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DITA For
Everyone

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It’s not just for Tech Pubs!
Using DITA-based knowledge, experience, and tools
to help the whole organization succeed.
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DITA FOR EVERYONE
It’s not just for Tech Pubs!
In the corporate world, the technical

made by technical publications organizations,

publications department is often viewed as a

the rest of the enterprise has not benefited from

cost center, necessary as a provider of content

the potential advantages of moving content to a

to support a packaged product or service

standards-based environment.

offering, but having no value to the core
revenue generation functions of the enterprise.
As a result, technical publications managers
must fight hard to get the budget for any new
technologies and must be prepared to show
strong ROI arguments to justify those
investments.

Is this a missed opportunity? Why hasn't DITA’s
success been replicated by other corporate
organizations that produce content? Why aren’t
other departments leveraging the skills and
knowledge of the technical publications staff to
increase their own value to the enterprise? This
paper will highlight some of the potential

Over the last decade, the implementation of the

benefits for these "other" corporate

DITA standard has greatly optimized the

organizations as they interact with the technical

creation, management, and publishing of

publications department, and provide some

technical content. DITA-based tools and

insights into how they can achieve similar

processes have resulted in dramatic cost

productivity gains.

savings and process improvements. However,
despite the large investment of time and money
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Intro
duction

“Content is king.” You’ve heard it
said in many corporate boardrooms.

With the increasing popularity of online search

And yet, despite the clear and proven benefits of

engines, cloud-based software, and mobile

DITA, not much else has changed for those

devices, the need to access relevant and

technical publications departments from a

useful content has never been more urgent.

cultural perspective across the enterprise. The

And yet, the people responsible for producing

success of a departmental DITA implementation

the technical information that supports

rarely extends beyond organizational

products made by these companies are often

boundaries to be replicated in other

hidden deep within the Engineering or IT

departments. In most cases, other organizations

organizations, struggling for respect and

do not recognize the benefits of DITA for their

relevance as they compete for budgetary

own content, and they are somewhat fearful of

survival.

the costs and time required to successfully

In their efforts to provide the most useful, rich,

implement a DITA solution for production use.

and effective content in the shortest possible

This paper will illustrate four

timeframe and for the lowest possible cost,

scenarios where the technical

many technical publications groups have

publications departments can use

embraced the DITA standard. By moving away

their DITA-based knowledge,

from proprietary authoring and publishing

experience, and tools to support

tools that require years to master, and by

cross-organizational success

adopting standards-based approaches to

across the enterprise, including:

content creation, management, and
multichannel publishing, these writing

•

Product Engineering

departments have been able to dramatically

•

Marketing

reduce cost and increase efficiency related to

•

One DITA implementation at a
Fortune 500 technology
company resulted in 40%
reduction in product
documentation costs.
By reusing 80-90% of their
content, the company reduced
product development time by
4-6 weeks and localization
costs by $800K per project.

Customer support/field
support

the content life cycle.
Structuring corporate technical content into

•

Training/Education

reusable “components” (tasks, concepts,

For each of these scenarios, we will describe the

topics), DITA-based environments have

typical current environment, the potential

resulted in dramatic cost savings and faster

benefits of DITA-based collaboration with the

time-to-market. As industry success stories

technical publications staff, and illustrate with

pile up, the proof is clear: DITA is a winning

examples based on real-life success stories with

proposition for managing the process of

the easyDITA™ platform for authoring,

producing technical publications.

management, and publishing of DITA content.
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Product Engineering
Typical Current Environment

In a typical technical publication process, a writer will

Content Review

interact with engineers and/or subject matter experts

Again, there is often no formal tracking process to

(SMEs) in several phases of development: to gather initial

determine the status of SME content review. Engineers

specifications in order to produce draft content and to

are often busy with development project tasks, and

facilitate the content review by the engineer/SME. There are

review of technical documentation is not always

often problems associated with each of these phases:

prioritized as highly as these other responsibilities.

