DITA Newsletter Volume 1, Issue 3, October, 2007
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Features in this issue (see the web version at www.ditanewsletter.com)

• DITA User Group Meetings
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• DocZone pricing scheme
• WebWorks ePublisher Platform
• Upcoming DITA Events

DITA User Group Meetings Toronto DITA User Group, October 4 Topic: Moving DITA content to a CMS How a DITA environment is created in the SiberSafe XML CMS and a walk through the importing, creating, and publishing of content.

Speaker: Rob Hanna, Director of Professional Services at SiberLogic Inc.

Date: October 4, Thursday, at 7:00pm

Location: IBM Software Lab, 8200 Warden Ave Markham ON (nearest major intersection is Hwy 7 and Warden) Boston DITA User Group, October 18

Topic: Bookmaps in DITA 1.1

If you are publishing DITA content to pdf, the bookmap specialization in DITA 1.1 may be a good choice for you. Come learn about what the specialization supports, see a demo on how to design and create a bookmap, and discuss best practices for using bookmaps to generate output.

Speaker: Amber Swope, Principal Consultant Justsystems na.justsystems.com

Date: Thursday, October 19, 2007 at DocTrain East 2007, Doubletree Hotel, 50 Warren Street, Lowell, MA 01852

Reception at 5PM.
The presentation starts at 6:30PM.

Optional dinner with Amber after the presentation

Please RSVP to editor@cmsreview.com

 

Boulder-Denver DITA User Group October 25 Topic: DITA Linking and Relationship Tables
Speaker: Scott Stark, of IBM. Scott Stark is an Associate Information Developer for IBM's software group, providing technical and strategic support for authoring tools and DITA.
When: Thursday, October 25, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Where: Sybase, 3665 Discovery Drive, Boulder, CO 80303 and remotely by Web/phone

Watch the DITA.XML.org User Groups page for future meetings.

SecondLife DITA Island Meeting Consider joining SecondLife, getting yourself an avatar, and attending these virtual meetings of DITA enthusiasts organized by DITA Technical Committee member Christian Kravogel. Tuesday October 9 3pm PT
6pm ET 12 pm CET (midnight) 8am in Australia (Sydney)

SIM Address at Secondlife: DITA (185, 132, 27)
Or send an IM to the Chris' avatar: Seico Flanagan
Adobe Technical Communication Suite Adobe will release a new tool suite later this month with DITA integration. It combines the just released FrameMaker 8, RoboHelp 7 (the second release of RoboHelp this year and proof of Adobe's commitment to maintaining their user assistance tool as a market leader), Captivate 3 (also recently released and filling the eLearning hole left by Macromedia Authorware), and Acrobat 8 (with its extraordinary ability to integrate 3D files that can be viewed in interactive 3D in the latest Acrobat Readers).

The Technical Communication Suite is fully multilingual with Unicode support throughout. Not only are font menus showing options in the font itself, menus and other options display in their native languages.

You can include Help in FrameMaker projects, eLearning in RoboHelp and in Frame, 3D animations in Help and Frame and in PDF documents, RoboHelp screen captures from Frame, etc, etc. All the tools include direct access to aspects of the others from within the tool. You do not have to leave one tool to "Edit with…" another tool. And no longer are conversions needed to reuse assets.

If you reuse some Frame content in a RoboHelp project, and then update the Frame document, it automatically updates in your RoboHelp. This is meaningful single-sourcing without XML includes or DITA conrefs (though it is outside the DITA standard).

FrameMaker 8 claims better XML roundtripping and better integration with Office 2007, which may provide an alternate path to migrate documents in Word format to structured FrameMaker and then to DITA.

It's like one big toolset for technical communicators and for instructional designers.

Dorothy Hoskins comments:

If you want the nice visual presentation you are accustomed to in FM for your DITA XML content, you will be generally pleased with FM 8's DITA capabilities for PDF content. The way to get your corporate look is to edit your FM-DITA EDDs. If you are not familiar with EDD development, I strongly suggest using an EDD consultant like Lynne Price, Alan Houser, Brightpath Solutions, Scriptorium (please add others that you know do good work). It certainly is miles better than trying to tweak the DITA Open Toolkit's XSL-FO. Or take a look at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FrameMaker /8.0/structapp_dev.pdf.

Quadralay WebWorks ePublisher Platform Earlier releases of FrameMaker were bundled with Quadralay WebWorks to provide the HTML output. Now that FrameMaker includes HTML among its many output formats, Quadralay has just released the latest version of ePublisher, which it calls a "publishing platform." It has considerable support for the DITA structured publishing standard and can merge DITA XML documents with FrameMaker and Word content to make a single online deliverable. Quadralay says ePublisher:

Allows a user to publish DITA content online in over a dozen output formats without needing to learn the complexity of the DITA open toolkit.

Gives users the ability to merge information authored in DITA-XML, Adobe FrameMaker, or MS-Word into a single online deliverable.

