Conference Program Abstracts

7 Reuse Strategies for DITA
France Baril – IXIASOFT

I reuse, you reuse, he/she reuses, we reuse, you reuse, they reuse…and yet most of us are doing it different ways and for different reasons. We want to increase consistency, save time, save money, adapt content to different users or contexts, generate a new output format, and more. Then a standard like DITA comes along and its supporters pretend that it enables R – E – U – S – E. Wow! A standard that pretends to do the same thing that a lot of other tools and standards are pretending to do. What an innovation! Well, the innovation may just come from the fact that DITA actually supports a lot of different reuse strategies by offering multiple mechanisms. This presentation focuses on best practices and explores the what, when, and how of multiple reuse strategies: multiple output types, conditional text and filtering, automatic content creation, referencing content from other topics (conref), using variables for words and phrases, and repurposing or reusing content in different contexts.

After the Pilot Project, What Next?
Nancy Howe & Colleen Smith – Teradata Corporation

After the successful implementation of a pilot project implementing DITA and a Content Management System, Teradata executives are pushing for a phased enterprise-wide expansion of the solution. This presentation will explore how we communicated the value of DITA and content management, and how we achieved buy-in with other Teradata organizations, including customer service and training. We will discuss how we developed information architecture skills on our team, helped information developers make the move to topic-based writing, and how we are using targeted consulting services in our next phases.

All I Really Need to Know About Successful Content Management I Learned in Kindergarten
Suzanne Mescan – Vasont Systems & Charlotte Robidoux, PhD – Hewlett–Packard Company

Successful content management depends on effective collaboration amongst an organization’s team members. This session provides practical ways to build positive team interaction across your organization. Learn about key principles needed to engage your staff and maintain a strategic edge when implementing content reuse. Topics covered include team member involvement, training, executing processes, commitment, and momentum.

Applications and Documents Collide: The emergence of dynamic documents
Paul Wlodarczyk – JustSystems

Two previously divided worlds are converging: document publishing and application development. Traditionally, publishing processes were about static documents — print, PDF, HTML, etc. And as the web has become richer and more interactive, new content formats called rich media have emerged. But in traditional business process domains, document publishing has remained focused on static artifacts. Policies, procedures, technical manuals, product design documents — these are just a few examples of documents that are key to business operations. Today, they’re published as static documents. The good news is that we’ve taken steps to streamline and accelerate the implementation of change through versioning and other lifecycle services and XML-based componentization of the content itself. But the documents we publish are still just a snapshot in time. This causes mistakes to be made and unnecessary costs and liabilities to be incurred. In many process areas — particularly where accuracy is absolutely vital — this simply isn’t good enough.

How then, do organizations access live, interactive information? This is the domain of traditional business applications. Traditionally, ERP, SCM, PLM, BI, and custom workflow applications have been the source for live interactive information. Documents have been the domain of static information. But that’s beginning to change — the worlds of document publishing and application development are converging and the document itself is becoming the application — with live data and an interactive user experience. This session will discuss the emergence of “dynamic documents” as the new application context. Through a series of rich real-world application examples, this presentation will provide a new lens for reconsidering what were once very isolated domains. It will also provide a framework for thinking about the key business processes in your organization sitting at the intersection of content and data, business applications, and documents.

Authoring and Publishing DITA Content with Eclipse and the DITA Open Toolkit
Maria Brownstein – Sybase, Inc.
Guanjun Cai & David Muir – IBM Corporation

When combined, Eclipse and the DITA Open Toolkit provide a free yet powerful DITA authoring and publishing environment. This end-to-end solution includes up-to-date OASIS DITA standards, DITA-aware XML editor and validator, DITA content build and transform capabilities, and the Eclipse help system framework.

The first portion of this presentation shows how you can easily set up Eclipse and the DITA Open Toolkit for your team to author, edit, validate, transform, and deploy DITA content.

Beyond base Eclipse help plug-ins, are you also required to leverage the latest user assistance functions offered in Eclipse?

The second portion of this session demonstrates how both IBM and Sybase produce context-sensitive help from DITA source. Continuing with the low cost, open-source theme, we'll also discuss how to create customized Ant buildfiles and XSL transformations, then embed the DITA Open Toolkit to produce the additional feature files required for a complete Eclipse User Assistance system.

