Revision of Boston DITA User Group from Wed, 2008-01-02 20:41
- We hope to attract a larger number of attendees. Last year's meetings had dwindled to only a dozen people at times.
- We want the meetings to be more valuable - more emphasis on developing particular DITA skills than general DITA pep talks that preach to the choir.
- We hope to open the meetings to virtual attendees anywhere on the web.
- We will record the meetings and archive them for others to study.
- We will meet at different vendor locations - IBM, Information Mapping, PTC, Sun Microsystems, and XyEnterprise, among others.
Please RSVP to me (bobdoyle@skybuilders.com) so
we can inform our hosts. Some require that names are registered at
their door before you arrive, and they need to estimate the
refreshments needed. If you would like to test attending our meetings
virtually, I will send you details on how to log in as we get closer to
the meetings.
We met Thursday, October 18 at the DocTrain East 2007 Conference in Lowell, Mass.
Speaker: Amber Swope
Principal Consultant Justsystems na.justsystems.comTopic: Bookmap Tutorial: designing, creating and using DITA 1.1 bookmaps
You can find a one-hour Flash movie of Amber's presentation at
http://www.ditausers.org/tutorials/ditamaps/bookmaps_swope
We had some technical difficulty and Amber had to speak for the first several minutes without her slides.
The presentation has a table of contents - click on the little page icon - and can be expanded to full screen from your browser.
Future topics
At our May 2007 planning meeting, we developed a list of possible meeting topics. We created an online survey to collect opinions on the most important topics.
Survey results are online at http://www.ditausers.org/topics.html
We will approach potential speakers on the most popular presentation ideas. The most popular topic was Stylesheets. Next were Conditional Processing, Reuse, Relation Tables, DITA CMS, DITA Maps, Publishing, and Help Authoring.
Past meetings
September 10, 2007 Jay Dupont and Paula Ploetz described a pilot project at PTC to create user manuals with DITA. Tom Kenslea introduced them. Here are screen recordings with audio. Introduction (6 min.)
Jay DuPont Presentation (15 min.)
Paula Ploetz Presentation (15 min.)
_________________
June 12, 2007 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 - a DITA Manager User Guide on DITA Users.
May 14, 2007 John Hunt described the work of his Learning Content subcommittee, which is defining a new topic-level information type to facilitate training and eLearning with DITA
April 10, 2007: Anna van Raaphorst and Dick Johnson, of VR Communications and authors of the DITA Open Toolkit User Guide and Reference, presented "Setting the Stage: Creating DITA Projects That Will Scale Up."
March 27, 2007 : Amber Swope – Working with Bookmaps. David Pearson arranged a DITA Users Birds of a Feather dinner meeting during JoAnn Hackos' CM Strategies conference.
March 12, 2007: Bob Doyle (with David Pearson) demonstrated the new DITA Users website ("DITA from A to B"). http://www.ditausers.org. The site lets absolute beginners edit DITA files and process them with the DITA Open Toolkit online. The results can then be seen on the web and downloaded.
February 2007: Judy Kessler of Sybase presented "Making the Business Case for DITA." Her slides are attached below. Notes on her talk are at http://dita.xml.org/node/1566
January 2007: Nancy Harrison of IBM spoke on content migration. Notes on her talk are at http://dita.xml.org/node/1553
November 2006: Deb Boczulak, product manager at XyEnterprise, spoke about reuse. A video recording of her talk is being edited.
October 2006: Doug Gorman, CEO of Information Mapping, Inc., spoke about "Making DITA Ubiquitous." Slides are attached below.
September 2006: Dave Schell of IBM spoke about the business case for DITA. His presentation slides are attached below.
Attachment | Size |
---|---|
DASchell DITA Boston 2006.ppt | 4.32 MB |
DGorman DITA Boston 2006.ppt | 4.56 MB |
Sybase_DITA_Bus_Case.pdf | 953.67 KB |
SettingTheStage.ppt | 1.17 MB |
bookmap.pdf | 116.83 KB |
BoczulakOnReuse.ppt | 3.17 MB |
Hunt_Learning.ppt | 2.68 MB |
DITA_for_the_Non-Technical.ppt | 428.5 KB |
PeasonBDUG.ppt | 188 KB |