Hard Truths About Content Conversion

February 14, 2009 Blog 1 Comment

By Joe Gollner, Stilo International When organizations first look at migrating their content from unstructured to structured forms, there appears to be some common patterns that emerge. Sometimes the people involved don’t believe that adding structure to content is something that automation can provide any assistance with. We can call these people the “skeptics”. Teams operating on this assumption budget time to perform the conversions manually – diligently adding markup to text files exported from their legacy authoring environment or, as a personal favorite, copying and pasting from the legacy …

The Rise of Topic-Based Video in Task-Based Documentation: Is It Time For DITA and Video?

February 12, 2009 Blog 7 Comments

By Sean Healey, Owner, Wild Basin Media The adoption rate of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has been truly remarkable. While its growth stems from and is most apparent across those organizations that publish technical documentation, DITA is certainly not limited to technical publication departments. Because of its specialization feature, DITA is now viewed by a variety of businesses as a stable, low-cost solution to all sorts of documentation from marketing to financial reports to training material and so on. By some estimates, up to 80 percent of new …