For 2007-2008 we plan to have meetings at diverse sites around the Boston area, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, XyEnterprise, and our gracious hosts from last year, Information Mapping.

September

We will meet Monday, September 10, at PTC in Needham to hear about the migration of PTC content to DITA following the acquisiton of Arbortext.

October

We will meet Thursday, October 18, at the DoubleTree Hotel in Lowell during DocTrain East. Amber Swope will update us on the new Bookmap specialization in DITA 1.1 and learn what vendors like Justsystems are doing to implement Bookmaps.

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

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.

Bob Doyle