Introducing EasyDITA! An Interview With Paul Wlodarczyk
An interview with Paul Wlodarczyk, CEO, Jorsek LLC, publishers of easyDITA
TCW: Paul, as you know, I’ve been predicting the advent of an online collaborative authoring environment that supports the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) for several years. It just made sense. That’s why I’m so excited to talk with you about your latest project. What is ?
TCW: What’s different about easyDITA compared to other DITA solutions?
PW: The most important difference is that easyDITA is designed for non-technical users, so it’s incredibly easy to use and has virtually no learning curve. Even so, it has full support for all the capabilities of DITA, they’re just presented in a user-friendly manner.
Second, easyDITA runs entirely in a web browser, so you can create DITA content on any computer with a supported web browser, including non-Windows computers like Macs or Linux-based engineering workstations.
Third, easyDITA is a complete solution with everything you need to author, manage, search, review, and publish DITA content. It’s all pre-integrated so all you have to do is login and start creating content.
Finally, easyDITA will be affordable for organizations of any size. We don’t have a user-based pricing model, so cost is never a barrier to DITA-based collaboration in your organization, no matter how many content contributors or reviewers you need to support.
TCW: Tell me more about the way collaboration works in easyDITA.
PW: The most fun we had was building the collaborative editing. To collaborate, an author simply invites other users to a document they’re working on, like a topic or map. Users have roles with permissions. If the user is invited in the role of Reviewer, they can login into the document at any time and suggest additions or deletions and add comments, with editorial markup that is like track changes in Word. If they have an Author role, they can make changes directly to the document. If multiple users are logged into the document at the same time, the first Author to arrive has “the wand” and can make changes, while other users are all in a reviewer role and can suggest changes. Edits are real-time so everyone logged into the document concurrently can see what others are typing as they type it. The author with the wand can pass it to other users and let them edit directly. It makes review and collaboration simple and fun – and productive.
TCW: What if I’ve already invested in desktop authoring tools like XMetaL or Arbortext? The easyDITA CMS can integrate with your desktop tools. We support multiple ways to integrate, including WebDAV, CMIS, REST, and SOAP. You can continue to use your desktop tools for more technical authors who are comfortable working in the structure, store your content in the easyDITA CMS, and use the easyDITA editor for collaboration (for things like review and content contribution from non-technical authors). We believe easyDITA helps existing DITA adopters get to the next level of maturity by giving them affordable and easy to use component content management and collaboration.
TCW: You mentioned affordable – and you know how much I like to talk about costs. So, how is easyDITA priced?
TCW: What browsers does easyDITA support?
PW: The current beta version works with Firefox, with Internet Explorer support coming before we go to public beta.
TCW: How long has easyDITA been under development?
PW: We’ve been working on easyDITA for about two years. The core platform for content management has been in development for about five years. It started off as a platform for collaborating on web site content – so that non-technical users could create, review, and contribute web content in an easy-to-use web-based solution. Obviously the DITA community has similar needs, so it was a good application for our platform, which was developed to work with any XML vocabulary (schema or DTD).
TCW: What’s the current status of the product? Can someone buy it?
PW: The product is currently in beta test on an “invitation-only” basis. We’re doing this so we can keep our focus on meeting our Q2 2011 release date. We are engaging a few early adopter customers in paid pilots. This, too, helps keep our developers focused on our launch, but it gives us feedback from real users on real projects, so we can be sure the product has all the features essential to the success of most DITA projects, out of the box.
TCW: What can I do to get invited to the beta?
PW: You’ll be most likely to get an invitation to the closed beta if you’re a DITA consultant, developer, or a prospective customer with a very pressing need for our capabilities. We’re looking for beta participants that will actually spend time in the product and give us feedback, without a lot of time asking basic DITA questions. That lets us focus on launch and bug fixes. End-user beta accounts are being provided today for prospective pilot customers, so if you have a qualified opportunity for a paid pilot, you’ll get a beta account right away.
TCW: What kinds of pilot projects are you looking for?
PW: We’re interested in finding a cross-section of companies in different markets. Right now we have pilot projects under discussion with a high-tech manufacturer for their customer documentation and training, with a scientific / technical / medical (STM) publisher, and with a major medical research institute. These pilots will give us good exposure to customer feedback in the major DITA markets. We’d like to find some pilot customers with needs for reuse in corporate policies and procedures (like HR manuals), financial services (for equity or other investment research publications), and legal departments (for internal collaboration on contract terms and similar business documents).
TCW: What if a customer decides to stop using easyDITA and move to another platform? What happens to their content?
PW: Our customers are never locked-in. If you’re not completely satisfied with easyDITA you can end your subscription and export your content at any time, free of charge. All your content can be exported as standards-compliant DITA because easyDITA does not create proprietary XML.
TCW: What’s the response to easyDITA been like from your early adopters?
PW: People enjoy using the product. They agree it’s easy to use for non-technical authors, and that there’s nothing else out there like it. Most of our users tell us it’s fun to use, too, especially the collaboration features.
TCW: What’s been interesting or fun about working on easyDITA?
PW: We’ve really enjoyed building out sophisticated features with simple and fresh user experiences. One example is track changes. We have the capability to track changes down to differences between each auto-save of a document – that’s a load of detail. The question is – how do you help a user find the practical information they need amongst all those small changes? Usually you care about when something got added or recovering content that was deleted – not every little change. We had fun building an interface like nothing out there today – to let you look at a specific portion of a document, between specific dates, looking at specific types of changes like adds, deletes, comments, suggested edits, etc. One idea we’ve prototyped is to let the user “fast forward” and animate the changes to the document over time, so you can see when something got added or deleted. We can also graph changes to the document, so you can spot dates with lots of activity and focus in on those. No one else out there is doing anything like this. We have an advantage because the CMS and the editor were designed to work in close harmony, so we can make huge leaps in usability like this. We think that’s fun.
TCW: What’s the future of easyDITA?
PW: Well the near future is our launch in the spring, which we’re very excited about. Soon after we expect to add social media features like publishing to wiki and blog, as well as a DITA-based wiki that is bi-directional. We are planning some specific CMS integrations as well for publishing out to popular portal and web CMS solutions – this is a high priority request from our early adopters and systems integration partners. We’re also planning a dynamic portal interface of our own that will let end-users search and aggregate content using our extensive metadata capabilities – this takes us into the “intelligent content” market, which we think is the future of DITA publishing.
TCW: Paul, thanks for sharing news of your new product with our readers. I look forward to watching as easyDITA matures. All the best.
PW: Thanks, Scott. We’ll definitely keep you up-to-date as we progress. See you at the Intelligent Content conference in Palm Springs.
Similar Posts:
- None Found
Recent Comments