Keith's Notes from the Kirkland DITA Listening Session

And here are my notes from the Kirkland session:

Kirkland DITA Listening Session

January 25, 2017

In attendance: Scott Hudson (Jeppeson)

Virtually: Amy Bowman (ServiceNow), Dawn Bunting (ServiceNow), Joe Storbeck (JANA), Joe Zucker (ServiceNow), Kathy Madison (ComTech), Keith Schengili-Roberts (IXIASOFT)

 

Dawn Bunting

- 30 writers plus a tools team plus others who also contribute 

- Joe Zucker is her boss

- what we love about DITA: the ability to write in one place and publish to many; are able to push to the knowledge base, community site, and several other places at once

- currently have about 10K of docs per release, and have 3 releases they work with on a regular basis, so they manage about 35K of DITA content

- more sophistication is better for us; love the ideas of keys, keyscopes, etc.

- not currently doing any translation, though it may happen in the future; are confident that if asked they could do so

- are currently using DITA 1.2, planning to move to 1.3 later this year because we want scoped keys

- she is presenting on DITA NA this April because Dawn Stevens talked to her about scoped keys and she discovered that they had a solid use case for adoption

- we have essentially the same documentation with slight variations for 6 different products, and scoped keys makes this much easier to accomplish and manage

- currently have about 300 ditamaps, with a hierarchy about 5-levels deep, 

- are big fans of oXygen XML, "every time we find something new about the product we found something new and love it even more"

Current toolchain is: oXygen -> Eclipse -> GIT -> Jenkins -> Zoomin (and no CCMS)

- process takes everything our writers have checked in and the next day it is up and available on their staging site for viewing/checking

- Zoomin is their dynamic publishing engine

- DITA makes their lives easier, but we would love for someone to talk to once a month about the challenges; are hoping that DITA Adoption might be able to help us hook up with other people who are not in a CCMS on a regular basis  

- like the open toolchain a lot, as it allows them to work directly with things, and nothing is hidden behind a “proprietary curtain”

- have a challenge with what they called "cross bundle" links, have a heck of a time getting links from one publication to link to another; Scott mentioned that there is a solution for this in DITA 1.3

- search engine optimization: would like to see anything that would help with this; Keith mentioned his efforts in this area, and offered to share his presentation on this subject; Kathy mentioned that as CIDM members that they could watch the recorded version
 of the webinar they did with Keith 

- possible additions for DITA 2.0: would like to be able to put othermeta not just in the prolog but at the block level within a topic in order to point people at particular sections within their own type of online help

- since we are pushing our content to developer sites, many times they or their SMEs want to use special characters is strings such as ampersand or dollar signs; Scott mentioned this is a limitation more with XML in general, and that Schematron might be a solution
 for this 

- would have loved to have had more information on what to do/what not to do when migrating to DITA and using it; feels like she had to dig a lot in order to find out what they needed to know; when you start talking to people who have DITA experience you find
 that there is a wealth of information, and if we could start a movement to provide better pointers to what information is out there or perhaps regular virtual meetings to bring people together.

Joe Zucker

- Jenkins does a build of the content from the repository and then uses the DITA-OT along with Zoomin and  

- next stage for us is linking this up with enhanced personalization, and metadata in the topics to allow us have content consistency across different platforms; Keith mentioned iiRDS metadata

- we need t-shirts that say "We Love DITA" ;)

Survey: 

DITA 1.2 = 1 

DITA 1.2 = planning 

Specializations = no; we talk about it every once in a while, but were warned not to unless we have to (and so far they have not had to); maintenance overhead is primary reasons

Constraints = no, "but we so want to!"; will do so later this year

Filtering = yes

Branch filtering = no, planned

Content libraries = yes, "in our conversion we did not set that up, but within the last 3 months we have started putting that in place. A perfect case of we would have liked to have known that this is how to do this."

Keys = yes, whenever possible (what we conref we would rather use as keys; would like to replace conrefs with keys)

Troubleshooting = planned (sold on it, but not using it yet)

Release management = no, try not to have writers do too much in the prolog; would love to auto-generate release notes though

MathML = no

SVG = no

Translation = no 

Linking videos = yes, but only to external YouTube videos

Learning and Training = no, "it's a bit too heavy for what we need" 

Machinery task = no 

Hazard statement = no 

Highlight element constraints = not constrained, but plan to. Emphasis might be a better a better, more semantically descriptive element.

Separate DITA vocabulary release schedule? = would depend on tools supporting it 

DITA 4 Publishers = no 

Dynamic Publishing = Zoomin 

Lightweight DITA = aware of it, but don't as yet see a use for it

Augmented reality = no 

IoT = no, but should certainly be considered in future DITA development

Have an information model? = yes, 

Use Dynamic Information Model? = no, but maybe?

Resources:

Knew about white paper on that available from OASIS website: Yes

Where do you go for information on translation? = not needed  

Use dita.xml.org = yes

Where do you go for information = OAIS DITA spec, Yahoo group (dita-users), personal networking, oXygen forum, CIDM/Comtech content and conferences

Cheers!

 

-

Keith Schengili-Roberts

Market Researcher and DITA Evangelist

 

IXIASOFT 

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