the value when selling structure. Why do so many tech pubs departments fail to get support for structured content and what can we potentially do to change that?
In episode 76 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Alan Pringle talk about expectations versus realities of tools when moving to smart structured content.
“You can have different people using different tools and still pour all of the content into the single content management system. People connect to it differently based on the authoring tool that they prefer, and what works best for them.”
—Alan Pringle
If you had told me in July 2015 that LearningDITA would have 10 courses and be available in three languages, I wouldn’t have believed you. Since the site’s initial launch, it’s grown from a single course to a major resource for those who need to learn to use DITA.
In episode 52 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey talks with Mark Gross of DCL about content conversion. They explore some of the use cases they have seen and what partial conversion looks like.