Content contribution
SMEs typically do not follow a structured process for

Therefore, review comments are typically late and often
incomplete.

sending initial content to the writer. If the writer is lucky,

The most common mechanism for SME content review is

there will be formal specification documents that are

for a writer to send MS-Word or PDF documents via email

managed by version control and follow an approved format.

to each stakeholder in the review process. Each reviewer

If the writer is not as fortunate, the contribution can range

provides comments and edits to their own copy of the file

from a myriad of Word documents, email messages, Wiki

and returns the edited version to the writer. Once all

discussions, and even handwritten notes.

comments are received, it is up to the writer to face the

Often, there is no formal tracking mechanism in place to
determine if complete, up-to-date information has been
provided to the writer. If specifications are modified, the
writer often finds out too late (if at all).

challenge of consolidating these comments into one final
document - and even acting as a referee when comments
from different reviewers are not in agreement.
+
Benefits of a
DITA
Environment
A technology platform based
on DITA can help address
many of the issues with content
contribution and content
review:
A DITA component-based
content management system

Example: The easyDITA content management system has powerful versioning
and notification features. This screenshot shows a topic’s version history,
indicating who to notify if this content is updated in the future.

provides a centralized storage
area, with versioning to track
content as it is updated in the
system. Imagine if functional
specifications were authored
in DITA and stored in a
centralized repository: if a
specification was changed, an
automatic notification could
immediately be sent to the
technical writer.
A collaborative workflow
environment helps the writer
to determine who has
completed their review tasks
and who is overdue. It also
helps facilitate the
management of comments
from multiple reviewers and
encourage online
collaboration to resolve
discrepancies.

Example: easyDITA has robust automated workflow features, including an
intuitive browser-based review tool for SMEs to easily add comments and edits
to content, and reporting to show status of outstanding review tasks.
+

Marketing
Typical Current Environment

Marketing departments do not usually

What’s the issue?

have much interaction with technical

Some of the issues that marketing

publications groups. Marketing

organizations face include:

deliverables are vastly different from
product manuals, which tend to follow a
standardized, usually simple, format. In
contrast, marketing brochures,
newsletters, catalogs, and data sheets are
highly graphical in nature and very
layout-intensive.
Some marketing content is targeted for
web delivery (e.g., blog postings,
websites, etc.), while other deliverables
are primarily print-based. Due to these
factors, marketing organizations use a
variety of tools to produce their end
deliverables, ranging from simple web
editors like WordPress to highly
sophisticated layout tools like Adobe
InDesign.

The variety of content creation tools
make it inefficient to produce multiple
output formats. For example, a brochure
may have to be designed and produced
with a layout tool and then adapted later
for delivery to web or mobile devices.
Many companies serve a global audience
and have a need to produce multilingual
marketing collateral. Because marketing
content is usually developed in different
formats (e.g., Adobe InDesign files,
HTML, MS-Word, etc.), it can be costly
and time-consuming to translate these
deliverables into other languages with
the proper layouts.
+

Benefits of a DITA Environment

A DITA-based platform provides marketing organizations with an efficient way
to produce multiple outputs for web and print in multiple languages from a
single source.
Multi-channel publishing
Because DITA is based on “format-neutral” XML markup; the written content can be
created once and transformed to the required output formats in an automated way.
Tools exist to easily flow XML content into desktop publishing applications for further
layout, while delivery to online formats like HTML5 for delivery to the web and to
mobile devices can be completely automated.

Multi-channel publishing from the same source DITA content at the click of a
button from the easyDITA component content management system.

Multi-lingual output
DITA is a highly efficient format for content localization. Most professional translation
service providers have experience working with XML/DITA (and usually prefer it!)
When you receive localized DITA content back from your localization vendor, you can
use the same automated publishing processes for your target languages as you do for
your source language.

With easyDITA you can export and import content to and from your translation
partner for an end-to-end localization workflow.
Customer Support
In our experience, we’ve seen a mystifying phenomenon
at many large corporations: The customer support
organizations use issue-tracking systems and
knowledgebases to troubleshoot problems logged by
customers, while technical writing departments produce
manuals that are designed to help customers avoid having
to call customer support in the first place. Even though it
seems logical that there would be a symbiotic relationship
between these two organizations, in many companies
these departments are completely isolated from each
other and do not share information!

Benefits of a DITA Environment
A DITA-based platform provides significant
benefits to both the product support and
documentation organizations:
Because the technical writing teams typically
create DITA content at a topic level (e.g., task),
they can provide very discrete units of
information that are highly targeted and easy
to query against. If the support organization
could get direct access to these DITA topics,
imagine how much easier and more efficient it
would be to troubleshoot an issue!
Support engineers could provide valuable
feedback to the technical writing team. If a
support person finds mistakes or incomplete
information in a task, they could add
comments to the DITA topic and send it back
to the original writer for editing and
incorporation into the next product release.
This leads to potentially significant cost
savings and higher customer satisfaction,
because people would not require as much
customer support if the technical
documentation is more accurate and
understandable.

