The Content Wrangler
DITA-izing Your Documents: Five Issues To Think About When Converting Your Legacy Docs To DITA
Data Conversion Laboratory has published several useful and very informative articles on issues impacting the conversion of legacy document collections when making a move to XML and/or DITA. Mark Gross identifies five issues that you will likely have to face as you pour existing documentation into DITA. In the same issue of DCL News Diane Wieland interviews Ann Rockley and Steve Manning of The Rockley Group about DITA, XML, and legacy content conversion and issues of critical importance to those organizations considering a move to dynamic personalized content delivery and component content management.
These articles and more are part of DCL News, the official newsletter of Data Conversion Laboratory. The monthly newsletter is free and always includes a few interesting original articles or interviews as well as tidbits, tips, humor, and links to interesting stories written by others.
Great pointers about the overarching issues you have to consider when looking at your legacy content. I just wrote a post about the steps to take when converting/migrating existing Frame content to DITA:
Frame 8 is here: conversion or migration from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA at http://urltea.com/14sd
And I wrote a post a while back about puzzling over re-writing content as topics:
Turning information into DITA topics at http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-gentle/anne-gentle/topic-izing/
Thought these might be useful to people reading these articles and puzzling over conversion (migration, really, when it comes down to it.)
Hope this helps!