10,000,000 DITA Topics Can't Be Wrong

The DITA standard has fundamentally changed the way that the technical writing community thinks about structured authoring. With DITA, firms can benefit from content reuse, consistent messaging, lower localization costs, and much more. As an open standard, DITA is highly interoperable and comes with a mature set of tools bringing additional advantages over other formats. This presentation focuses on the development of DITA and the tools that have evolved alongside it to effectively manage what may be vast quantities of technical content. The “10 Million DITA Topics” is a conservative estimate of the number of DITA topics some firms are managing within their component content management systems when one includes versioned content. This is not only being done efficiently, but the added flexibility provides process opportunities for intelligent content that were not previously available. Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and Keith Schengili-Roberts, DITA Information Architect with IXIASOFT as he examines the developmental roots of DITA, and how some of the original architectural decisions in DITA have opened a dialog as to the nature of effective technical communications. The talk will compare some of the key differences between DITA and other structured content formats, and delineate what makes a specification successful from a market and client perspective. Through the use of case studies, Keith will also examine how clients have leveraged these DITA features in practice. The presentation will be of interest to technical writing managers and those who are trying to understand the ramifications of the success of DITA in the marketplace, and how it has changed ideas about how structured authoring can become intelligent content.