Download - Lavacon 2014 | STILO - DITA authoring for occasional content contributors

@StiloInt #LavaCon

DITA authoring for

occasional content contributors

Les BurnhamCEO

Patrick BakerVP Development & Professional Services

Copyright © Stilo International plc, 2014

Stilo International (LSE:STL)


HR

Legal

Marketing

Other

LIKELY CANDIDATES FOR DITA ADOPTION?

Customer

Support

Training Engineering

Supply chain

Partners

Customers

Other

Tech

Docs


Who? How many? How often? How much?

Curated? Tools? Knowledge of DITA?


Why adopt DITA? – top answers

► Content reuse very important,

especially to engineering,

training and customer support

► Publication tool chain

can be leveraged


Impediments to enterprise adoption of DITA

► Management support is generally high, but some are more sensitive to

cost implications

► In large organizations, there is concern that SMEs may resist change,

in smaller organizations this appears to be less of an issue

► Benefits accrue to reusing team, not to author

► Some engineers don’t care much about docs

(e.g. they go to social media when they need help)

► Authoring tools must be very easy to use and robust

(and very low-cost)


Possible drivers for curation by tech docs team

► General editing (spelling, grammar, style)

► Refine DITA markup

► Localization

► Apply metadata

► Manage links

► Manage content reuse

► CCMS access (roles, licenses)


Current authoring tools – some observations

► Conversations and email with tech docs

team are another way of “authoring”

► Open Office sometimes used in place

of Word, but not too often

► Internal web tools are often

home grown

► Illustration and movie

programs important to

training


Occasional contributors prefer to use familiar tools

EDIT & TOPIC CREATION Browser-based, WYSIWYG Full DITA configurability Server-based conversion and validation CCMS integration

IMPORT Template library Central rules configuration Server-based conversion and validation Cloud service, workflow integration

DITA

Custom XML


ckeditor.com

Open Source

Fully customizable

Multilingual support

Plugin architecture


► An enterprise solution for users with no knowledge of DITA

► Enables web-based contributions at very low cost

► NOT meant to compete with generic XML editors

► Work-in-progress, Q4 pilot with significant enterprise customer

► Initial release planned early 2015


Initial Release – general capabilities

► Check in / out

► Browse CMS

► Insert graphics

► Edit – 3 topic types (concept, task, reference)

► Create new topic from a template


Comprehensive DITA support under-the-hood

► Core Module► ~200 elements

► DITA/XSD driven context-sensitivity inside an XML structure

► Generates compliant, valid DITA every time

► Fully customizable & configurable (per user, per department)► Conrefs, Conditions, Reltables

► Specializations

► Attributes


FUTURE support for selected CK Editor plug-ins

► http://ckeditor.com/addons/plugins/all

choose from 230+

e.g. Google Docs viewer, LoopIndex Track Changes, Templates, Tables,

Form elements, Paste from Word, Equation editor, Math editor, Youtube

embedding, List, Formulae, Spellchecker, Floating Tool-Bar …


www.stilo.com/authorbridge

[email protected]