Conference Program

Documentation and training organizations have long recognized the value of migrating content to XML to attain the benefits of content reuse, reduced localization costs, and single-source publishing. But, many of these organizations have never been able to justify the high cost and long implementation cycles required to install an in-house XML content management solution.

Recently, a new alternative has emerged – the "Software as a Service (SaaS)" model, which offers a hosted XML content management environment on a subscription basis. According to leading research firm InfoTrends, over 40% of their survey respondents would either “prefer” or “definitely consider” a hosted content management solution.

This session compares and contrasts the differences between a SaaS model and the traditional in-house CMS implementation, and spotlights some recent customer success stories, with an emphasis on the purchasing process, the implementation details, and ROI results.

Dan Dube, DocZone
Cathrine McNair, Agfa Healthcare

A team of 6 writers, using RoboHelp, WebWorks Publisher, and FrameMaker, was faced with the challenge of supporting a potentially unlimited number of versions of our software application. Each version had a different look and feel and offered slightly different features. Estimating that there was the opportunity for about 80% re-use of content across versions, we began looking for a tool that could support that re-use, as well as an ever-quickening development cycle.

We had investigated single-sourcing tools in the past but most were too expensive or required too much restructuring of our content to even begin working with them. One tool, AuthorIT, stood out from the rest because of its relatively inexpensive price and Word-like interface.

Learn how to improve content quality and reduce costs associated with content management and localization. Using a case study Paul Trotter, CEO of AuthorIT Software Corporation, and Scott Ludwigsen, President of Lingo Systems, demonstrate how OSIsoft dramatically reduced their localization and content management costs by implementing AuthorIT.

Paul and Scott discuss the reasons that OSIsoft began an assessment of solutions to their content management and localization needs. The evaluation process is detailed identifying the options available, leading to the reasons for the selection of AuthorIT as the preferred solution. Learn about the 10 step process that Lingo Systems has identified to ensure a smooth content management and localization implementation.

Delta has been a pioneer in developing SGML and XML publishing solutions within the Maintenance and Engineering departments. Delta was one of the first airlines to implement an SGML publishing solution for manuals and task cards in the early 90’s. This created a strong foundation for building XML publishing systems beginning in the late 90’s. Currently Delta is using XML publishing technologies for large technical manuals, maintenance task cards, engineering documents, and portal content.

How do you get off to the right start in creating your content management strategy and then ensure that you continue moving in the right direction? How do you estimate ROI and measure it over time? How do you determine what content management tools are right for you now and into the future? How do you prepare the writing team and organization for this change and ensure their buy-in and success over time? Oh, so many questions…

This presentation provides an introduction to writing plugins for the DITA Open Toolkit. Topics covered will include how to take advantage of the preprocess output for resolved conrefs and map traversal, how to create specialization-aware XSLT, how to create the XML files used to register your new plugin code as a new transtype with the Open Toolkit, and how to create Ant tasks that use your plugin. Examples will cover code related to JavaScript TOC generation for the Open Toolkit XHTML output in the tocjs plugin and code for creating a full text search index used in the kindex plugin.

Many writers suffer from the perception that structured writing constrains creativity, and that content management translates to loss of ownership. Ghada Captan dispels these misconceptions and illuminates the freedom that comes from embracing structured writing and content management.

Avaya’s decision to move to structured authoring using DITA has resulted in some creative alternatives for this acronym that provide valuable lessons for moving this effort forward. The first lesson in DITA is, Don’t Intimidate the Authors! In the first part of this presentation, Susan shares how Avaya moved from an unstructured authoring environment into structured authoring. She shares how authors were educated and supported, how adopter projects were selected, and the steps taken to assure that deliverables are met while continuing the transformation of our content.

Research In Motion delivers multi-language content in multiple formats. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how, by using a CMS and the DITA Open Toolkit, we have automated our publishing environment in order to meet the deadlines and customizations required by our customers and partners.