Example: easyDITA integrates with the intelligent content portal
SuiteShare, which can be configured as a support troubleshooting
tool using technical content authored in easyDITA. The illustration
above shows an example of SuiteShare configured to help customers
self-diagnose an issue.
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Training/Education

Typical Current Environment

Benefits of a DITA Environment

In another example of the “islands of content” dilemma, a

The primary benefits of migrating your training content

corporate training/education department is usually under a

to DITA are localization and consistency:

completely separate (often revenue-based) department
within the enterprise. Even though the educational content

Localization: By “chunking” your content into

being developed typically has a high percentage of overlap

reusable topics, you will only have to translate the

with the content produced by technical publications, there is

individual topics that have changed since the last

commonly very little content reuse between technical

localization cycle. Furthermore, because the content is

publications and training departments. In many cases,

marked up in format-neutral XML and can then be

learning content is developed redundantly to the technical

automatically rendered to several output formats, you

publications content, and is often stored in a completely

will no longer have to pay a localization service provider

different repository or Learning Management System (LMS).

for desktop publishing (DTP) in your target languages.

If the educational content is being developed for a global

These 2 factors have been shown to reduce localization

audience and needs to be localized, this content is also sent

costs by an average of 70% for many technical

out for a separate translation, at a real cost to the company.

publications groups!

Consistency:

Most popular tools in the “learning”

space (such as PowerPoint or Captivate) give the course
developer many creative liberties. As a result, the final
output from different courseware creators can look quite
different, thus diminishing your brand recognition.
7 More Habits of Highly Successful DITA Teams
1. DITA encourages the writing of concise topics that can easily be
assembled in any order. For example, a training department could use a
DITA specialization to reuse technical writing topics and leverage it for
educational purposes.
2. DITA conditional processing allows one set of content to automatically
produce documents with different uses, like instructor and student guides.
3. Because DITA is format-neutral, the same source content can be
automatically output as print-ready manuals, PowerPoint slides, or
optimized for a tablet device.
4. The separation of content from presentation (style, format) frees writers to
concentrate on what they do best: create valuable content...instead of
spending time adjusting fonts and troubleshooting layout issues.
5. DITA/XML content is highly desirable as a language translation format. If
technical publications topics are already translated, other departments will
not have to spend as much money “re-translating” the content for their
needs.
6. If the DITA repository is robust enough, there may be no need to invest in
setting up and maintaining a separate content management systems like an
LMS, easing the burden (and associated cost) related to IT support.
7. A powerful DITA repository can also manage video and multimedia content
that could be shared by both the technical publications and other
organizations.

+

Jorsek LLC
302 N. Goodman St. e201
Rochester, NY 14607
(877) 492-2960
easyDITA.com

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White paper dita for everyone

