DITA Implementation

Among the substantial benefits that DITA can bring to your company are:

  • Effective content reuse
  • Easy content updates
  • Convenient handling of content variations
  • Fast preparation of deliverables
  • Publishing to multiple formats

It does not really matter if you are a lone writer in a company or a part of a documentation team – DITA can be beneficial in both cases. However, getting from the drawing board to implementation is not an easy task. You need to clearly understand how exactly you benefit and what efforts and costs are involved.

How You Benefit

These are some areas in which DITA can make your work more effective:

  • Content reuse: DITA provides a flexible mechanism for reusing content on any level
  • Content variations: DITA enables you to conditionalize content at any level and easily handle complex content variations, which is especially useful when you have several conditional axises
  • Consistency in structuring and formatting: DITA enables you to keep content consistently formatted throughout the entire documentation set
  • Producing multiple formats: from a single source, you can generate multiple formats, including PDF, HTML, and Java Help
  • Translation: DITA provides mechanisms for facilitating the translation process

 Tools You Need

At a very minimum, you need FrameMaker 7.2 or above and the DITA plugin. This combination of tools enables you to author in DITA, filter conditional content, and produce PDF. If you are a FrameMaker user and have a limited budget, it can be a cost-effective solution that allows you to benefit from DITA, even when you are a lone writer in a company. Using FrameMaker as a DITA editor reduces the learning curve and eliminates expenses caused by purchasing new licenses.

If you are an MS Word user, there are tools that let you create DITA content while staying in the MS Word environment.

Alternatively, you can always use native XML editors, such as Arbortext Epic or XMetal, that may give you more flexibility. For these editors, however, you will need a publishing engine that produces outputs, such as PDF, HTML, or Java Help, from the DITA content.

 

Efforts

DITA implementation is a multi-step process that usually involves the following stages:

1. Content strategy development
No new solution can be successfully implemented without a roadmap that defines a variety of aspects, including:

  • How monolithic documents are split into individual topics
  • How content variations are handled
  • How existing content is to be restructured or rewritten
  • Whether and how to customize DITA

2. DITA specialization
DITA provides a flexible mechanism known as specialization that enables adjusting the DITA content model to the structure of your content.

3. Stylesheet development
With DITA, writers are not responsible for formatting. Authors focus on content while look-and-feel, which is defined in separate stylesheets, is applied automatically. Based on the results of content analysis, you need to decide which stylesheet must be built.    

4. Legacy content migration
There is always an amount of existing documentation to be converted to DITA. Because any conversion is style-based, the success of your conversion depends on whether you use styles consistently, avoid ad hoc formatting, and do not practice manual formatting.

5. Training
The biggest issue in implementing DITA is getting people to understand how to write in a structured fashion. For some writers, the move to the guided authoring environment may be difficult. Proper training can make this move smooth and help writers use DITA concepts in the most effective way.

Implementing DITA takes time and patience. However, a properly implemented DITA solution helps you do more within the same time and, thus, justify all your efforts.