Best Practices for DITA in a Global Economy
Eric Severson – Flatirons Solutions

In the last year, DITA has literally taken the world by storm. Having quickly become the standard of choice for technical publishing, it is now being taken very seriously in a number of other application areas. But implementing and using DITA is not always straightforward. Based on real–life experience with DITA implementations, this presentation reviews key lessons learned and provides a wealth of practical advice for those considering DITA. It also specifically looks at how DITA can be used to reduce costs and cycle times for content globalization — including not just language translation, but also country–specific legal rules and cultural norms.

Business Drivers for Changing to DITA
Bruce Nevin – Cisco Systems, Inc.

Bruce will discuss Cisco’s decision process for implementing the information structure of Cisco content in DITA rather than in their proprietary DTD, and various ramifications of that decision. He will review business drivers and expected benefits. He will also discuss the need to re-implement conversion tools, authoring customizations, rendering code, and other costs. Finally, he will discuss change management costs and benefits, and describe considerations and tradeoffs for phasing the rollout to a large and complex constituency of users.

CMS/XML/DITA Terminology Primer
Presented by CIDM Associates

If you are coming as a first time participant to the CM Strategies/DITA conference you may be investigating content management, XML, and or DITA for the first time to make a decision whether these technologies are right for your company. You may not know much about these technologies and when you go to the sessions you may find yourself overwhelmed by the new concepts and vocabulary that the speakers are using.

To help you over this hurdle, CIDM is holding a free two hour session on Sunday March 6, 2008 from 12:00pm – 2:00pm to give you a jump start to make the sessions more meaningful to you. We’ll give you an overview of the basic technologies of the conference with special attention to the vocabularies that will be used in the sessions.

If you’re an old hand at his stuff, there’s no need to attend, but if you feel a little intimidated, this is the session for you. It will add to the value of the conference for your company and make a much richer experience for you.

Implementing a CMS to help manage what your current CMS doesn't
Robert Lankford – Lexmark International, Inc.

You've done the planning. You've implemented the system. XML data into and out of your content management system is now a reality. So now what? What do you do when you realize that there is more to managing your data than simply managing your data?

At Lexmark International Inc., Information Development learned that there is more to content management than DTDs, XML, and XSLT. Collaboration between globally positioned team members within the department is crucial. Furthermore, a system to help manage a company-wide presence is necessary for expanding and automating collaboration across the enterprise. In reality, there is simply more 'stuff' to keep track of than what is handled by a traditional CM system whose purpose is to take XML data and produce derivative outputs.

For us, the solution to this dilemma was to implement an entirely different kind of CM system. One based on web technologies that would allow us to create an Intranet site that could provide and integrate the following types of tools: wiki, forums, procedures repository, news and announcements, blogs, downloads area, software ticketing system, custom project allocation system, and more….and yet be flexible enough to: integrate within the framework of our company's Intranet, support group provisioning/granular access management, provide a development API that allows for custom web application extension, support page caching for performance reasons, and allow users to sign up for relevant notifications (pull vs. push).

This presentation will cover choosing an appropriate tool to meet our needs (criteria, support, etc.), setting up the web server environment (XAMPP stack), installing XOOPs (CMS system of choice), adding/configuration of open-source modules, customizing XOOPs (themes/templates), adapting XOOPs (TinyMCE WYSIWYG HTML Editor), extending XOOPs (writing custom web applications for the XOOPs environment), and looking to the future.

Complex Maps for Componentized Products
Judy Kessler – Sybase, Inc.

Tired of theory? Past the simple stuff? This presentation will give you practical tips for designing and implementing DITA maps that satisfy complex business requirements. At Sybase, our business requirements included delivering content in varied output formats for different types of componentized products, where users may have any mix of components.

To meet these requirements we developed design policies and models for information components, and applied a variety of reuse strategies in our DITA topics, maps, content units, and relationships. This presentation describes our design solutions and offers detailed examples of how we applied them to specific difficult problems.

Content Excellence and the Total User Experience
Eileen Jones, David Muir, & Jamie Roberts – IBM Corporation

People today have access to an ever-expanding volume of technical information in the course of their jobs. In terms of sheer quantity, more new information has been produced within the last 30 years than in the previous 5000 years!

