At CGI in Calgary, CGI and 4 sponsor companies are developing a new software program for production accountants in the oil and gas business. Along with the software, the writing team is developing the Help system using the DITA framework. We store information and reusable text in DITA topics and generate Eclipse Help. We have found the benefits of using DITA over the Help authoring tool we were using (RoboHelp) include DITA's reuse capability, link control via relationship tables and the output control through ditamaps.

This case study outlines an approach at BMC Software with a pilot project where we modeled both an error messages manual and an installation and configuration manual. A great read, and now the article is available with an optional registration with the Rockley Report.

Case Study: Using DITA to Develop a New Information Architecture at BMC Software

Patrick Willekens of ICOS Vision Systems shares lessons learned, success factors, and recommendations for others who are thinking of making a move to DITA in this exclusive interview with Scott Abel of TheContentWrangler.com.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has seen rapid adoption and implementation. This is especially true when you compare the adoption of DITA with other standards-based approaches to content creation and distribution. Here we are less than a year after DITA 1.0 has been approved and major companies are shipping large multi-language documentation and Help sets that have been created using DITA. We can also point to DITA-specific user groups and conferences, and a myriad of vendors who are now touting DITA support in their products.

As you should expect, Comtech Services has used DITA to create the Introduction to DITA: A Basic User Guide as a print publication. Each lesson in the tutorial begins with a concept topic. The tutorial lesson itself is a task topic, and the list of elements used in the lesson is a reference topic. Topics are referenced in section-level maps, which in turn are organized in a book-level map.