The demonstration will highlight:

• how far we have taken single-sourcing
• an overview of how we manage ditamaps in our CMS
• the integration between our CMS and the DITA-OT
• the modifications that we have made to the DITA-OT
• the advantages of automated publishing
• the trade-offs we have made along the way

This presentation is a case study of how a customer of Translations.com has adapted a content architecture designed originally for only English content to accommodate global/multilingual content.

• Integration of globalization functions into content management system user interfaces and workflows
• Automation of submission, extraction, delivery, reintegration and change management of content with content management systems
• Extending this functionality to other content repositories such as databases or file systems
• Integration of translation memory into content management systems to allow for instant word counting and instant translation of fully leveragable assets
• Content promotion workflow issues, i.e. reading from a production live system, but writing back to development or staging environments
• Meta Data-specific considerations for multilingual search

This presentation uses real life examples of a client's systems, and is co-presented by one client executive representative and one technical representative from Translations.com.

Nearly every major pharmaceutical company in the United States (and several internationally) has instituted a research “knowledge management” program in one form or another. Content Management is often a cornerstone of these programs. Some of these programs succeed, while many do not, but a challenge common to all is the wide disparity in the ways different groups of scientists consume information.

Experience at one such company yielded a specific finding: while a gap in understanding between the different sciences made things difficult, a more subtle (and surprisingly intractable) problem was seen in the divide between younger and older researchers. During this program, it proved difficult to generate a consensus that took advantage of information technology while meeting the requirements of the most experienced colleagues. Unsurprisingly, those with the most experience tended to wield the most power. That power generally pushed against the direction of basic knowledge management trends like self-service, distributed storage, and ad-hoc collaboration. In essence, the way the researchers “do science” was split along generational lines.

Several questions arose from this experience that bear considering by members of both industry and academia in pharmaceutical sciences. What kinds of tools make the best sense for managing and distributing pharmaceutical research content? Is there a common ground in needs between the generations of scientists? One place to look toward the future might be academia, where students today will be tomorrow's research staff. However, the attitudes of these students might surprise, and certainly shed insight on what is most important in content management programs.

• Create migration goals to expand the possibilities for using open source and alternative editing, and production tools.
• Implement source and document management principles to help understand and justify the use of a content management system.
• Provide revision controls and manage translation costs.
• Continue to provide release-driven product documentation with minimal impact on budget and no impact on schedule during the migration effort.

1. Unstructured topics –Unstructured document – Unstructured Production. The first step is to break documentation content into standalone topics in the current FrameMaker production environment.

2. Structured topics – Unstructured document – Unstructured Production. Provide structured topics using DITA/XML document type definition within the Framemaker production environment and provide conversion rules for storing topics in DITA/XML source.

3. Structured topics – Structured document – Structured Production. Structure the entire document set using DITA architecture, allowing the use of the FrameMaker production environment as well as open source and alternative editing, production, and content management tools.

Most discussions of XML-based projects tend to focus on a few of the major components of the project, such as content authoring or content management. However, few attempt to provide a comprehensive outline of all the components necessary to ensure project success. Rajal Shah (Document Engineering Manager) and Richard Hendricks (Manager, JUNOS Protocols Writing Team) from the Technical Publications department at Juniper Networks share their up-to-the-minute experience of a current conversion project to help you learn the secrets of success and avoid common pitfalls. They also provide a comprehensive outline that you can use to assist you in planning your own FrameMaker-to-XML conversion project.

Technology has improved radically in the past decade, meaning that Content Management investments are less often and to a lesser extent dependent on their technological components, but more dependent on planning, development, and operational factors that are less discrete and thus more difficult to describe and measure.

The definition of many successful CM efforts has broadened to include the impact on and value perceptions of a wide range of contributors and end-users, especially in the growing e-Government world. No matter how technologically solid and well-designed many systems may be, their success will often be defined by whether their intended users accept and use them and whether, by that use, the underlying objectives are brought closer to realization.

A growing initial step in the development of a system and IT investment plan is the discovery and description of the involved user community:

• What are the target user demographics?
• What range and mode of facility with computer systems and the Internet is likely to be present among the user community.
• What user internal and end behavior does the system require for successful operation?
• What is the impact on the organization’s process life cycle of invalid or incomplete user behavior?
• What is the impact, on the strategic objectives, of user failure to engage the system?

