June 2007 meeting of Boston DITA Users Group

The final topic for 2006-2007 was High Tech Tools for Low Tech People.

Neil Perlin discussed DITA for non-technical authors. David Pearson described development of a technology planning tool. And Susan Czerepak showed her Eclipse Help project for the DITA Manager on DITA Users. 

Perlin is a certified trainer for Adobe RoboHelp and Captivate, as well as Madcap Flare and Mimic. See http://www.hyperword.com. Sixty percent of his clients are low-tech. There is widespread ignorance of DITA and structured authoring among them. They don't know what DITA is or the benefits needed to make the business case.

He recommends we evangelize DITA by selling the benefits. Establish whether the company needs reuse. Nancy Harrison added translation as a big benefit.

Perlin says forget about XML initially. Don't show them the underlying code. Start with Word-style (WYSIWYG) tools, or tools that integrate DITA into Word, like Information Mapping's ContentMapper.

Neil's powerpoint slides are attached below.

David Pearson showed his projects with DITA Storm on the DITA Users website. He is developing a general template for technology planning.  http://www.ditausers.org/Users/dpearson/ 

David's presentation is online at http://tinyurl.com/yvht4w

Susan Czerepak showed her draft DITA Manager User Guide pages. They are visible as online help at http://www.ditausers.org/eclipse

Bob Doyle presented the results of a survey of possible presentation topics for the coming year. Poll results are at http://www.ditausers.org/topics.html. The most popular topic was Stylesheets. Next were Conditional Processing, Reuse, Relation Tables, DITA CMS, DITA Maps, Publishing, and Help Authoring.

Stan Doherty announced a summer project in DITA 1.1 Reuse techniques. It will include a library of sample files, ready-to-build demos, and supporting explanations. Contact him at stanley dot doherty at sun.com if you would like to participate.