  • 1. + DITA For Everyone + It’s not just for Tech Pubs! Using DITA-based knowledge, experience, and tools to help the whole organization succeed.
  • 2. 2 1 ç + DITA FOR EVERYONE It’s not just for Tech Pubs! In the corporate world, the technical made by technical publications organizations, publications department is often viewed as a the rest of the enterprise has not benefited from cost center, necessary as a provider of content the potential advantages of moving content to a to support a packaged product or service standards-based environment. offering, but having no value to the core revenue generation functions of the enterprise. As a result, technical publications managers must fight hard to get the budget for any new technologies and must be prepared to show strong ROI arguments to justify those investments. Is this a missed opportunity? Why hasn't DITA’s success been replicated by other corporate organizations that produce content? Why aren’t other departments leveraging the skills and knowledge of the technical publications staff to increase their own value to the enterprise? This paper will highlight some of the potential Over the last decade, the implementation of the benefits for these "other" corporate DITA standard has greatly optimized the organizations as they interact with the technical creation, management, and publishing of publications department, and provide some technical content. DITA-based tools and insights into how they can achieve similar processes have resulted in dramatic cost productivity gains. savings and process improvements. However, despite the large investment of time and money
  • 3. 2 1 + Intro duction “Content is king.” You’ve heard it said in many corporate boardrooms. With the increasing popularity of online search And yet, despite the clear and proven benefits of engines, cloud-based software, and mobile DITA, not much else has changed for those devices, the need to access relevant and technical publications departments from a useful content has never been more urgent. cultural perspective across the enterprise. The And yet, the people responsible for producing success of a departmental DITA implementation the technical information that supports rarely extends beyond organizational products made by these companies are often boundaries to be replicated in other hidden deep within the Engineering or IT departments. In most cases, other organizations organizations, struggling for respect and do not recognize the benefits of DITA for their relevance as they compete for budgetary own content, and they are somewhat fearful of survival. the costs and time required to successfully In their efforts to provide the most useful, rich, implement a DITA solution for production use. and effective content in the shortest possible This paper will illustrate four timeframe and for the lowest possible cost, scenarios where the technical many technical publications groups have publications departments can use embraced the DITA standard. By moving away their DITA-based knowledge, from proprietary authoring and publishing experience, and tools to support tools that require years to master, and by cross-organizational success adopting standards-based approaches to across the enterprise, including: content creation, management, and multichannel publishing, these writing • Product Engineering departments have been able to dramatically • Marketing reduce cost and increase efficiency related to • One DITA implementation at a Fortune 500 technology company resulted in 40% reduction in product documentation costs. By reusing 80-90% of their content, the company reduced product development time by 4-6 weeks and localization costs by $800K per project. Customer support/field support the content life cycle. Structuring corporate technical content into • Training/Education reusable “components” (tasks, concepts, For each of these scenarios, we will describe the topics), DITA-based environments have typical current environment, the potential resulted in dramatic cost savings and faster benefits of DITA-based collaboration with the time-to-market. As industry success stories technical publications staff, and illustrate with pile up, the proof is clear: DITA is a winning examples based on real-life success stories with proposition for managing the process of the easyDITA™ platform for authoring, producing technical publications. management, and publishing of DITA content.
  • 4. 2 1 + Product Engineering Typical Current Environment In a typical technical publication process, a writer will Content Review interact with engineers and/or subject matter experts Again, there is often no formal tracking process to (SMEs) in several phases of development: to gather initial determine the status of SME content review. Engineers specifications in order to produce draft content and to are often busy with development project tasks, and facilitate the content review by the engineer/SME. There are review of technical documentation is not always often problems associated with each of these phases: prioritized as highly as these other responsibilities. Content contribution SMEs typically do not follow a structured process for Therefore, review comments are typically late and often incomplete. sending initial content to the writer. If the writer is lucky, The most common mechanism for SME content review is there will be formal specification documents that are for a writer to send MS-Word or PDF documents via email managed by version control and follow an approved format. to each stakeholder in the review process. Each reviewer If the writer is not as fortunate, the contribution can range provides comments and edits to their own copy of the file from a myriad of Word documents, email messages, Wiki and returns the edited version to the writer. Once all discussions, and even handwritten notes. comments are received, it is up to the writer to face the Often, there is no formal tracking mechanism in place to determine if complete, up-to-date information has been provided to the writer. If specifications are modified, the writer often finds out too late (if at all). challenge of consolidating these comments into one final document - and even acting as a referee when comments from different reviewers are not in agreement.
  • 5. + Benefits of a DITA Environment A technology platform based on DITA can help address many of the issues with content contribution and content review: A DITA component-based content management system Example: The easyDITA content management system has powerful versioning and notification features. This screenshot shows a topic’s version history, indicating who to notify if this content is updated in the future. provides a centralized storage area, with versioning to track content as it is updated in the system. Imagine if functional specifications were authored in DITA and stored in a centralized repository: if a specification was changed, an automatic notification could immediately be sent to the technical writer. A collaborative workflow environment helps the writer to determine who has completed their review tasks and who is overdue. It also helps facilitate the management of comments from multiple reviewers and encourage online collaboration to resolve discrepancies. Example: easyDITA has robust automated workflow features, including an intuitive browser-based review tool for SMEs to easily add comments and edits to content, and reporting to show status of outstanding review tasks.
