It went all too quickly, but for the past few months I’ve been working with Tom Parish on podcast production at talk.bmc.com. I’ve since decided I can’t juggle quite that many balls in the air, but I’m pleased with how these podcasts turned out. I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes work of recruiting interviewees, finding topics, and producing the shows. With an assertive goal of four shows a month, you have to be constantly looking for the next person to talk with, setting a schedule, and researching the topic well enough to come up with a set of 5-7 questions to fill a 15-30 minute recording.

Our goal with talk.bmc.com/podcasts is to produce educational shows about Information Technology, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), which is a set of standards published to help you tighten up your IT department and align it with the whole company, and Business Service Management which is a revolution for how IT departments can run in order to tie technology into business goals.

William Hurley – Seeing Transparency through Open Source and Enterprise Software

Mary Nugent – Preparing your Business Services for the Future

Dennis Drogseth – Value Proof for CMDB Deployments

Tom Bishop and Dan Turchin – The Mobile IT Worker – They Walk, Talk, and Keep Businesses Running

Mainframe Trends in Enterprise IT for 2008 with John Albee and Mike Moser

Peter Armstrong on Guiding Principles to Changing Behavior and Speeding the Adoption of BSM and ITIL

Doug Mueller – Taking the Service Desk to the Next Level

The links above go to the show notes for each show, which is basically a blog entry to entice people to listen to the show. My favorite is probably William Hurley with Mary Nugent a close second. And the Mobile IT Worker has some fun stories in it.

The neat thing about podcasting is that it lets people tell their stories. Stories are very difficult to convey any other way, although the Google Chrome comic does tell individuals stories in a unique way.

I’ve been on the interviewee side of podcasts a few times, and I’m planning another one this week with Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis of DMN Communications. But it was neat to be an assistant to podcast production even if only for a few months.

Here’s a reading list for DITA materials when you’re just getting started. I’ve been fielding some questions via email and IM about DITA lately, and pulled this blog post out of my drafts. I hope it’s helpful.

Learning more about DITA
http://justwriteclick.com/2006/05/18/learning-more-about-dita/

Getting started with DITA
http://justwriteclick.com/2007/04/12/getting-started-with-dita/

Structured writing, structured documentation
http://www.mbwest.com/Rants-and-raves.htm

BMC Case Study featured in The Rockley Report:
http://www.rockley.com/TheRockleyReport/V2I1/Feature%20Article.htm

Is DITA Going to Tip? By JoAnn Hackos in the CIDM newsletter
http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/200512/feature.htm

Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing
Architecture book by Jennifer Linton and Kylene Bruski.

Planning for DITA Success: How to Set Up the Right Team and the Right
Strategy, Part I, by Steve Manning of The Rockley Group and Su-Laine
Yeo of Blast Radius
http://www.rockley.com/articles/WhitePaper_DITA_Success_Dec05.pdf

Planning for DITA Success: How to Deploy DITA, Step-By-Step, Part II,
by Steve Manning of The Rockley Group and Su-Laine Yeo and Paul
Prescod of XMetaL
http://www.rockley.com/articles/WhitePaper_DITA_Deploying_Apr061.pdf

10 DITA Lessons Learned From Tech Writers in the Trenches
http://www.thecontentwrangler.com/article/10_dita_lessons_learned/

Updated to add:
ISTC Communicator articles about DITA (2005-2007)
http://dita.xml.org/resource/istc-communicator-articles-about-dita-2005-2007

Just doing a little data mining of the posts I’ve written about DITA in the last few years. I think that there’s a gap for DITA users who are writers or content creators and not coders. I’d like to say that DITA bloggers can bridge that gap. Join me on the DITA blog by writing your own experiences with DITA.

These posts are ordered from newest to oldest, and I wrote them to share my experiences with DITA and to chronicle some of the Central Texas DITA User Group meetings I attended.

A watched folder for publishing from DITA source files

June 15, 2007: I’ve figured out a way to automate DITA builds where you just drop a zip file of your DITA source files into a “watched folder” and PDF and CHM files are automatically built.

Usability and inline links in user assistance systems

May 19, 2007: Examining DITA’s linking and usability.

Getting Started with DITA

April 12, 2007: A brief overview for a couple of fellow Austin writers who have asked me recently how and where to get started with DITA.

Checking out the new DITA Users website

April 10, 2007: Using a coupon code (it’s BETA) I joined the new DITA Users website for free today.

A new DITA Open ToolKit release and brand new DITA newbie blog

October 04, 2006 : A couple of blog-worthy items in the DITA world

Turning information into DITA topics

September 14, 2006: What would you do to make this particular type of content into topics?