Once the general impact universe and functional profiles of the contemplated investment are well understood, the project must adopt or develop ways of managing its actions to meet the defined goals:

• How to ascertain the portions of the information life cycle, from content creation to final consumer participation, which must be included in the definition and measurement of success.
• How to adopt value measurement approaches to each included sector so that the planned investment may be evaluated prior to commitment.
• How to adopt measurement approaches to monitor an investments considered, including approaches to convert the general perception of need into strategic goals and tactical objectives that will form the basis for defining effective investment and measuring all aspects of investment success.
• How to adopt methodologies for dealing with system input from “uncontrolled” users; customers, interested visitors, citizens, voters, subject matter experts, business owners and managers, etc.

This presentation explores the growing influences on successful Content Management planning and implementation, suggesting some concrete ways in which organizations may increase their chances of success.

The promises of XML and DITA include better content quality, lower production costs, better usability and increased collaboration between authors. Are these promises a reality or are there monsters in the closet?

This presentation is based on true DITA implementation stories. It offers remedies and suggestions against monsters that might be haunting writers and sheds some light around scary dark shadows that are lurking to get in your technical departments.

• Hide and Seek: The story of the vanishing topics and of those whose presence you have never felt.
• The Giant Spider: Are you going to get caught in the related links spider net?

• The Writer's Death (or More Skeletons in the Closet): There's a horrifying rumour going around about writers dying in agony. They are no longer wanted because structured writing and DITA means that anyone can feed content into predefined topic structures and because a machine can format everything for them.

Simplified Technical English (also known as Controlled English) is a method of writing that makes technical English easy to understand. The use of Simplified Technical English stimulates global acceptance of technical documentation as it improves readability and prevents misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

As today's authoring environment is changing to structured XML and content management, it would only make sense to also adapt controlled terminology and good writing practice rules to further improve reusability and create additional cost savings.

Doing so will not only standardize the content, it will standardize content management in general, create efficiency, and further increase the many benefits content management already offers. Reusability is the key word here, which applies both to the English content, as well as to the translations, which can decrease the content up to 30% AND save translation cost up to 40% per language!

What does the Total Information Experience look like to the practitioner in the lines of business at IBM, to the information developers creating the content for our customers? Line organizations have built communities of practice linked to the various initiatives at the corporate level, to implement processes and standards at an operational level on delivery teams. These teams leverage the collaborative tools and technologies sponsored by the corporate team to create consistent, integrated, reusable content for our global customers. Come hear us talk about how one line organization has created communities of practice linked to corporate initiatives to drive adoption of DITA, integrated information, and new tooling, and the associated cultural change required to be successful.

Tutorials often show users, novice or advanced, how to perform specific product tasks by directly interacting with real-life examples and sample content. Tutorials are usually organized in a logical order with an introduction, modules, lessons, and a summary. Tutorials may also contain building blocks for more formal learning, which may include assessments. The DITA Tutorial specialization includes specialized topic types for each of these pieces of content, making tutorial writing an easy task to accomplish.

Hear how the IBM/Lotus information development team used the DITA Tutorial specialization to create a tutorial that introduces new users to IBM Lotus Component Designer.

Authoring and translating DITA documents can be greatly enhanced by the use of related standards such as XLIFF, TMX, SRX, TBX, GMX-V and xml:tm. These standards should not be viewed in isolation but as an integrated framework which reduces costs and increases choice. This presentation also includes the basic do's and don'ts of XML authoring and translation as well as a summary of the work of the DITA Translation TC.

Translated content can be difficult to manage – no matter what type of system that you use. As part of implementing a content management system at Research In Motion, the Software Documentation group encountered many benefits and faced many challenges when working with content in a number of languages. This session looks at our past methods, our initial CMS translation process, and how we adapted that process as we learned more about our tools. What changes were required for content development? How was linguistic quality assurance incorporated? Where did we change publishing and formatting tools? How did our vendor relationship change? Where do we go from here?