Today at IBM, our products are documented in over 200 information centers containing nearly a million technical topics. This formal offering information is supplemented by hundreds of thousands of articles in developerWorks; numerous hints, tips, and flashes; ITSO Redbooks, Redpapers, and Technotes; and an exploding number of wikis and blogs. The result? Clients and support teams who might be experiencing what psychologist David Lewis calls Information Fatigue Syndrome (IFS). The symptoms of IFS include "paralysis of analytical capacity...leading to foolish decisions and flawed conclusions." Users tell us they suffer from many problems with our technical content: they can't find it quickly, they can't understand it or can't tell if it's current if they do find it, and it's often inconsistent from product to product. This seminar explores the key ways that IBM User Technologies is addressing these issues, and the key roles information architecture, business processes, and DITA play in solving user's content problems. From designing an appropriate content experience through to managing authoring and content infrastructure, DITA is the "common currency" in IBM's approach to content excellence.

We will also explore new opportunities for leveraging DITA XML beyond just static or passive content, and discuss how DITA can be actively used by tools to help build an excellent Total User Experience.

Content Management: Where did we come from? Where are we going?
JoAnn Hackos, PhD – Comtech Services, Inc.

As innovation accelerates ever faster in the high-tech world, we must turn to history to understand what lies ahead. At the opening of the Tenth Annual Content Management Strategies Conference, Dr. JoAnn Hackos leads us through the history of managing information, from the days of the cottage industry to the beginnings of topic-based writing to the headlong plunge into XML and DITA that we’re immersed in today. From her historical perspective, she gives us clues about where we are headed.

Content Reduction and Reuse in a Multi-Channel Publishing Environment
Elizabeth Fraley & Maria Ortmann – Single–Sourcing Solutions, Inc.

It all comes down to managing and reusing source. Recycling content is not new. Reusing and repurposing content is about efficiency: automating, accelerating, and merging applications, systems, and processes. This means modular writing, link management, and metadata to control variable content within a book, across books, across releases, product lines, audiences, and targets. How do you determine guidelines for content reuse in all these situations?

This presentation will serve people already working in documentation and single-sourcing environments the tools to determine the answers up front. PM staff will see the benefits organizations can gain through efficiencies gained where systems intersect.

A Democratic Approach to Overcoming DITA & CMS Issues
Sarah–Beth Doner & Laura Hood – Research In Motion, Ltd.

Research In Motion implemented a DITA CMS in 2006. Our CMS solved many of the issues that we faced with our previous toolset, but it also presented new challenges to overcome. The move to DITA and a CMS initiated significant changes in the way our writers do their work and how they think about technical writing. We will share strategies that we used to overcome early implementation issues and strategies that we are using as more writers start working in the system. Our goal is to provide a high–level overview of issues and to share the strategies that enabled us to deal with these issues in a democratic and inclusive manner. We will present these issues and strategies from two key perspectives: that of a technical writer using the CMS, and that of a tools specialist developing and supporting tools for the CMS. This presentation should appeal to managers, writers, and tools specialists at any stage in their CMS implementation.

Defining an Optimal Content Repurposing Systems Architecture
Jim Cain – Jacquette Consulting

An educational publishing organization's predominant product focus has been on print materials, such as textbooks. Recently, they have added online learning courses to their product offerings. This requires duplication of their content across the two product lines, resulting in increased development and maintenance costs. This discussion presents our analysis of the changes required for the organization's content, technologies, and system architecture in order to enable repurposing of their content. Although the implementation of the new system is in progress, there are beneficial observations to be shared from this experience.

Developing a Comprehensive Information Model
Frank Miller & Anne Bovard – Comtech Services, Inc.

Frank and Anne describe the approach they used to develop a comprehensive Information Model for the ITT Fluid Technology Global Enterprise Content Management initiative. This unique integration of Information Mapping, DITA, and minimalism proceeded from an analysis of user and tasks. The analysis stemmed from three Voice of the Customer studies conducted internationally and a task analysis with leading subject-matter experts. The integrated Information Model was introduced through a series of workshops to corporate staff responsible for technical publications and a group of writing vendors who are developing a unified manual to support Installation, Operations, and Maintenance of the corporation’s pump products.

The DITA Troubleshooting Specialization
Daniel Dionne & Carolyn Henry – IBM Corporation

The DITA Troubleshooting Specialization (TSS) was released by IBM in 2007. Consistent, quality troubleshooting documentation is extremely important to customers and support costs. Come learn about the process the team went through to develop the architecture and specialization itself as well as how to use the specialization with the DITA Open Toolkit 1.4.

