Presentation at Content Management Strategies/DITA North America, April 2008 by Kristen James Eberlein. Also presented at the 23 April 2008 meeting of the RTP DITA Users' Group.

IBM Task Modeler is an Eclipse-based 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 provided an overview of the application and demonstrated 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 of this session also received a handout that augments the online help by explaining how to perform all of the tasks demonstrated during the session

The ZIP file contains a PDF of the slides and the handout (CHM).

8 May 2008: Difficulty viewing the CHM file? Try the following:

1. Save the CHM file to your local system.
2. Right-click the CHM file, and then click Properties.
3. Click Unblock, and then click OK. The contents now are displayed when the file is opened.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/902225/ for more information.

2 July 2008: I've attached a PDF of the handout. Please let me know if you find it helpful!