How did Sybase Tech Pubs move on down the road to DITA? By means of our "ruby slippers"-tools and transition.

The road to a successful DITA implementation is fraught with challenges for authors: Rapid Application Development (RAD); product managers, engineers, and others pelting them with continually evolving product requirements, tools, and Eclipse delivery framework; authors and subject matter experts spread across 7 time zones spanning the globe; and a monumental task of transforming volumes of legacy books and topics to topic-based, minimalist, user goal-oriented content.

Like Dorothy, authors can make it to the Emerald City with thorough, thoughtful planning, flexible tools and developers, and, like the Cowardly Lion, a healthy dose of courage to change and to exercise the leadership needed to overcome the "not my doc set" syndrome.

Sybase recognized early that to make it past all the obstacles on our road, we needed a dual focus: tools and author transition. We created an internal Technical Publications Solutions team that not only develops and implements technical requirements, but also aids authors in their transition to DITA through training, documentation, and management.

Literate programming is the software development process in which documentation and source code are written into one source file. In this presentation, Schlumberger Documentation Manager John Cornellier explains how literate programming has been achieved through DITA. John describes what the project requirements were, why DITA was chosen, whether or not it successfully met those requirements, and what the challenges were along the way. John also describes how users were trained to use the new system and where the future lies. During the presentation, see examples of the authoring system and its output.

Once you have done everything right and moved your company to single source XML DITA authoring architecture supported by a multilingual CMS, what do you need to know about the localization process, tools, and techniques? These choices will impact your existing legacy materials and the reusability of years of investment in Translation Memories, Context TM and Translation Management systems.

Perhaps it’s that the stock price of Google has us bamboozled, but our continuing focus on “search” misses the point. Merely being able to find some colossal number of documents across the web is a technical feat that does no one any good. We need to stop focusing on “search” and start focusing on what people are trying to do with information, which is use it in a particular context for a particular purpose. As such, what they need is not a search-based “information dump,” but instead the presentation of only the information that is directly relevant to their tasks. This requires a new generation of content applications based on XML tools and technologies, such as XQuery, that enable the integration of content from different sources, repurposing and delivering content through multiple channels, and mining content to find previously undiscovered information.

Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic describes how new technologies, combining content integration, content processing, full-text search, and the W3C-standard XQuery language, enable information providers to use their XML content to quickly create a new type of role-based information product, such as an application designed specifically for nurses in an ER. He also explains how the new tools enable companies to experiment with new business models, including Web 2.0 applications, by introducing several products on a single infrastructure, aggregating and transforming content from numerous sources, and repurposing content among various products.

This session explores the use of a policy-based approach to applying presentation and style to DITA topic-based content. This "styling by example" starts from the successful strategy of CSS, XSL-FO, and ODF. In this approach, a specialized DITA policy topic type defines available presentation properties for DITA topics. The style designer defines a style policy document that selects content elements by type or by example and specifies their properties. The writer then applies a particular style policy by choosing from a gallery. That style then gets used across the DITA topic-based content to create a deliverable with a consistent appearance and behavior.

This presentation itself provides its own demo - it uses style policies to present the DITA topic-based presentation content as a slide show!

If Web 2.0 is teaching companies anything, it’s that integration between the technologies used to manage web sites is becoming easier, not harder. Organizations of all sizes are integrating different content management strategies to build cool Web 2.0 applications such as Site Subscription, Email Campaign Management, RSS Feeds, Podcasting, and many more. This session educates attendees in the methods for creating these marketing tools to foster better communication with customers and deliver sales opportunities for their companies.

One would think that with the recent influx of DITA tools into the marketplace it would be easier to justify authoring and storing documents directly in XML using DITA. By now most IT managers have been exposed to the benefits of creating XML content management systems according to some agreed upon set of documentation rules. However, understanding the benefits of this technical approach and being able to justify the expense of implementing it are two different things. This session helps business managers articulate the long-term advantages of converting corporate data repositories to XML using DITA in order to build a suitable business case to get such projects off the ground.

