CIDM Calendar of Events |
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Conferences |
 Registration is now open for Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2007 to be held March 26–28,
in Boston, Massachusetts.
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News & Events |
| JoAnn Hackos' New Book Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio and People is Released.
Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People, the new book from JoAnn Hackos, is now available on Amazon! Read the press release here.
DITA Webinar Series–Sponsored by Comtech Services, XMetaL, and XyEnterprise
Part 3: Specialization featuring JoAnn Hackos and Jennifer Linton, XyEnterprise, and XMetaL
January 18, 2007
10am PST | 1pm EST | 6pm GMT
More Information
STC France Chapter Annual Conference and Competition Awards
Join your colleagues at the FIAP Jean Monnet International Visitor and Conference Center in Paris on Friday, 2 February, and Saturday, 3 February, 2007, for this year's STC France Chapter Annual Conference, a great opportunity to develop your skills, forge new professional ties, and hear about the latest trends in technical communication.
Comtech
Services Releases DITA User Guide
We are accepting orders for Introduction
to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing
Architecture. Order
your copy today!
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Workshops |
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DITA: Getting Started
Jen Linton
January 10–11, 2007
Phoenix, AZ
DITA Boot Camp
JoAnn Hackos
January 29–February 2, 2007
Redwood City, CA
Minimalism: Creating Manuals People Can Use
JoAnn Hackos
March 22–23, 2007
Princeton, NJ
For more information on these and other workshops,
visit the JoAnn
Hackos Workshop Series web site.
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Technology Helps the OASIS DITA Standard Tip
JoAnn Hackos, PhD
CIDM Director
www.infomanagementcenter.com
For the past several weeks, we have been reviewing the latest releases of JustSystems XMetaL Editor and PTC’s Arbortext Editor. Both vendors have made significant improvements to the usability and functionality of their products. XMetaL has an impressive WYSIWYG-like interface that makes text entry easy. Arbortext has released its DITA–compatible Styler that helps in creating style sheets for PDF and HTML output. Both products have significant support for setting up DITA maps with easy-to-use functionality supporting conditional processing. Although I personally prefer to use the tags-on view when I’m writing, writers who prefer a more Word-like interface can select that convenient mode of operation. If others in your organization prefer something even more Word-like, you might implement Elkera or In.vision. If you prefer to stay in the FrameMaker environment, you can take advantage of the DITA plug-in for this desktop publishing tool.
Read
the article
More articles
The Promise of DITA: Pulling it All Together from Content Creation to Content Management
Angie Hirata, JustSystems XMetaL
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is on the leading edge of information management and is certainly one of the industry’s most significant developments in the last 10 years. DITA takes into consideration many common information challenges that content-rich organizations face and attempts to offer practical solutions with smart content modeling. There are several things that DITA offers that other “standard” information models do not. The core DITA concepts are good, the potential to re-use information is outstanding, and the potential to share information across business units to keep information consistent and accurate is promising. One other aspect that makes DITA unique is the large user community and freely available online support groups that make it an unparalleled standard – making adoption easy. When you take into consideration all of DITA’s attributes, if you haven’t looked into DITA, you should.
Read
the article
Technically Write
Rahul Prabhakar, Samsung Electronics Company, Ltd.
Are you suffering from bouts of technophilia? Do you bend over backwards to understand technology? If you write daily about new or complex products, it seems highly improbable that you will not value the underlying technology. Most writers admit that they continually face the challenge in learning different technologies at their workplace. If content is today's king, then why such an outcry about technology?
Read
the article
Information-Development Purchasing Guide: XML Authoring Tools
Jen Linton, Comtech Services, Inc.
In an eight article series for the e-newsletter, CIDM will be discussing buying tips for typical services and products that you, as an information developer, might be interested in buying.
This is the fourth in our e-newsletter series of purchasing guides for purchasing information-development products and services. In this issue we look at XML authoring tools.
Read
the article
Next-Generation Product Documentation: Survey Results on the Current State and Future Directions of Documentation
Chad Jackson, Aberdeen Group
What are the top pressures on the documentation department, the biggest challenges, the processes and technologies that are working – or not working? Most documentation professionals probably have ready answers to these questions within the confines of their own organizations. But what’s the big picture?
Read
the article
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