DocBook vs. DITA: Will the real standard please stand up?
Teresa Mulvihill – t2a Communications

Over a decade ago DocBook became the standard for those forging ahead in XML publications. DocBook offered a cheaper and more efficient way to publish to multiple formats. Single-sourcing became a reality for hardware and software companies. However, in recent years, many in technical documentation publications have proclaimed DITA as standard for XML documentation. DITA offered an architecture in which to create and publish structured content. Makers of XML editors advertise seamless integration with DITA. Does this leave DocBook on the shelf? Are these two seemingly rival standards really that different? This presentation answers these questions with comparative examples, allowing the audience to decide for themselves.

Don’t Seek and You Will Find: Bringing content directly to your fingertips
Matt Armstrong – Author-it Software Corporation

Generating content takes time and money. And while there has been a recent focus on more efficient content reuse, this is still very dependent on knowing key words on which to search for specific information.

However, in order to maximize the benefits of content reuse, and make this information available to the entire organization, content management needs to take that next evolutionary leap to fully automate that process.

Join Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corporation, to discuss the latest content automation technologies available and to understand how automated content reuse can revolutionize the way your organization uses and manages one of your greatest knowledge assets.

From Unstructured to Structured, From HTML/FRAME to XML: A case study
Padma Neppalli – Intel Corporation

In this session, Padma will share her experiences, frustrations, successes, and insights in managing the migration of content from an unstructured to structured environment and in implementing an XML publishing infrastructure in a high-risk tool environment. She will share the process Intel followed, the additional skills they required, the resources they hired, the risks they took, the decisions they made, the infrastructure they set up to enable the migration (ex: Structured Authoring Style Guides, Information Models, etc.), and the tools they evaluated and the ones they finally picked.

This presentation targets writers, technical publications managers, and XML engineers who are considering moving to XML, but are not sure how to get started and what to expect. In addition to sharing their best practices for creating structured content and implementing an XML/CMS system, Padma will also share Intel’s experience with integrating the EMC/Flatiron’s CTS software into their XML publishing infrastructure. Since Intel was the very first company to adapt this new technology from EMC, the experience has been extremely painful, although somewhat successful.

Getting Enterprise Buy-In to XML Content Management
Bjorn von Euler & Ron Watson – ITT Fluid Technologies & JoAnn Hackos, PhD – Comtech Services, Inc.

Bjorn and JoAnn will detail the course of action they took to introduce the concept of XML Content Management to ITT. The effort began with key contacts who were encouraged to investigate content management. The next step was an introductory meeting to explain the value and benefits of XML Content Management to key managers. A comprehensive business case achieved support from C-level management. The result is a successful multi-organization implementation that is attracting attention widely in the corporation.

Hands-On Specialization Workshop
Erik Hennum – IBM Corporation

In this workshop, you learn how to create your own specializations. You learn not only the mechanics of extension by substitution and pluggability but also design considerations including: when to define structure with special topics, when to assign roles to topics with special maps, when to add vocabulary choices through domains, when to specialize attributes or the element, pros and cons of flexibility vs precision, and how to enable future extensions of your specialization.

Implementing DITA in the Real World
Raymond Lei – Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a leading provider in the telecom equipment market. To satisfy customization requirements and reuse content, Huawei decided to migrate to DITA in 2005 and has successfully completed the first phrase of migration. This session introduces strategies and techniques that Huawei is using to develop large-scale DITA-based publishing solutions for complex products and product suites. The content of this presentation will include background information of Huawei, why we chose DITA, implementation strategies, design pattern changes (line-based design to modular-based design), tools decisions (authoring, CMS, publishing engine), and lessons learned.

Improving Code Quality with DITA Code Reviews
Carolyn Henry & Shannon Rouiller – IBM Corporation

To capitalize on filtering enhancements, automation, and to someday provide faceted browsing capability to your users, ensuring the quality of your DITA coding is crucial. One method that teams at IBM have used to check and increase quality is called the DITA code review. This session will briefly explain what a DITA code review is, what you can expect to learn in a code review, typical tagging problems to look for, and how to successfully complete code reviews on your team.

