Archives for the month "August 2006"

Norman Walsh talks DocBook

Why was Norman Walsh, DobBook guru and chair of the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee, a speaker at the 2006 DITA conference? It was an interesting meeting of the minds, actually. Walsh did some DocBook feature comparison to DITA, noting that different types of content have different structural needs. Rather than adopt an “DocBook versus DITA” [...]

Michael Priestley talks DITA

Michael Priestley, a DITA architect and an IBM representative on the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, talked with IDI about DITA maps after presenting on the topic of DITA specialization. While many of the technicalities went over my head – or perhaps because much of the presentation was more technical than I care to get – [...]

Documentation Director Francis Gambino explains the benefits of content management

On March 24, 2006 at the DITA conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, Frances Gambino, Director of Documentation Services at Information Builders, a New York software company, spoke with IDI’s Rahel Anne Bailie about Information Builders’ experience with content management. Frances explained how her department used content management to conserve resources and increase customer satisfaction. Hear [...]

Scott Abel looks into the future

The Content Wrangler’sScott Abel was at the 2006 DITA conference, and always in motion. Abel was taking in sessions, blogging, and broadcasting as a guest host on the My Technology Lawyer radio program. Scott took a moment from his activities to talk with IDI’s Rahel Anne Bailie about how content management will influence the field [...]

Steve Manning shares highlights of DITA conferernce

Steve Manning of The Rockley Group spoke to IDI about some of his highlights of the DITA conference.  We talked about ways that technical writers use DITA, how it compares to the online help paradigm, and where it differs. Hear Steve Manning talk about content management. – 3.82 MB

Robert Anderson talks about some benefits of DITA

Robert Anderson, Chief Architect of the DITA Open Toolkit and member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, talked with IDI about DITA, its benefits, and the role of specialization. DITA, which revolves around content units called topics, much like in online help, which are re-usable in a “mix and match” way. Additionally, the tags can [...]

Bernard Aschwanden talks about choosing content management tools

Bernard Aschwanden, principal of Toronto’s Publishing Smarter , talks about choosing content management tools and the importance of considering their interoperability. When choosing your XML editor, it’s important that the tool keeps clean XML code so that files can be shared between authors using different tools. The way to handle this is to look to [...]

Frank Gilbane discusses industry trends

Frank Gilbane, organizer of the respected Gilbane Conference and President of the Gilbane Group out of Cambridge, shared his perspective on content management trends to watch. In the conference’s opening keynote panel, a handful of industry analysts were asked to name the top three technologies that content management developers and strategists need to watch for [...]

Seth Gottlieb demystifies authoring in a content management environment

Seth Gottlieb, of Boston’s Optaros Consulting and contributor to CMS Report, took time at the Gilbane conference to talk about some of the facts and fantasies around authoring in a content management environment. Seth discussed the pros and cons of centralized versus decentralized authoring, debunks the myth that authoring in a content management system means [...]

Yermek Okayev talks about content management issues in Kazakhstan

Yermek Okayev, owner of Biko Publishing in Almaty, Kazakhstan, came to the Gilbane conference to find a content management solution and found a community. When Okayev discovered that he’d arrived a day early for the conference, he decided to join the Content Management Professionals Association for their spring summit. As we spoke over the course [...]