How to substitute your custom CSS when using DITA Open Toolkit transforms

September 07, 2006 : When you want to use the DITA Open Toolkit transforms but you want to use your own CSS, here’s how to substitute your CSS for HTML Help (CHM)

DITA Open ToolKit now has a User Guide

August 22, 2006: Just released last week, the DITA Open ToolKit now has its own User Guide

Using the DITA catalog for your specializations, creating a Public ID

August 16, 2006 : Thought our discovery might help you as you specialize DITA

Evaluating XML editors for DITA

August 01, 2006: Notes from the July 2006 Central Texas DITA User Group meeting

A web-form-based DITA editor

July 14, 2006: Could this be the perfect storm for a DITA wiki?

Troubleshooting tip for the DITA Open Toolkit install

June 23, 2006 : Finally figured out the fix for my DITA Open Toolkit “resource/messages.xml” not found error

Where to put your files and other setup for DITA

June 09, 2006: Working with the environment setup for DITA

Defining OPML and relating to DITA maps

May 31, 2006: I found a nice definition for OPML from whatis.com as their word of the day, and I’m starting to wonder about similarities between OPML and DITA maps

Learning more about DITA

May 18, 2006: Learning about how to get started with DITA and a trivia item for fun

Notes from the central Texas DITA user group meeting

April 21, 2006: Two speakers shared their takeaways from DITA 2006 and CMS 2006

Our DITA experience at BMC Software

March 02, 2006: Link to a case study published about BMC’s DITA experience

DITA from the trenches

February 20, 2006: Information Architect from IBM, Kristin Thomas, presented to the Central Texas DITA User’s Group meeting last week, and here are my notes.

Moving from Books to Topic-oriented Writing

January 27, 2006 : A report from JoAnn Hackos’ talk at the Central Texas DITA Users Group meeting January 2006

DITA and wiki combo

December 05, 2005: Darwin Information Typing Architecture, meet Wiki.

Darwin Information Typing Architecture – DITA (dih tuh)

November 04, 2005: Roundup of the DITA reading I’ve been diving back in to lately.

I’m cruising through the BMC UserWorld session catalog, looking at the sessions I’d like to attend but can’t. Fortunately, it’s for a very good reason. I’ll be a little bit too pregnant to board the plane for the trip home to Austin from San Francisco!

The main conference starts August 29th and goes until September 1st. I’ll be 32 weeks pregnant on the 30th of August, and both my doctor and the airlines discourage airplane travel after 32 weeks. It’s our second child so I do have some experience with the whole pregnancy scene, and completely agree not to board a plane at that point in the gestation period.

The BMC UserWorld website itself is a treat with some videos of the hosts of the various tracks. David Wagner has a blog at talk.bmc and David also has a cool video on the UserWorld site. The video style is like the iPod styling with a dual-chromatic tint for the entire video. The effect is rather cool.

Speaking of iPod-styled images, here’s our first born son dancin’ with a photoshopped iPod. I used this graphic for our holiday newsletter this year, following these instructions in a tutorial on photoshop Lab. The second baby on the way is also a boy, so we’re looking forward to lots of fun and adventures!

Enjoy BMC UserWorld and let me know what you learn. I plan to have lots of guest bloggers while I’m on maternity leave in a few more months, so keep an eye out for some new voices and ideas on my blog this fall and winter.

Shortly after posting my ITIL and monitoring scenario about BMC Performance Manager notifying CONTROL-M that an SAP job was failing, I got a great response about how CONTROL-M even takes it a step further towards ITIL ideals with the Batch Impact Manager module.

Just read your blog. I wanted to update you on a couple of items which help to fill out the drive to ITIL standards achievement in the operations and monitoring environments.

BMC CONTROL-M has an additional module called BMC Batch Impact Manager. This module allows a user to reduce a large flow of jobs to a single service instance and monitor those services critical to the business. Is there any other kind? When a service is predicted by Batch Impact Manager to fail its due out time, Batch Impact Manager issues alerts to operations and provides an interface to Service Impact Manager to focus attention on bringing the service back to normal. Therefore if an SAP process was included in that critical service, as soon as the non-availability of the SAP process impacted the service, CONTROL-M and or Batch Impact Manager would start to squeal.

Great stuff! I’ve just added some links and spelled out the acronyms, otherwise unretouched. The embarrassing thing is, I knew about this module but hadn’t made the connection. Thanks Ronnie for bringing it to my attention!