Gives you the ability to produce PDF for DITA, FrameMaker and Word content - you can even mix and match your DITA and legacy FM or Word content into a single PDF output.

DocZone has new user group and pricing scheme DocZone, the XML software-as-a service CMS, has a new Pay-per-minute pricing option to purchase blocks of minutes for a fixed per-minute rate, with discounted rates available with the purchase of larger amounts of usage time. There are no restrictions to the number of users that can share the purchased minutes within a customer's DocZone environment. This model is similar to the pricing plans offered by many mobile phone service providers. They also launched a DocZone user group on Yahoo. Upcoming DITA Events October 2-3, 2007 JoAnn Hackos Workshop on Minimalism: Creating Manuals People Can Use, in Austin, TX.

Information developers everywhere are being told to cut the volume, reduce costs for translation, make information more easily accessible, and provide only what audiences need to know. The Minimalism workshop gives you specific guidelines for evaluating your information and making the right decisions to reduce the volume. But the Minimalism workshop is not about cutting the verbiage alone. We focus on what readers really need to know. Taught by Bill Gearhart.

http://www.comtech-serv.com/workshops/index.shtml or call 303-232-7586.

DITA Users members contact Lovonya Thomas at lovonya@comtech-serv.com to receive a 10% member discount. October 4-6, 2007 DITA East 2007, in Raleigh, North Carolina. DITA 2007™-East, the third BrightPath North American conference of DITA users, brings together experts from around the globe for a conference designed to help attendees leverage the power of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture OASIS Standard.

http://www.travelthepath.com/conf/ditaeast.shtml

DITA Users members receive a 10% member registration discount using code DITA USERS. October 9-10, 2007 Managing Your Documentation Projects, in Golden, Colorado. How will we meet the deadline for the project? Our staff is stretched to the limit. Can we maintain our quality standards without stressing everyone? The Managing Documentation Projects workshop gives you the tools to maintain your sanity and still get the work done.

Information planning, resource and schedule estimating, project tracking, and content planning activities in the workshop give you the information you need to communicate with management and define a documentation project that meets deadlines, maintains quality, and works within resource constraints. Taught by Bill Gearhart and Bill Hackos.

http://www.comtech-serv.com/workshops/index.shtml or call 303-232-7586.

DITA Users members contact Lovonya Thomas at lovonya@comtech-serv.com to receive a 10% member discount. October 16-20, 2007 DocTrain East 2007 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The theme of the 8th Annual Documentation & Training East Conference is Advancing Your Career. The event is designed to help you improve the skills and expertise you'll need to future proof your career and improve your value as a professional technical communicator.

Register today

October 22-26, 2007 JoAnn Hackos will hold her DITA Boot Camp in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Hosted by XyEnterprise

In the DITA Boot Camp program you'll get the core values of

• Structured Authoring
• Information Modeling
• Minimalism
• Business process change
• DITA details and implementation

This workshop includes a complimentary copy of the Introduction to DITA: A Basic User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture book.

Taught by JoAnn Hackos.

DITA Users members contact Lovonya Thomas at lovonya@comtech-serv.com to receive a 10% member discount.

 

November 13-14, 2007 DITA Europe Conference 2007 JoAnn Hackos' CIDM and OASIS will hold the 3rd Annual 2007 DITA Europe Conference at the Stanhope Hotel in Brussels, Belgium. The conference will be held November 13-14. Meet publications professionals who have implemented DITA in their organizations and hear from representatives of key tools vendors who are actively supporting the DITA community.

DITA Europe gives you many opportunities to learn about DITA from people who are in the midst of their own implementations. Learn the benefits of managing information as topics and the pitfalls to avoid for success. Come away with an understanding of what DITA is, how it can improve your technical information, and what tools you will need to bring all of this together.

Register now.

November 27-29, 2007

Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies

Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA

Conference program

Registration

See the DITA News Events Calendar for more events. About DITA Newsletter DITA Newsletter is published by DITA News, one of a network of websites in support of DITA. It will be available online at www.ditanewsletter.com. Each of our websites is optimized for some community-oriented function. DITA Users - helping members get started with topic-based authoring using a web-based editor (DITA Storm ), the Open Toolkit on the server, a personal workspace folder on the web, and a private member directory to locate other DITA Users.
ditausers.org

DITA Infocenter - the DITA architectural and language specifications, and the OT User Guide, in an Eclipse Help format.
ditainfocenter.com

DITA News - a blog aggregator, a mailing list, and this newsletter on DITA.
ditanews.com

DITA Blog - a group blog for DITA information developers (based on WordPress).
ditablog.com

DITA Wiki - over 600 pages of resources in a format that encourages comments and discussions (based on MediaWiki).
ditawiki.org

and a couple of other sites to come soon, including

DITA Tutor - a set of self-paced and instructor-led DITA Tutorials (based on a Moodle LMS)
ditatutor.com

Please consider joining DITA Users today. Membership is $100USD/year. Discounts on DITA conferences and workshops more than offset the annual membership fee http://www.ditausers.org/membership/how_to_join/