  • 6. + Marketing Typical Current Environment Marketing departments do not usually What’s the issue? have much interaction with technical Some of the issues that marketing publications groups. Marketing organizations face include: deliverables are vastly different from product manuals, which tend to follow a standardized, usually simple, format. In contrast, marketing brochures, newsletters, catalogs, and data sheets are highly graphical in nature and very layout-intensive. Some marketing content is targeted for web delivery (e.g., blog postings, websites, etc.), while other deliverables are primarily print-based. Due to these factors, marketing organizations use a variety of tools to produce their end deliverables, ranging from simple web editors like WordPress to highly sophisticated layout tools like Adobe InDesign. The variety of content creation tools make it inefficient to produce multiple output formats. For example, a brochure may have to be designed and produced with a layout tool and then adapted later for delivery to web or mobile devices. Many companies serve a global audience and have a need to produce multilingual marketing collateral. Because marketing content is usually developed in different formats (e.g., Adobe InDesign files, HTML, MS-Word, etc.), it can be costly and time-consuming to translate these deliverables into other languages with the proper layouts.
  • 7. + Benefits of a DITA Environment A DITA-based platform provides marketing organizations with an efficient way to produce multiple outputs for web and print in multiple languages from a single source. Multi-channel publishing Because DITA is based on “format-neutral” XML markup; the written content can be created once and transformed to the required output formats in an automated way. Tools exist to easily flow XML content into desktop publishing applications for further layout, while delivery to online formats like HTML5 for delivery to the web and to mobile devices can be completely automated. Multi-channel publishing from the same source DITA content at the click of a button from the easyDITA component content management system. Multi-lingual output DITA is a highly efficient format for content localization. Most professional translation service providers have experience working with XML/DITA (and usually prefer it!) When you receive localized DITA content back from your localization vendor, you can use the same automated publishing processes for your target languages as you do for your source language. With easyDITA you can export and import content to and from your translation partner for an end-to-end localization workflow.
  • 8. Customer Support In our experience, we’ve seen a mystifying phenomenon at many large corporations: The customer support organizations use issue-tracking systems and knowledgebases to troubleshoot problems logged by customers, while technical writing departments produce manuals that are designed to help customers avoid having to call customer support in the first place. Even though it seems logical that there would be a symbiotic relationship between these two organizations, in many companies these departments are completely isolated from each other and do not share information! Benefits of a DITA Environment A DITA-based platform provides significant benefits to both the product support and documentation organizations: Because the technical writing teams typically create DITA content at a topic level (e.g., task), they can provide very discrete units of information that are highly targeted and easy to query against. If the support organization could get direct access to these DITA topics, imagine how much easier and more efficient it would be to troubleshoot an issue! Support engineers could provide valuable feedback to the technical writing team. If a support person finds mistakes or incomplete information in a task, they could add comments to the DITA topic and send it back to the original writer for editing and incorporation into the next product release. This leads to potentially significant cost savings and higher customer satisfaction, because people would not require as much customer support if the technical documentation is more accurate and understandable. Example: easyDITA integrates with the intelligent content portal SuiteShare, which can be configured as a support troubleshooting tool using technical content authored in easyDITA. The illustration above shows an example of SuiteShare configured to help customers self-diagnose an issue.
  • 9. 2 1 + Training/Education Typical Current Environment Benefits of a DITA Environment In another example of the “islands of content” dilemma, a The primary benefits of migrating your training content corporate training/education department is usually under a to DITA are localization and consistency: completely separate (often revenue-based) department within the enterprise. Even though the educational content Localization: By “chunking” your content into being developed typically has a high percentage of overlap reusable topics, you will only have to translate the with the content produced by technical publications, there is individual topics that have changed since the last commonly very little content reuse between technical localization cycle. Furthermore, because the content is publications and training departments. In many cases, marked up in format-neutral XML and can then be learning content is developed redundantly to the technical automatically rendered to several output formats, you publications content, and is often stored in a completely will no longer have to pay a localization service provider different repository or Learning Management System (LMS). for desktop publishing (DTP) in your target languages. If the educational content is being developed for a global These 2 factors have been shown to reduce localization audience and needs to be localized, this content is also sent costs by an average of 70% for many technical out for a separate translation, at a real cost to the company. publications groups! Consistency: Most popular tools in the “learning” space (such as PowerPoint or Captivate) give the course developer many creative liberties. As a result, the final output from different courseware creators can look quite different, thus diminishing your brand recognition.
  • 10. 7 More Habits of Highly Successful DITA Teams 1. DITA encourages the writing of concise topics that can easily be assembled in any order. For example, a training department could use a DITA specialization to reuse technical writing topics and leverage it for educational purposes. 2. DITA conditional processing allows one set of content to automatically produce documents with different uses, like instructor and student guides. 3. Because DITA is format-neutral, the same source content can be automatically output as print-ready manuals, PowerPoint slides, or optimized for a tablet device. 4. The separation of content from presentation (style, format) frees writers to concentrate on what they do best: create valuable content...instead of spending time adjusting fonts and troubleshooting layout issues. 5. DITA/XML content is highly desirable as a language translation format. If technical publications topics are already translated, other departments will not have to spend as much money “re-translating” the content for their needs. 6. If the DITA repository is robust enough, there may be no need to invest in setting up and maintaining a separate content management systems like an LMS, easing the burden (and associated cost) related to IT support. 7. A powerful DITA repository can also manage video and multimedia content that could be shared by both the technical publications and other organizations. + Jorsek LLC 302 N. Goodman St. e201 Rochester, NY 14607 (877) 492-2960 easyDITA.com