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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It seems natural to use maps and topics to capture a suite of use cases. Does anyone have examples of this?

I'll be giving a short workshop at Content Week 2007 on "Information architecture for Web 2.0" - inevitably, I will have a DITA angle. The conference is January 29th-Feb 1st, in San Diego.

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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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