Improving Source and Translation Quality with DITA and Content Management
Ann Adams – Kyocera Technology Development & Dan Dube – DocZone.com

Kyocera Technology Development produces software for printer drivers and networked device management. The technical communicators are responsible for creating user assistance and system administration manuals. They also edit UI strings and hardware messages and manage translation for 23 languages. This presentation describes how authoring in DITA topics and managing those topics in a content management system has contained translation costs while improving overall information quality.

Influence: The missing ingredient for content management
Meryl Natchez – TechProse & Andrea L. Ames – IBM Corporation

The technical aspects of DITA and content management are difficult enough to master, but getting corporate buy-in to the underlying process can be even more critical to success. This presentation provides practical tips for gaining and maintaining the corporate influence necessary to achieve that buy-in. You don’t have to be an extrovert to get people on board—a straightforward communications plan, action items, and strategies for success can do most of the heavy lifting. This presentation provides an overview of the process, sample communications, and tips for success at every stage. Learn how to make your project not just a technical but also a political success.

Information Architecture in the DITA World of Topic-Based Information
Lori Fisher, Andrea L. Ames, Shawn Benham, & Jennifer Fell – IBM Corporation

One of the most powerful aspects of DITA is the integration of an underlying architecture. The true power of reuse and componentized information comes from leveraging this architecture. Merely tagging information in DITA is not enough. To maximize the return on the investment in DITA, information development teams must invest in the architecture of their information, both by restructuring existing information as well as having a clear design for new information. As information development teams move to architected information, the role of the information architect becomes critical. What skills are required to be a successful information architect? What are the lessons learned from some successful information architects? How do managers hire or grow this skill? How does an information architect differ from an editor or a team lead? A panel of experienced information architects as well as managers will discuss their experiences developing a staff of architects for a world-wide organization of information developers. The panel will discuss challenges and recommendations.

Information Modeling Workshop
JoAnn Hackos, PhD – Comtech Services, Inc.

In this workshop, learn how to build an information model for your organization. Define your information types, the content units they contain, your standard document structures, as well as your metadata schema, naming conventions, and file and folder structure.

The Ins and Outs of Content Migration
Joe Gollner – Stilo e-Publishing Solutions

Too many projects have arrived at the uncomfortable position of having a fabulous new content management system in place but then having little content available in a condition that can be used with the system so as to show-off its innate capabilities. It is a bit like having a sparkling new car in the drive-way but not having any fuel. When the project turns its attention to harvesting its available content resources there is often a rude shock for the stakeholders when the time and expense of migrating legacy content to a more useful form is considered. Making matters worse, it is only during the process of large-scale content migration that many lessons about the content and how it must be managed come to the surface. Suddenly it can become clear that the new CMS might not be as perfect for the task as it once looked.

Content migration is the inescapable and invariably tough job of extracting content out of various legacy formats and producing high quality reusable content assets. It can be summed up as having mountains of MS Word and FrameMaker files but wanting DITA content.

Fortunately, we have learned a lot about converting content over the last 20 years and techniques exist that have been proven to make migrating content much less painful than it once was. One of the critical success factors for any content management initiative, and specifically any initiative targeting the latest generation of reuse oriented standards (e.g., DITA or S1000D), will be how well they leverage the available tools and techiques for migrating content efficiently and effectively. This presentation will introduce some of the key tools and techniques that should be considered.

An Introduction to Using XSLT with the DITA Open Toolkit
Steve Anderson – Salesforce.com

This presentation will introduce you to basic concepts of XSLT, the transformation language used by the DITA Open Toolkit to create various output formats from your DITA files. It will describe how the DITA Open Toolkit uses XSLT and provide tips on making your customizations easier to maintain and upgrade as new versions of the Open Toolkit are available. This talk is aimed at those who want to use the DITA Open Toolkit to create content, but don’t know how to customize the output to meet their needs. While you will not be an XSLT expert after attending this presentation, you should understand how XSLT interacts with the Open Toolkit and how to customize XSLT to meet your needs.

Managing Links with Relationship Tables
Amber Swope – JustSystems

One of the major benefits that DITA provides is the ability to abstract relationships from within topics and manage them in the maps that reference the topics using relationship tables. Relationship tables are tables that specify the non-hierarchical relationships between topics based on topic type. These relationships determine the links the DITA Open Toolkit generates that appear at the bottom of a topic under the “Related Tasks,” “Related Concepts,” and “Related Reference” labels.

This functionality is particularly important if you are generating HTML or online output or using nested maps to generate complex deliverables. Come learn how to maximize the automatic DITA link-generation capabilities!

