When you decide to make the move to DITA, that's also a great time to start rethinking your content life cycle and planning the way you will manage your content moving forward. But where will you get the information you need to ensure your content management project is a success?

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The 8th Annual Documentation and Training Conference will take place this year for the first time on the west coast of North America in beautiful downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. The event takes place at the Marriott Pinnacle, April 18-21, 2007 and will feature several DITA-specific presentations including:

• 4-hour Introduction to DITA workshop (with popular XML publishing guru Bernard Aschwanden)
• Case study from one organization that has been using DITA and S1000D together
• The debut of the DITA Structured Blogging plug-in (a free plug-in to several popular blogging platforms that will allow bloggers to produce valid DITA content without the need for a help authoring tool)
• A demonstration of the recently released DITA Solution from In.Vision Research Corporation that allows technical communicators to create structured XML DITA content for reuse using Microsoft Word and DITA Studio

The 8th Annual DocTrain Conference will feature 4 topic-focused tracks:

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In this exclusive TheContentWrangler.com interview with Rick Schochler of Innodata Isogen, Scott Abel talks to Rick about his company’s experience working with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). While he and his firm see DITA as an excellent “option” for some organizations, he advises readers to maintain a “healthy skepticism” when it comes to software tools and their “support” for DITA. “Some day we’ll have tools that will provide some default functionality,” Schochler says. For those who, for whatever business reasons, decide not to move to DITA, Schochler has this advice: “Get your data in a tool-neutral format (XML), then choose the content structure approach that best fits your requirements.”

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In this exclusive TheContentWrangler.com interview, Scott Abel interviews Chip Gettinger, VP Services and Sales Support at Astoria Software, an XML content management software vendor, about his company’s experience moving to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Gettinger says of DITA, “It’s all about reducing the time, cost and risk associated with producing content.” Read the interview to learn how Astoria is using DITA to produce software manuals, online help and other deliverables.

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If you're considering a move to the Darwin Information Typing Architcture (DITA), make time to read 10 DITA Lessons Learned From Tech Writers in the Trenches.  This exclusive and informative article is based on interviews with technical writers at more than 20 software companies -- tech writers that are actually using DITA to create documentation today. It's jam-packed with useful advice, practical tips, honest warnings, and lessons learned from technical writers in the trenches. No marketing blabber. No hidden sales agenda. Just straight forward and useful information no software company is likely to share with you any time soon.

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