Charter

The purpose of the RTP DITA Users' Group is to facilitate communication and the sharing of knowledge between DITA users in the Research Triangle Park (RTP) area of North Carolina.

Meetings

We meet on the fourth Wednesday of each month from 5:30-6:30 PM. Currently our meetings are held at the following location:

Systems Documentation, Inc
1005 Slater Road, Suite 220
Durham, NC 27703.

Directions to Systems Documentation, Inc.

Communications

We have a Yahoo! Groups mailing list. To join, go to http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rtp-dita/
For more information about the group, you also can contact keberlein at pobox.com.

Upcoming events

October 22: Crossing Organizational Boundaries with DITA
After completing a successful pilot project using DITA and a CMS, Teradata's Information Engineering group is partnering with Teradata Customer Services to share and reuse tech pubs content for creating custom system change documents for field engineers. Challenges in this project include:

• getting executive buy-in
• breaking down the organizational, bureaucratic, and geographic walls
• understanding and reconciling conflicting user goals from multiple audiences
• teaching software engineers how to create content using DITA, XML Editor, and CMS tools
• creating a reuse and filtering strategy to satisfy the requirements of both organizations
• creating customized processing routines and output formats

In this case study, we will learn how information developers at Teradata are implementing DITA and content management, and how they are addressing the challenges of this cross-organizational project.

Presenter: Colleen Smith, Teradata Corporation, Content Management Information Architect

September 24: DITA, Metada, and Taxonomy

Note that this meeting will be held at a different time than usual: 7-8:30 PM.

DITA contains ready-to-go metadata structures, but what are best practices for using those structures in a meaningful way for your writing teams? Learn what team members should know and who to identify to take on the tasks related to taxonomy definitions. Also decide how to define those taxonomy definitions in your Content Management System (CMS). Join Paul Arellanes, Robert Berry, and Mike Harris from IBM for a panel discussion and some coaching on how to organize your content
without going crazy.

Presenters: Robert Berry, Mike Harris, and Paul Arellanes (IBM)

(Jointly sponsored with the Central TX DITA User Group)

Past events

August 27: DITA 1.2: Understanding the upcoming release

DITA is still evolving. The OASIS Technical Committee responsible for the
standard is actively working on a draft of the next DITA release, which
will include significantly more features than the previous (1.1) release.
Come learn about plans for the release, what will be coming, and when. We
will go into depth on many of the new features, explaining where they came
from and how they will be used. We will also get a preview of several of
the new features using the latest test build of the DITA Open Toolkit, and
hear about what toolkit developers will be working on in the near future.

Presenter: Robert D. Anderson, IBM. Chief architect of the DITA Open Toolkit.

(Jointly sponsored in conjunction with the Central Texas DITA User Group)

 

July 23: Managing Content and Producing Output with the Eclipse IDE

An organization with limited resources must carefully choose its strategies for managing content and producing output. Since DITA is a dialect of xml, the available strategies are almost limitless. This variety is both a blessing and a curse. I will demonstrate the usage of a set of tools for managing content as well as generating output, using the Eclipse IDE. I hope to de-mystify some of the issues involved in storing and rendering content, and propose a solution that uses tools that are freely available.

One blessing of an open standard such as DITA is the freedom from being locked into a single set of content delivery tools. The set of tools I am about to demonstrate could be replaced, as a set or as single components, at any time, as new tools become available, without disrupting the integrity of your organization's data.

Presenter: Tom Ed White, Tekelec

June 25, 2008: The DITA Troubleshooting Specialization
The DITA Troubleshooting Specialization (TSS) was released by IBM in 2007. Consistent, quality troubleshooting documentation is extremely important to customers and support costs. Come learn about the process the team went through to develop the architecture and specialization itself as well as how to use the specialization with the DITA Open Toolkit 1.4.

Presenter: Carolyn Inkster, IBM

May 28, 2008: Brushing your teeth with DITA: Leveraging relationships to improve usability

After you have written your topics in DITA and created a table of contents with a DITA map, you can take your information architecture a step further and greatly improve the ability of your users to find the information they need by creating effective relationship tables. Using the simple documentation example of an information center on toothbrushing, we will demonstrate how to improve topic interlinking and usability by designing effective relationship tables which are easy for writers to implement.

 

We will cover the evolution of a relationship model which was developed for the IBM Director documentation, illustrating how changes to the model affect the relationship tables, and in turn, the inter-topic links in the information center. We will discuss the appropriateness of exceptions to the rule with the principle that usability for the customer trumps consistency. Examples will illustrate how application of the model -- and the judicious use of exceptions to the model -- improve the user experience.

Presenter: Shane Taylor, Computer Task Group

April 23, 2008: Using IBM Task Modeler to Create DITA-based Information Sets
IBM Task Modeler is a graphical tool that can be used to prototype and develop DITA-based information sets. Available as a free download from IBM Alphaworks, it generates graphical representations of DITA maps that can easily be understood by a wide range of stakeholders: managers, developers, marketing representatives, and technical communicators.

This session will provide an overview of the application and demonstrate how to use it to easily and rapidly create a DITA map, stub DITA files, and a relationship table that links the DITA files. Attendees also will receive a handout that augments the online help by explaining how to perform all of the tasks demonstrated.

Presenter: Kristen James Eberlein, Systems Documentation, Inc.

March 26, 2008: Round table discussion on DITA maps and relationship tables

February 27, 2008: Organizational meeting

January 23, 2008: Organizational meeting