OAXAL – Beyond DITA
Andrzej Zydroń – XML–INTL

DITA has been a tremendous success in the technical authoring field. Its modular approach to authoring has many benefits in terms of cost reduction through reuse. As a well-defined vocabulary for technical documentation, it has also helped reduce the entry costs for adopting XML for technical literature. Nevertheless DITA is only part of a rich tapestry of Open Standards that as a group form a very potent tool set furthering the benefits of a standards-based approach to authoring and localization tasks.

OAXAL (Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization) puts DITA into a complete Open Standards context. OAXAL comprises the following standards: DITA, xml:tm, Unicode TR29, SRX, GMX, TBX, and XLIFF to form an elegant and complete architecture. The main features of OAXAL are cost reduction, workflow automation, authoring consistency, and advanced translation technology.

Pilot Projects: What to ask yourself before you start and after you finish
Suzanne Barr & Martha Morgan – Network Applicance, Inc.

You wouldn't buy a car without taking it for a test drive — would you leap into a new authoring technology without trying it out first? Of course not, and that's why if you're thinking about jumping into DITA, you need to run a pilot project. We started on our DITA journey with one such project, and without the luxury of trying things outside of "real work," we launched our first DITA effort with real writers, real content, and a real product deliverable to build.

We'll talk about our experience and lessons learned. We’ll discuss what to consider when you make your project selection, how to run the pilot to maximize the amount of information that you have at the end, what issues and metrics you should track, and how you can use the pilot to determine and establish rules and best practices for your department.

The Playlist Model: Designing and delivering modular content
Renu Bhargava & Christine Nay– Juniper Networks

The playlist model is setting the bar not just for music, but for all types of content. As content producers, we really have no choice but to respond to this demand. To give the user more control over content, we have to break up books into smaller pieces that can be individually consumed, the same way that albums have been broken up into songs that can be individually consumed. However, breaking up books is much more challenging than breaking up a typical pop music album. Songs usually "stand alone" as individual units, but sections in a book do not necessarily stand alone. They rely on previous sections, chapter titles, etc. for context.

This is what made our current project such a spectacular opportunity. We did not have to deal with legacy books, but were able to design our content as individual modules that could be grouped in a variety of ways, depending on the customer's needs. Sure, they can still have books, just like you can still buy albums. But that can no longer be the only choice. Our presentation focuses on this fundamental paradigm shift from a book-based mentality that was embedded in our processes and our delivery systems. Thus, we had many hurdles to overcome in moving away from book-oriented content. We will discuss those challenges, what it took to overcome them, and best practices.

Pleasures and Pitfalls of Content Management for Enterprise Product Documentation
Liz Semmelmeyer & Carol Woronow – Symantec Corporation

Moving from a book-delivery paradigm to topic-based writing in a content management system offers pleasant efficiencies, but also unseen pitfalls for Enterprise product documentation. Some pleasures include easy reuse of content, ease of restructuring deliverables, and simple export to multiple delivery formats. Pitfalls include the complex interaction of simultaneous reuse possibilities (for multiple platforms, releases, and OEM deliveries), completely rethinking the structure of administrative topics, and the need to be always aware of who else might be using a source content section.

Enticed by the pleasant efficiencies of CMS systems, plus a corporate push to leap forward and be more efficient, we migrated over 5,000 pages (PDF and web help delivery) of legacy content in 10 months, to the Vasont CMS (plus XMetaL editor). In addition, we authored content for two emerging products, attempting to practice the best of topic-based source content structure.

Restructuring the legacy content for optimal use became impossible. One attempt to restructure a large chunk of content for optimal reuse rendered the structure of that content incomprehensible to any of our writers. Creating the new source content was an adventure in content management. Restructuring the sections in the deliverable was easy. Delivering the content as PDF, help, or even MS Word was easy. Reuse was a simple drag and drop from source to deliverable.

Lulled into complacency, we forgot to consider the other writers using our sources. One writer had an unpleasant surprise when a PDF extract (that was fine two weeks ago) had missing sections and content that no longer applied. Another challenge was consideration of all the possible uses of our source (for multiple platforms, releases, OEM deliveries, and products), which required months of planning around conditional text. Tracking hundreds of topics in various stages of completion expanded our use of Excel spreadsheets. And writing for topic-based reuse constantly challenged us to think differently than our past linear writing.

