Roundup of the DITA reading I’ve been diving back in to lately
Here’s a rough grouping of some interesting articles I’ve been reading about DITA implementations lately. BMC has explored DITA implementations for both mainframe and distributed documentation, modeling the information for a couple of books. I’ve been looking at DITA case studies this week.
This article about Adobe’s journey into DITA-land, “Adobe Systems Speaks Out on DITA: Internal use of FrameMaker, CMS, and DITA” offers insight from an information architect at Adobe. Re-use for solutions-type documentation was Adobe’s main goal and the article describes the percentage of re-use that Adobe got out of structured authoring. Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, posted about this case study originally in DITA at Adobe — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (but he doesn’t have trackbacks built in to his blog, bummer.)
Since there aren’t a lot of companies using DITA yet, this additional case study (well, interview with an implementer) is pure gold. Off the top of my head, I think it’s generally known that Nokia’s using DITA, IBM invented it so they use it, and France Baril, Documentation Architect at IXIASOFT, implemented DITA for doc for CEDROM-SNi, a Canadian on-line content company. Today I learned that Autodesk uses it as well from this entry on the Gilbane Report Blog. And then, with a little more Google searching, I found a blogger who’s looking at DITA from the globalization standpoint, John Yunker. When DITA became an OASIS standard in June, John Yunker posted about it in his blog, trying to find more case studies. Don Day, the Chair for OASIS DITA Technical Committee and IBM Lead DITA Architect, notes that “you can find case studies from IBM (Michael Priestley, Susan Carpenter, Ian Larner), Ixiasoft (France Baril), Nokia, and others. In fact, among the references is a Gilbane whitepaper commissioned by Idiom about their work with IBI on a DITA implementation.” I’ve linked directly to the case studies that Don refers to, hoping that the URLs remain accurate. It’s a lot of reading material but worth digging in to.