Just finished day 1 of Conference Week 2007, in San Diego; the first day consisted of pre-conference workshops, including one by yours truly. Here are some quick impressions:

• I started off by giving a two-hour workshop/presentation on information architecture, DITA, and Web 2.0; I lost track of time and skimped on the final demo, which is unfortunate, but still think it went generally okay. The audience was small (15 or so) but engaged, and we had some good discussions about information architecture, the reusability of topic-based content, and the changing roles of information architects in the Web 2.0 space. I'll aim to get my slides uploaded later tonight.
• Next workshop I attended was on Web Globalization meets Web 2.0, by Simon Mathews from Ion Global. Some excellent examples of places where translation is either made possible by Web 2.0 technologies (such as user-provided subtitling for shared videos) or made a priority by them (such as the success of Web 2.0 web sites across many different languages and cultures). Also a nice nod to DITA as a key architecture that is making a lot of the pain of translation more manageable (DITA: we help you tolerate your pain).
• After that was a presentation by Shaun Walker of dotnetnuke, who presented on content management strategies. Some good practices summarized, providing a checklist of questions to ask of a content management vendor. I'll admit to being disappointed that source format, or at least interchangeability/portability of content, wasn't mentioned. I definitely see DITA having an important role to play here as a cross-CMS interchange standard, even where it isn't playing a more central role as primary source format.
• Finally we had a workshop from Ty Baysinger at Autodesk, presenting on their DITA-like content management case study. Autodesk was one of the early adopters of the DITA model, although not technically a user of the standard. They're seeing generally good results, although I wish there were a business case for them to converge back on the standard now that DITA is formalized- I think they may be missing some opportunities on the DITA map front in their reuse architecture, for example.

Off to dinner now, hopefully I'll have time to post again tomorrow.

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.

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