I’m relatively new to BMC Performance Manager but I’ve learned a lot in the past year or so about the capabilities and how it fits into the Infrastructure and Application Management Route to Value. So this post talks about a white paper my co-worker Bill wrote, BMC Performance Manager – Cornerstone of your ITIL Implementation. (Look at that, our white papers no longer require a webform registration before you can download them!)

I like that he includes realistic scenarios. Scenarios help me understand the real issues and problems that need to be solved by businesses. With BMC Performance Manager for Servers, you can manage the health and performance of different operating-system environments and applications. BMC Performance Manager helps you close in on ITIL Availability Management objectives and, when used with other BMC Software products, also helps companies with other ITIL processes, such as Incident Management and Problem Management. This white paper describes how you can use BMC Performance Manager for availability management. Here’s an example scenario from the white paper.

A company uses SAP for supply chain management and BMC CONTROL-M for scheduling SAP jobs. When there is an unscheduled outage of the SAP system due to excessive paging that makes it unavailable to suppliers, BMC Performance Manager automatically detects the problem and initiates recovery procedures.

Unless BMC Performance Manager reports this unavailability, CONTROL-M is not aware of this outage and would continue to schedule jobs to SAP.

Because the SAP system is not active, business processes managed by CONTROL-M could fail, resulting in long recovery time that impacts SAP users’ productivity. When an unplanned failure of an SAP application is detected by BMC Performance Manager and then reported automatically to CONTROL-M, the operator can use the data provided by BMC Performance Manager for Problem Investigation.

What do you think about this scenario? Sound like something that could happen in your environment? Let us know if we’re on the mark, and share any harrowing experiences you have.

All this is documented in the Controlled Availability release of the BMC Performance Manager Software Development Kit (SDK), but I thought I’d write it up here as well, hoping it’s helpful. Contact your sales rep if you want more information about the SDK for BMC Performance Manager.

BMC Performance Manager is a product with the ability to be extended, allowing you to write your own custom monitoring tools, called Performance Managers. If you write a custom Performance Manager, you’re going to want a help system to go with it, so that your users know which parameters are monitored with your tool. And if you want your custom Performance Manager to be certified by BMC Software, a help system is required. Here’s an overview of writing that custom help system including sample files.

1. Write an HTML file for each application class and the parameters within that class, nested like this set of sample HTML files for the BMC Performance Manager for Citrix Presentation Server . For example, the farm application class contains parameters like “logged in users” and “disconnected sessions,” with each parameter documented in separate HTML files. These files contain Dreamweaver template code but should be useable with any HTML editor.
2. Place your Help content files in your Performance Manager Maven project in the following location: …/META-INF/help/browser_help/.
3. Open your application definition XML file and add these Help elements in the application definition: help-group-definition or help-group-reference, and help-item. You need unique attributes msgkey and name on both these elements. Here is an example code snippet:

4.  <application-definition name="patsdk-ri-service">
   
   <display-name>Reference Implementation Application</display-name>
   
   <description> Instances of this application-definition can be used
   
   to monitor the availability of many common network services
   
   such as HTTP, Telnet, FTP, etc.</description>
   
   <help-group-definition msgkey="riapp.intro.displayName" name="intro">
   
   <display-name>Patsdk RI Application</display-name>
   
   <help-item msgkey="riapp.intro.about.displayName" name="about">
   
   <display-name>About</display-name>
   
   <file>riapp/about.htm</file>
   
   </help-item>
   
   </help-group-definition> <help-group-definition
   
   msgkey="DRCIT-Farm-Container.desc.book"
   
   name="DRCIT-Farm-Containerbook">
   </help-group-definition>

5. Add Help-related fields to your project.properties file (located in your Maven project folder). There are a couple of commented lines that you can uncomment by deleting the # sign at the beginning of the line. Set solution.product.code equal to your PAR file name (without the .par extension), and use a sample category such as database, networking, etc.

6. solution.product.code=PRD
   
   solution.help.category=networking

7. When you build and deploy your Performance Manager, the .htm files that you created are compiled into cross-platform browser-based help. These files and the Help content are packaged in a .jar file which is then put into the .par file and deployed to the BMC Portal Help repository server. Automagically.

Sounds pretty straightforward, and we’ve done this internally for a few Performance Managers already, which is why I wanted to share some sample files with you. Let us know how it works for you.

With The Rockley Report now available for free, I can point you to a case study about our use of DITA. DITA stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based information architecture design originally from IBM but also an OASIS Standard with an open source toolkit on SourceForge also available.

This case study outlines our approach with a pilot project where we modeled both an error messages manual and an installation and configuration manual. A great read, and now the article is available with an optional registration. Enjoy!

Case Study: Using DITA to Develop a New Information Architecture at BMC Software