The DITA 2007-West second annual conference is happening in San Jose, CA from February 5 through 7. The schedule is online here: http://www.travelthepath.com/conf/schedule.shtml.
This conference provides attendees wih three days of DITA, three tracks per day! Check out the great list of speakers lined up...experts, peers, real-world users, gurus. Presentations range from introductory topics through specialization and case studies.
When moving to structured authoring, DITA is working out to be less of a pain in the a** (PITA) than other options. The reason for this is that many of the tools have DITA support built in.
If you move to structured authoring and choose to make your own custom structure, there is set up you will need to do to get your tools publishing. While all authoring tools require some kind of set up, I'll use FrameMaker as an example. With a custom designed structure in FrameMaker, an EDD has to be created, the DTD or schema saved and adjusted, read/write rules written, and a Structured Application set up. For DITA, FrameMaker's EDD, DTD, rules, and application are already built into the software. So, with some tweaking of the FrameMaker DITA template (to look the way your docs are supposed to look) you can be up and running fairly quickly.