Putting the "M" in CMS
Harvey Greenberg – XyEnterprise

While it is true that CMS refers to a Content Management System, one could argue that the "M" often represents the Mechanics of a CMS. That’s because the focus of most implementations – and rightly so – involves mechanics, such as importing existing content, creating new content, editing, and publishing. While important, these functions represent only one component of a CMS. The management portion is often overlooked, and yet it is the area that can provide the most value to an organization. From planning your deliverables, building and maintaining schedules, and improving your process through metrics, a well thought out and executed plan can help drive acceptance and compliance in an organization. Moreover, the CMS can act as a component of a best of breed solution that can grow with your business. This session draws in part on some real life case studies of companies who mastered the "M", while also presenting some new ideas for consideration. Bring some examples of your own, and help us make this an interactive and engaging session.

Reducing Translation Costs with Scalable Vector Graphics
Hal Trent & Frank Miller – Comtech Services, Inc.

During their enterprise-wide content management implementation, ITT Fluid Technology recognized a need for one graphic file format. ITT FT, with assistance from Comtech Services, tested a variety of formats and ultimately selected Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Frank & Hal will discuss the benefits of using the SVG standard, including translation cost reduction and delivery method versatility.

Selecting a Content Management System for DITA
Scott Wolff – WOLFF and Associates, LLC

Today, there are a wide variety of CMS applications to choose from, many which list DITA as a supported standard. Selecting the right system can be an enormous challenge when you haven't transitioned to DITA. Choosing the wrong system can be a costly mistake. If you are using a DITA-based information model: Which CMS applications provide the best DITA support? What types of CMS applications should you avoid? Can you avoid buying a CMS by employing a SaaS/ASP CM Service? This presentation will focus on the CMS features that facilitate DITA applications and provide a basis for assessing the level of DITA support needed and provided. Scott will feature screen shots provided by a variety of CMS vendors and servicers to help illustrate the DITA-oriented features discussed.

Single Sourcing and eLearning Content: From XML to DITA
William Gill – Innovatia, Inc.

This presentation will describe a pilot implementation of a single-source solution within a corporate knowledge services environment. The pilot illustrates Innovatia’s experience converting existing documentation from various formats (including unstructured) to a DITA-based solution. The Innovatia solution was made extensible by allowing an automated transformation to various formats including a custom documentation standard, Documentation (pdf) outputs, Help outputs, and to eLearning outputs. Innovatia adopted an integrated approach to the creation of the single-source solution, creating a new methodology, workflow, topic templates, and integrated workflow system. Similarly, to implement these processes, a new toolset was introduced to the documentation team. This presentation will summarize the pilot process and highlight its practices and outcomes.

Staged Production and Quality Documentation within a DITA-Based CMS
Keith Schengili-Roberts – AMD, Inc.

One of the key challenges facing AMD's Graphics Product Group Documentation & Localization department was to adopt a DITA topic-based authoring model while ensuring that production documentation was of the highest possible quality. By implementing a staged production model within the IXIASOFT DITA CMS Framework, they have a system in place that checks the validity and accuracy of content at the topic level from the original knowledge transfer stage with engineering out to final published product. Keith Schengili-Roberts from AMD will talk about the implementation of their information-quality review system, and highlight the key features that support it. Of interest to anyone who is seeking processes designed to improve the quality of their documentation using a DITA environment.

Strategy to Scale Global Documentation at VMware
Denise Kiser, PhD & Sharon Fingold – VMware, Inc. & Howard Schwartz, PhD – SDL International

In the past, software and hardware were tied together. Software was installed and ran only from a single computer. By the same token a single computer ran only a single operating system. Virtualization software like that offered by VMware has enabled software and hardware to be separated. The effect has been to allow a single computer to run multiple operating systems and applications and single applications to be moved easily from one computer to another.

As a pioneer in software virtualization, VMware now faces the challenge of scaling to meet the demands of a global market. Founded in 1998 and then acquired by EMC, VMware was recently spun out for an IPO in August 2007. This talk discusses how the technical publications organization is developing a strategy to meet the new demands for faster global documentation. Among the challenges faced by the organization is the increase in new products, faster release cycles, and rapidly escalating number of markets and languages into which the documentation has to be delivered. The problem is compounded by various audiences to which the documentation is targeted.

