1. DITA Overview – Build the case for DITA

2. Overview Understand your business objectives
Realize your problem statements
Understand the most important thing
Know the DITA benefits
Learn DITA basics
Realize the DITA gotchas
Consider the vision
How you can make a difference

3. Understand your business objectives
Get a corporate sponsor
Find out what your business objectives are
Marry the business objectives to your content objectives
Work with a team and not in a silo

4. Total user experience (UX)
What’s your total user experience?
What team’s play a part in your user experience?
Provides UI design based on in-depth user research. Designs are tested with target users early and often throughout the development lifecycle, thus ensuring that the finished product meets users' needs.
User Experience Design
Documentation
Training
Provides a research-based, structured curriculum delivered through interactive, just-in-time methods, with a focus on eLearning and virtual classroom delivery.
Provides non-intrusive but easily accessible product assistance based on in-depth research of how users interact with the products and the contexts in which they seek additional information.

5. Problem statements (Questions to ask)
What tools are your teams using and what are the outputs they are producing?
Can your teams single-source their content? Do they store it all in one place?
Do your teams store content all in the same format?
Do your teams use all the same styles, standards, and branding? (Unified content?)
How fast is your content repository growing? Can you sustain it?

6. Common Tools Common Styles Quality Content Common Repository
Most important thing
Common Tools
Common Styles
Consistent Content
Common Repository
Quality Content
Confidential

7. Why select DITA? Meets all of your business objectives
Enterprise standard that is independent of proprietary tools
Provides content reuse
Provides content exchange
Enforces consistent content types and organization
Permits metadata usage
Produces content in a cost-effective way
Provides automated formatting and publishing
Prepares content for translation
Extensible which means teams can be proactive and not reactive

8. DITA benefits everyone
Benefits to Customers
Consistent content across product lines
Unified look and feel for all of our outputs
Easily searchable content and less content to weed through
Improved content quality
Enables content translation if the business adopts translation
More efficiency
Better control over content versions
Unified content storage repository
Automated publishing and workflows
Corporate/Management benefits
Better skill set definition
Greater output flexibility
Lower personnel, software, production, storage, support, and maintenance costs on the go forward
Benefits to content creators
New industry standard skills and software to learn
More time writing – quality content
Professional and personal growth

9. DITA basics

10. DITA overview - DITA vs DITA Open Toolkit (OT)
DITA is an acronym for Darwin Information Typing Architecture
DITA is an XML-based standard for authoring and delivering information
DITA is an architecture for creating topic-oriented content that can be reused and single-sourced
DITA is not a static standard. It continues to evolve and improve.
When DITA became a public XML standard in 2004, IBM contributed the DITA OT.
The DITA OT transforms DITA content (XML files) into output formats such as PDF, XHTML, and Windows online help (CHM files). It is a publishing Engine.
DITA
XML Standard for Writing Content
DITA OT
Publishing Engine Donated by IBM

11. Complete tools solution includes
Content Migration Tool
Authoring Tool, such as XMetal or oXygen
CCMS
(Content Repository)
Styles Enforcement
Publishing Engine, such as DITA OT)
Interactive Online Repository

12. DITA key concepts Generic Topic
Three additional topic types based on the Generic Topic – Concept, Task, and Reference
Each topic consists of tags
Topics Author content in topics
Dita map
Book map
Dita maps (think of it as the table of contents file)

13. DITA key concepts – structure in the content
Structure – Hierarchical order in which content occurs in a topic
The more consistent the structure, the easier it is for users to read/use and the easier it is for writers to write
Structured content allows you to collaborate, share, and exchange content
Common Issues for Enterprises
Teams using different structures and structures have no governance
Managers want you to focus on quality content rather than trying to remember the structure, the layout/formatting details, and publishing the output

14. DITA gotchas
You need to put guidelines/best practices around specific things that will give you a headache.
Content reuse
Versioning topics
Branching topics
Conditional text
Variables
Goal: Keep it simple. You could do many nifty things, but that does not mean these things are sensible, logical, or advisable.
Horror Stories… There are plenty. Don’t over think your solution.

15. Consider the vision Place focus on quality content
Have greater control over the user experience destiny
Give writers/trainers higher visibility so you become partners with other areas of your organization
Become proactive towards business objectives and customer requests rather than reactive
Contribute and/or increase the revenue that writers/trainers generate for the business

16. How you can make a difference
Speak up and become a part of the effort
Do not be a bystander
Collaborate with your peers and your team
Tout our your effort and its progress with metrics

17. Key takeaways Understand your business objectives
Realize your problem statements
Understand the most important thing
Know the DITA benefits
Learn DITA basics
Realize the DITA gotchas
Consider the vision
How you can make a difference