Presenters: Joe Gelb, President, Suite Solutions and Yehudit Lindblom, Project Manager, Suite Solutions Abstract: Migrating to DITA XML-based authoring and publishing promises rich rewards in terms of lower costs and faster time to publication. But DITA migration also requires a well-planned process that will lead you through all the steps of a successful implementation. In this webinar, experienced project manager Yehudit Lindblom and Joe Gelb will review a process that covers all the bases, helping you build your game plan for a winning DITA implementation. Visit us at http://www.suite-sol.com Follow us on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/company/527916

2. XML-based Authoring/Publishing Solutions
Enterprise Intelligent Dynamic Content: SuiteShare Social KB
High Tech, Aerospace & Defense, Discrete Manufacturing
Healthcare, Government

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Familiar with your content
Open to learning the new methods and tools
Not necessarily the most senior and entrenched person in the group…
Someone with a good understanding of the corpus of your content and
how is (or should be) used
Someone who can understand the toolset being customized and
stitched together
Understand what they do, who to turn to if something breaks or needs
adjustment, can work well with vendors and your IT department

10. Helps you build a comprehensive project plan
Helps you coordinate with your external resources: IA consultant,
software vendors, conversion experts, style sheet developers…
Has a broad and detailed view of all the moving parts and is focused on
the success of your entire implementation
Brings experience to your team

11. Gathering material
Testing and approvals
Training
Regular update meetings and decision-making sessions
Answer questions
Test
Re-test
Approve
Allow enough time to do the job right and not take shortcuts: you
need the solid foundation to build on

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Gain a good understanding of the process and vocabulary
Get some hands-on experience
Set expectations
Hands-on training with exercises on real, familiar content

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What are the business goals: yours? Your stakeholders? Your
company?
Types of content
Who’s reading it? What are their goals?
Types of outputs
What are the pain points that need resolution?
Answer these questions for now and over the next 3 years
Design for a phased implementation: it may not all happen at once
Build a business case around the potential savings and value-add
What will be a reasonable budget request to start, implement in
stages, and maintain

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The content will need work to get into the proper structure
Some work is easier to do before the conversion, some after
Lists all headings in the document
Set the granularity for splitting into topics
Change titles, add indexes or metadata, merge conditionalization…

18. Will save time later; reduces need to stop and tweak the
conversion tools for unexpected styles or patterns
Be rigorous with the styles used in the input documents
It is irritating grunt work to check and re-apply styles, but it will
save huge effort later
Even one character styled wrong has potential to throw off the
conversion algorithm for that topic

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Have all the fonts available
Invest the time to put together good test data, based on your IA, that
simulates each combination of tagging and structure
Test data should account for how it will look coming out of the CMS
Communicate clear and detailed formatting requirements
You do not need separate style sheets for each language…

20. As you migrate more content, you will encounter new patterns in
the tagging
Style sheets are very sensitive to differences in tagging, especially
for PDF
Page-break rules are sometimes complex and may be tweaked
over time

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Requires coordination with information architect and style sheet
developers

22. Integration with the DITA Toolkit
Integration with PDF rendering engines
Antenna House, XEP, FOP, Top Leaf …

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Share tagging situations they came across
Ask questions to the information architect
or “go to” expert
Discuss ideas for sharing and organizing content
Discuss ideas for updating the tagging model
Allow for time and budget to tweak the style sheets and
CMS tools