Testsystems, Technical Communication and ePublishing

2008-02-05
tekom Regional Conference: Great interest for DITA

Almost 20 interested guests came to the tekom Regional Conference in SYSTEC’s training center in order to exchange their experience with DITA.

DITA-specialist Georg Eck introduced the guests into the world of DITA. His presentation was easily understandable, yet it covered a wide range of information.
To begin with, the SYSTEC CEO Georg Eck introduced the DITA building blocks -’topics’, then he showed how to efficiently structure a DITA document. He also broached the issue of tools for processing DITA data explaining their strenghts and weaknesses.
Finally, Georg Eck discussed the question with the audience how to manage and organize DITA data best: file-based or in a Content Management System (CMS). Georg Eck voted for a CMS such as Contenta or Schema ST4: "This allows the DITA user to publish quickly and easily directly in print- and OnlineHelp formats." In this case, the editor could focus completely on the content while the CMS would control the production.

The Adobe Certified Expert gave a lot of useful tipps: "If you want to start through with DITA right away, I would recommend our DITA/3D Cookbook." The booklet includes the most important information on DITA and a step-by-step user guide. "All DITA Cookbook files are included, this means that you only need to change the logo and address and your DITA documentation is ready."

The presentation did not spare the critical points of DITA: "Of course there are quite high costs when introducing DITA and a CMS.” But on the other hand, there are many advantages. "One of our customers was able to reduce the volume of its documentation in several languages from origianally 1800 to 700 pages thanks to DITA. This saves an enormous amount of costs." As soon as a documentation is in DITA format, the maintenance and translation efforts can be reduced considerably. Especially the reusability of information increases remarkably. “The original investment of our customer paid off already in less than one year.“

Georg Eck’s arguments pro DITA were not without effect. Wolfgang Gärtner, the representative of the tekom Regional Group certainly spoke for the whole audience when saying “I guess it’s time that I start working with DITA, too.”

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