Authored by Bob Doyle, this article was published in the April 2008 issue of Intercom.

The article contains an overview of the key features of DITA tools: authoring tools, management tools, and publishing engines. Especially noteworthy are the matrixes which compare features -- including price -- of DITA editors and DITA content management systems (CMS).

Published in eContent magazine, this article describes what prompted AMD to move to a DITA strategy and implement IXIASOFT's DITA CMS Framework, an XML-based content management solution, to support their technical documentation process.

Many resources are available to explain what Darwin Information Typing
Architecture (DITA) topic specialization is and the syntax to implement
it, but you still might be wondering "I have some content that might be a
candidate for topic specialization. What's next?" This tutorial
walks you through a series of steps to evaluate your content's suitability
for different DITA topic types, specialize one of those types, and test
your specialization using the DITA Open Toolkit.

As the Darwin Information Typing Architecutre (DITA) gains wider acceptance as an XML standard for technical documentation, there has been increased activity towards interoperability with other standards, such as S1000D and SCORM, specialization for uses in specific industries, and adaptation for different use cases. Noteworthy is the current effort to adapt DITA for monolithic business documents other than technical documents. This adaptation opens the possibility for techdoc groups to implement DITA without requiring the paradigm shift to topic-based authoring.

The increasing popularity of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) means that more users within an organization are looking to repurpose and reuse content across the enterprise. To realize the promise of reuse with DITA, you must optimize the mechanisms it supports and understand how to implement it. When considering the implementation of a reuse strategy, consider the following five best practices.