It's time for the next installment of the DITA OT in the Arbortext Monster Garage. 

In the first session on Arbortext and the DITA OT (last month), shop coach Mark Giffin from Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc., explained the basics of how Arbortext works with the DITA Open Toolkit.

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We get a lot of questions about whether you can use Arbortext with the Open Toolkit.  The answer is, "Yes, of course," but any further details are difficult unless you know what the questioner means by that: "Arbortext" is a portfolio of products that includes an editor, multiple publishing engines (for both typical and magazine-quality publishing), a content management system, a styling tool (so non-programmers can create stylesheets), a DTD/configuration tool, a dynamic link manager, and an illustration tool.

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Last week, Single-Sourcing Solutions held a webinar to talk about best practices for doing DITA stylesheets in Arbortext Styler.

The presentation focused on several key points that contribute to a successful DITA implementation: understanding fall-back processing, using read-only stylesheets, and developing with modular stylesheets.

In case you missed it, you can sign up to view the recording here or, because the event had a live Twitter stream, you can read through the highlights here.

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The M060 release of Arbortext 5.4 is now available for download from the support site. 

With this release, the OASIS DITA 1.2 specification included in the Arbortext Help Center is updated to the public review draft released by OASIS on July 7, 2010. The latest version of the specification includes not just the language reference but also the architectural specification and other information. The final version of the specification will be included in a future release of Arbortext Editor.

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While writing my review of the PTC/User conference last month, I couldn't help thinking about the CMS/DITA NA 2010 conference that had happened two months earlier.

At the 2010 CMS/DITA NA conference, there was a major shift in awareness. For the first time, there was little talk of tools, and a lot of talk the importance of business issues, especially the importance of organizational socialization:

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