Abstract:
One of the main barriers to DITA optimization, and in some cases adoption, has been the reluctance of the reviewer community to embrace DITA because of a perceived added layer of complexity inherent in the framework. Organizations developing content in DITA have long been struggling with the need to obfuscate the underlying XML architecture for internal and external stakeholders such as subject matter experts (SMEs) or reviewers. There are many instances within an organization where showing XML tags can hinder or even derail the review process. Overly complex review environments can be confusing and time-consuming, leading to distrust or resentment toward the technology and in turn hurting adoption efforts. Quality and accuracy in the review process has also been an ongoing struggle, as proposed SME changes cannot be reflected in the source document, thus making the review process prone to error and contribution of new content within the reviewed document completely impractical.

Nenad Furtuda of Bluestream, George Bina of Syncro Soft (Oxygen), and Frank Miller of Comtech Services will discuss the challenges and show how new technologies, along with best practices in information architecture and process, are enabling organizations to meet those challenges. Nenad, George, and Frank will demonstrate how an organization can round-trip content through the review cycle and accurately collect SME feedback via an interface that shows none of the complexities of the DITA architecture.

Presenters:
Frank Miller is a Senior Consultant at Comtech Services, assisting companies with their information design, process efficiency, and tools and implementation needs. Frank manages and implements enterprise content management solutions. Frank also guides corporations through their information architecture process. He has experience in conducting and analyzing benchmarking studies and information redesign for content management.

George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor. He has more than 10 years experience in working with XML and related technologies including XML related projects, oXygen XML Editor and participation in open source projects, the most notable being oNVDL—an open source implementation of the NVDL standard, project that is now merged into Jing.

Nenad Furtula is partner and a VP of Sales and Marketing at Bluestream Database Software. Nenad has been working with XML and bringing XML related products to market for over a decade. Currently his primary professional interest lies in building and socializing a DITA-enabled value-based component content management system called XDocs.