DITA…everyone’s talking about it. It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread! But is it? Sliced bread is great, unless you’re gluten-intolerant. DITA is great, too, unless it’s not for you—and it’s not for everyone. Too many groups commit to making the move to DITA then find the process is more difficult than they imagined, requires resources they don’t have, and is not saving either the time or the money they thought it would.
Before you do the DITA deep dive, you should know the good, the bad, AND the ugly. If you’re deciding whether to make the move to DITA or not, this presentation gives you some things to consider when making that decision. If you’re already committed to making the move, this presentation gives you some pointers on making your journey a little smoother.
Leigh White
Leigh White is a technical communicator with almost 20 years of experience as a content creator, content manager, and production coordinator. One of her primary interests is exploring ways that small technical publication groups can leverage existing tools and improve processes to maximize the reuse of their content, improve their efficiency, increase their offerings, and save their sanity. To accomplish these goals, Leigh advocates that effective technical communicators need to be more than writers; they need to be part programmer, part designer, and part project manager. She is also a devotée of XML and structured documentation and she believes that DITA might just save the world. Her other professional interests include DTD and XSLT design, FrameMaker structured template and EDD design, and relational database design. When she is not parked in front of a computer, Leigh enjoys reading, running, hiking, photography, motorcycles, and a variety of other rather dangerous activities.
