I am very excited about the new e-book we have produced for the Introduction to DITA. Those who already have a paper version might want to consider the electronic version to support cutting and pasting the XML markup. Others might find this an innovative way to get started using DITA in their organizations.

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On September 18 and 23, 2008, the OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee will hold its first webinars to present the benefits of using DITA in a translation environments.

To learn more and register for these events, see the Events page on dita.xml.org

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The Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference in Santa Clara, CA April 2008 was a great success with a record crowd. Lots of knowledgeable DITA users presented their results and discussed their continuing challenges.

Please see the conference blog at http://www.cidmblog.com

JoAnn Hackos

Monday 17 April -- Leaving for Shanghai

In 2005, I conducted a benchmark study of the state of technical writing in China. The white paper of this study and our updated India benchmark study is now available on the CIDM website at www.infomanagementcenter.com/publications.htm. Also notice the new website that we launched last week.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Shanghai for a few days, in part to speak at the LISA Shanghai conference (Localization Industry Standards Association). Dave Schell and I are introducing DITA. I'm also meeting with a Chinese company that will be implementing DITA. I expect many of the discussions at the conference and at the company will focus on the challenge of topic-based authoring. Localization service providers are concerned that handling multiple topics will increase the difficulty of administering the translation workflow.

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The CMS 2006 conference in April in San Francisco showed the energy and enthusiasm that DITA is helping to build for structured content and topic-based authoring, as well as support for content management. We had about 325 people at the conference with about 100 or so attending the DITA track each hour.

We're now planning for DITA Europe the first week in November in Frankfurt. I'd like to hear from interested people in Europe about taking part. We should have a call for papers on the conference website soon.

I'm pleased with the reception of the new DITA User Guide, now being shipped. It will be listed on Amazon soon but is now available on the Comtech web site at http://www.comtech-serv.com/dita.shtml

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