One of the most bewildering experiences that an administrator can suffer is to open a help system and view hundreds of help topics in the table of contents or navigation pane. What to do first? What tasks are required? Do I really need to read all this stuff? What procedures must be completed in order, and what sections are optional? How do I find the related concepts and reference information for the tasks I must perform?

As information architects, our job is to squash the bewilderment factor and enable readers to know what they need to do, when to do it, and how to do it, one step at a time. This session tells the story of how a first-time IBM Task Modeler user was able to analyze meaningful tasks, create topic hierarchies using the Task Modeler, and build a cookbook to successfully install, configure, and manage Lotus Sametime Gateway, a new product from IBM. In addition, this session also discusses a sane approach to topic hierarchies and linking strategies, aided by the Task Modeler.  The Task Modeler is a state-of -the-art tool for modeling activity as a hierarchy of tasks and related elements. Technical writers can use the Task Modeler to organize DITA topics, create DITA maps, and create relationship tables for help systems.

OCTANE, built on Microsoft Content Management Server, offers enterprise content management for Windows Live Operations with features such as version control, workflow management, content reuse, and metadata tagging.

Incident Management Console is a tool that has been designed and built to provide an end-to-end Incident Management workflow in the Windows Live Operations Center.

By using web methods and plug-ins to pass data between OCTANE and Incident Management Console, we have automated many standard tasks performed by Operations Analysts and introduced a much more streamlined Incident Management process within the Operations Center. This process will enable the Operations Center to scale to meet the forecast demands of the business over the next two years.

The Aerospace industry can be counted amongst the earliest adopters of markup technologies and this fact can be seen as something of a mixed blessing. On the positive side, aerospace documentation specialists frequently have extensive experience working with SGML and XML and consequently have a solid sense of what works and what does not. On the less positive side, aerospace documentation groups have weathered at least two generations of technology investment and are facing a third wave with the introduction of equipment-oriented modular markup standards - specifically S1000D. The most significant challenge associated with surviving those successive generations of markup technology is that frequently all of them represent ongoing requirements that need to be serviced even as the move is made to more modern standards.

Within projects undertaken for the world's leading aircraft manufacturers and operators, one strategy that has proven consistently successful is leveraging the extensibility framework provided by DITA to subsume the requirements of both new and legacy standards into overarching 'meta-standards' that allow documentation teams to streamline their workload while continuing to satisfy often conflicting legacy requirements. Dubbed 'extreme DITA' by the participants in these projects, the uses made here of DITA fall well outside what was originally envisioned by the originators of DITA and this has itself introduced challenges.

Web 2.0 technologies provide real opportunities for collaboration and development in social environments. But there remain real challenges when integrating Web 2.0 approaches into Enterprise strategies:

• how does an information architecture change when applied to a social environment?
• how can content be shared across organizational boundaries and applications?
• how can meaning be preserved across applications to enable robust integration?

DITA-XML has moved beyond the point of only appealing to early-adopters and into the mainstream for information development teams. Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of DITA is the DITA map. The DITA map allows content designers to organize DITA topics in a very flexible way to help better reuse the content elements. One example of how we can use DITA maps to organize content is to apply the DITA map to a workflow procedure. Sometimes when designing content, it is necessary to guide the user through a certain path of the content. This might be due to the user role or the user's product environment. In online environments, a standard method for guiding the user is to use an interview or wizard. In this presentation, I will show you how my team developed a method for using DITA maps to structure content to allow us a very flexible way to create a DITA-based interview. Our method allows us to develop all the topics, and then provide a layer of DITA maps that serve as the pathway to guide the user to a grouping of topics.

Due largely to its break with the book paradigm, DITA has revolutionized the way people create and manage content, and end users are already realizing measurable benefits. However DITA is not the only standard that has taken a topic-based approach. S1000D - an international specification used principally by Aerospace and Defense - is also topic based. Some aspects of S1000D are analogous with DITA while others represent interesting and possibly useful departures. This presentation compares and contrasts the two specifications and suggests issues you might want to consider before moving from your legacy world.