Meeting Notes

• February 2008: What does DITA have to do with Wiki? — Part 2. Lisa Dyer of Lombardi Software and Alan J. Porter of Quadralay WebWorks picked up where last month's discussion left off with more real-world examples of using Wikis for collaboration, coupled with DITA for publishing. See Lisa's and Alan's slides for some great ideas on using Wikis in "real world" situations.

• January 2008: What does DITA have to do with Wiki? — Part 1. Anne Gentle (Advanced Solutions International and just write click), Ben Allums (Quadralay WebWorks), Chris Almond (IBM) and Ragan Haggard (Sun) offered up a lively panel of folks who are currently using wikis in innovative ways to enhance technical communications. See Anne Gentle's blog entry, Chris Almond's blog entry, or Stewart Mader's blog entry for reactions and slides about the session.

• December 2007: Eric Sirois, of IBM, presented Using DITA for Eclipse Infocenters and Projects (from Canada via the web). This was an extremely valuable session for anyone considering using DITA to consolidate corporate information on a centralized web site, or for delivering component-based information. An on-demand playback of the presentation is available.

• October 2007: Don Day presented Hands-On XSL (XSL Even a Manager Can Understand), a simple, model-based demonstration of the principles behind the processing of XML content such as DITA. Don said it would be fun, and it most definitely was! Watch this space for a link to an on-demand playback of the session.

• September 2007: Bob Beims and Tom Cihak of Freescale presented a very condensed recap of the 2007 Best Practices Conference that they'd attended the prior week. An impromptu "vote" tally was kept as various presentations were discussed, and Bob took the action item to recruit several of the BP speakers to present at future CTDUG sessions.

• August 2007: Michael Carey, who leads Mark Logic's efforts in DITA and technical information delivery, presented Dynamic Content Delivery – Get more value from your investment in DITA. The focus was on the fact that while initial DITA implementations have primarily targeted static publishing to pre-defined PDF, HTML and Help formats, the real promise of DITA lies in supporting dynamic, personalized content delivery. He finished the discussion with a demo of what O'Reilly Media created with Mark Logic's platform: SafariU.

• July 2007: Derek Saldaña of Freescale Semiconductor demonstrated CodeWarrior® DITA Builder, an adaptation of the Open Toolkit used to deliver two production information sets from DITA content.

• June 2007: Eliot Kimber, of Really Strategies, presented a real-time demonstration of how to create a working DITA specialization, following the procedures outlined in his DITA specialization tutorial, including a brief discussion of the analysis behind why and when to specialize. An on-demand playback of the presentation is available.

• May 2007: Scott Stark, of IBM, presented "DITA Linking and Relationship Tables" based on the experience of his team in Silicon Valley. He talked in depth regarding how-to information and practical tips, from a true "in the trenches" perspective.

• April 2007: Robin Sloan, Arbortext Product Manager at PTC, presented ideas for overcoming some of the pitfalls/challenges in a DITA implementation. She shared her particular expertise borrowed from her experience in implementations at solutions at some of Arbortext's most strategic customer accounts, including John Deere, Toyota and Abbott Labs.

• March 2007: Stories from the Trenches, with France Baril, of IXIASoft. Her presentation was based on true DITA implementation stories, and offered protection against monsters (i.e. vanishing topics, related links spider net, etc.) that might be haunting writers and shed light around scary dark shadows that are lurking about and trying to get into your technical departments.

• February 2007: Sean Angus, Manager of Field Technical Support for XyEnterprise, recounted how "DITA Came To Life" at RIMM (the presentation was originally given at the 2006 Best Practices Conference). Sean was the project manager on this effort to move from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA publishing in one year.

• January 2007: Michael Priestley of IBM gave an abridged version of his presentation "Creating Task-based Navigation with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture" (co-authored with Amber Swope), followed by a live demo of using IBM's freeware Task Modeler tool to create such navigation systems. On-demand replay of the January 2007 meeting.

• July 2006: Don Day of IBM discussed “More than just another XML editor” to help us all with editor evaluations that are specific to DITA support. Notes from the July 2006 meeting.

• April 2006: Two speakers shared their thoughts after attending two related conferences this spring. Bob Beims from Freescale shared his thoughts on attending the DITA 2006 conference at North Carolina State in Raleigh, NC, the first conference of its kind. Next, Paul Arellanes, an information architect at IBM, gave his impressions of the Content Management Strategies 2006 conference in San Francisco. Notes from the April 2006 meeting.

• February 2006: Kristen Thomas spoke to us about converting the AIX doc set to DITA from SGML. Don Day descriptively called it "DITA from the trenches." Notes from the Feb 2006 meeting.

• January 2006: JoAnn Hackos spoke at the Central Texas DITA User Group meeting held at BMC Software on January 25, 2006 in a talk titled, "Moving from Books to Topic-oriented Writing." Notes from the Jan 2006 meeting.

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