A user finds answers on how to use a product in various ways; by searching the internet, by using the traditional manual, in paper or electronic format etc. A certain user in a certain situation need answers and we, as technical communicators, carefully arrange many answers (topics) in a deliverable (map). The answers in the map are sorted and organized according to some principle. But, why do we sort and organize the topics we have referenced in the map?

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Today, companies must launch products to global markets faster than ever before if they want to remain competitive. R&D organizations within those companies are continuously improving the development processes and ways to produce products to enable this possibility. This means that technical communication teams are also faced with a challenge. The content volume that we must manage is growing and we must be able to in parallel manage content for multiple product configurations and release manuals in shorter time frames using the existing staff.

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We get a lot of questions about whether you can use Arbortext with the Open Toolkit.  The answer is, "Yes, of course," but any further details are difficult unless you know what the questioner means by that: "Arbortext" is a portfolio of products that includes an editor, multiple publishing engines (for both typical and magazine-quality publishing), a content management system, a styling tool (so non-programmers can create stylesheets), a DTD/configuration tool, a dynamic link manager, and an illustration tool.

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A technical product needs documentation that helps the end user understand how the product is used to solve the needs, problems or requirements the user is facing. The documentation includes task information (as a DITA task topic) to instruct the user on how to do things.

But how does the technical communicator identify the user tasks? Let’s look at the traditional task analysis approach along with its challenges.

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DITA 1.2 includes the new subject scheme feature. I gave a presentation about the subject scheme feature on the 12th STC India conference in New Delhi 13th of November and how it can be used to manage and define the topic granularity. My experience is that many DITA users have problems in defining the size of a topic. How big is a topic? Is it two sentences or 10 pages?

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