To address these challenges, VMware considered various possible approaches and decided to move to DITA and put in place enabling technologies including a content management system and global information management system. This talk addresses the factors that shaped the development of this DITA strategy, how the team explored and educated itself about the various options, what kind of resource needs were identified and why this strategy was considered better than alternatives. Attention is also given to the intersection of US and global requirements and the challenges of meeting the rapidly growing localization challenges.

Successful Implementations of DITA and a CMS
Chip Gettinger & Fred Lass – Astoria Software

Implementation of DITA and a CMS provides many important benefits to organizations. This presentation will highlight several of these benefits, planned and surprises, in a customer case study style that focuses on best practices from production environments. Discussion points will include DITA techniques for content modeling, adoption methodologies for authoring, converting existing content, using a CMS with actual reuse models, localization techniques with translation memory, and processing/rendering using the Open Toolkit. We will cover planned benefits vs. actual outcomes, business value derived from implementation, and change manage techniques – both technical and human factors.

Using IBM Task Modeler to Create DITA-Based Information Sets
Kristen James Eberlein – Systems Documentation, Inc.

IBM Task Modeler is a graphical tool that can be used to prototype and develop DITA-based information sets. Available as a free download from IBM Alphaworks, it generates graphical representations of DITA maps that can easily be understood by a wide range of stakeholders: managers, developers, marketing representatives, and technical communicators.

This session will provide an overview of the application and demonstrate how to use it to easily and rapidly create a DITA map, stub DITA files, and a relationship table that links the DITA files. (Attendees of this session will also receive a handout that augments the online help by explaining how to perform all of the tasks demonstrated.)

Using SharePoint as the Complete DITA Content Collaboration Platform
Steffen Frederiksen – Content Technologies ApS

SharePoint is increasingly being adopted by companies everywhere as the corporate collaboration and content management platform. So how about implementing DITA on SharePoint? After all, only a few of us like to struggle with the DITA OpenToolkit on a local disk or a fileshare on a daily basis.

That's why Content Technologies decided to provide a simple, open, ready-to-use solution based on SharePoint. The solution is configurable in many ways, and it provides a CMS that is easy to maintain, with built-in versioning and single sign-on, browser-based topic editing, Microsoft Word as a basic DITA editor, as well as interfaces for other DITA editors (XMetaL, FrameMaker, and more).

This presentation describes how to organize, edit, and publish DITA in SharePoint. First we provide a (DITA) map-like overview, then a closer look at editing, SharePoint-related issues, and browser capabilities. Finally, a look at publishing DITA maps from inside SharePoint – through the Open Toolkit or through Word 2007/Open XML.

Veni, Vidi, Wiki: How (and why) open source wikis are changing the face of technical publishing
Peter Dykstra – MetaphorX, LLC

Open source wikis present a compelling value proposition for technical documentation departments, as well as an opportunity for technical writers to expand their skills and get hands-on experience with the new generation of Web-based publishing tools.

The Web is driving a move away from desktop-oriented publishing tools to centralized web-based publishing models. Originally conceived as the “simplest possible database,” the first browser-based wiki was designed to enable any Web user to create and edit Web content. Wikis have grown; in August 2007 the English version of Wikipedia (perhaps the most famous wiki) offered 1,945,048 articles. Along the way wiki technology has evolved to the point where wikis and CMS technology have essentially converged. At this point the main difference between a high-end wiki and a CMS is probably not the technology but the governance model.

Open source, standards-based wikis are changing the economics of technical publishing. While they lack some of the features and support available with commercial systems and require that you put the pieces together yourself, they also bring a fresh Web-based approach, with direct access to Web users. A CMS-based wiki can enable organizations to publish more efficiently, achieving benefits such as reuse and repurposing, and supporting new publishing models such as shared writing and interactive publishing. The technology can support Web content management as well as (with the advent of standards such as DITA), traditional formats such as PDF and Windows Help, XML-based formats, and multi-channel publishing.

This presentation reviews how structured writing practices, the Web, and new standards-based tools are converging to bring new capabilities and options for technical documentation management. It includes an overview of the Open Source CMS/Wiki landscape, issues involved in successful implementation, a demo of a wiki-style CMS, and an opportunity for Q&A and discussion. You can try it at home! See how a moderately savvy computer user can download a wiki CMS package, set it up in a few hours on a PC or Mac, and join the world of Open Source.