I am immensely excited to announce that we are now taking our annual European conference, the SDL Summit, on tour to Amsterdam this year. As a relatively new resident of the city, I am delighted to help bring our 3rd SDL Summit to the beautiful 17th century Koepelperk building at the Renaissance hotel in central Amsterdam on 22 May. We will be welcoming a community of different organizations, speakers and SDL experts, all eager to discuss this year's theme of 'Bringing Technical Information to Life'. Registration is open and free of charge!

I just got pinged by my boss about this issue.  It appears there are a lot of people trying to figure out how to justify the time, money, and effort they'll need to expend in order to go with a structured content development solution.  Here's a suggestion – and I used this approach many times at Boeing Corporate headquarters where I worked for many years – include the following in your proposal:

• Return On Investment (ROI) is critical since it's the bottom line.  Money talks, and it speaks with a really loud voice, so find some numbers to show what you're spending now, what it's going to take to get you to the next level, and what your expected costs will be when you start using your projected solution.  There may be no hard and fast numbers available anywhere, so in many cases, you'll have to predict what you think the ROI will be. This webinar has a good overview of how to build a business case for S1000D

It's a common question these days for people new to the structured content development paradigm/tech publications world.  Here's the simple answer:

• If you have to do a lot of parts related tracking and also integrate with servicing related information, go S1000D.  It's really the only thing out there with the muscle to get the job done. (by the way, you may be required to go S1000D by a government agency – so that makes the decision easy)
• If you need to run a website full of all sorts of different kinds of information – that generally does NOT require keeping track of a lot of parts and what they fit into – then go with DITA.

Yeah, it's really that simple.  DITA is incredibly flexible and there are some great tools out there to help make DITA a real workhorse in your business (check out our SDL Trisoft solution).  S1000D, because it's a more prescriptive approach to getting something big done (like documenting aircraft, tanks, trucks, cars, ships, submarines, field hospitals, aircraft carriers, etc) is a bit more challenging, but truthfully, it's a lot easier to implement than DITA. 

Basically S1000D tells you what to do and how to go about doing it – with a fair amount of analysis and design decision points built into the spec known as S1000D Business Rules that make it easier to figure out what to do for your specific situation.  DITA leaves a bit more head scratching since you commonly need to build your own set of schemas (though there are some generic starting point schemas you can pick up, you generally need to do a fair amount of data modeling to get where you want to go).  DITA does have one significant advantage – there are a lot of DITA books out there and a fair amount of available expertise you can get your hands on quickly in order to get started.

If you compare the earlier versions of the two specs, DITA about three or four years ago had a spec about 200 pages long (before you DITA geeks get too excited, yeah, I do know about all the other papers written to go along with the spec, but those don't really count since those were generally about how to build a system to compile the data and identify if you're DITA compliant).  S1000D has been in the 2,700 to 3,000 page realm for nearly six to eight years.  Granted, there are a lot of books on the subject about DITA and basically only the free specification for S1000D on the www.S1000D.org website – there are no available books on S1000D just yet, but I expect there will be soon enough.  Each has a wealth of information for you to plow through.  Each has its challenges.  Each has its faithful followers.

I lean toward S1000D because DITA could learn a lot from S1000D (and has).  DITA faithful have even created S1000D like implementations (isn't imitation the most sincere form of flattery?).  S1000D implementers dream of the flexibility of DITA, but understand why they're locked into the S1000D "standard".  That's another thing that separates DITA from S1000D.  Basically, DITA is a free form do what you want kind of standard, a "here's how you can go about doing it" approach (can I even venture to say it's a "theory Y" approach?).  Where as S1000D is more "if you're going to use it, you must use it this way – OR ELSE!" (I can definitely state it's a "theory X" approach – but sometimes that's a really nice way to make things happen)  That's what really separates the two specifications.  So, if you need a prescriptive approach, go S1000D.  If you want to make a lot of tailored and unique data models, then go DITA.

I was struck this morning by the technological change we're going through in the documentation industry.  New standards, new methods of doing business, software and hardware capabilities, and how best business practices merge together in documentation standards to produce more usable information in a timely and cost effective manner.  It may not seem all that important to you today, but it is a radical departure from what we had to do in order to put men on the moon back in the sixties.

I had the pleasure of seeing a fantastic story from Dell at this year's SDL Innovate conference, presented by MaryLee Grant. Here's the lowdown of the story...

Dell met their Return on Investment (ROI) goals in less a year by migrating to structured content using DITA, SDL Trisoft and SDL Global Authoring Management System (Global AMS), according to MaryLee Grant, Director, Information Development.

We're delighted to announce that we have released the latest version of SDL Xopus 4.3. Our mission is to change the way organizations work with structured content, such as XML and DITA, by continuously simplifying the experience of creating, reviewing and contributing to this content. This latest release is another step towards that mission.

The growing community of SDL Xopus users worldwide can now benefit from the following:

• Support for Google Chrome

Now that Google Chrome is the second most popular browser with an approximate 28% global market share and is continuing to grow both as a consumer browser and within the enterprise, this is a signicant milestone for SDL Xopus and allows us to satisfy the growing demand for online XML editors worldwide.

• New UI and branding

We have designed a new look and feel for the user interface for SDL Xopus, which follows a fresher look and uses a 'carbon' theme. This look and feel now aligns with the SDL Structured Content Technologies suite of products as well as the wider portfolio of SDL technologies. For users who prefer the previous user interface, you can switch back to it. We have also made various improvements to the user experience by moving some of the menu items into more logical locations within the user interface.

• Copy and Paste improvements

The ability to copy and paste content into SDL Xopus from external sources, such as Microsoft Word or HTML content, is a major benefit of SDL Xopus as organizations look to move their content into a structured format and to merge content from different silos within the organization. We have made improvements to how copying and pasting behaves consistently across the multiple browsers we support, as well as improving the way that structured content is pasted into SDL Xopus.

• User experience improvements

We continue to look for ways to improve user experience. In this particular release, our context menu has been changed to include the insert and delete options and we have improve the layout of some of the interface options as a result of customer feedback.

• Performance improvements

As the leading browser-based XML editor, SDL Xopus must continue to improve its speed and capability to support the tens of thousands of users it has worldwide. With every release, we look to improve performance and this release is no exception.

Those are the highlights, there are many other improvements we've made, which you can find here. There's also a demo available of SDL Xopus 4.3.

You can also learn more about SDL Xopus and how it fits within the Product Content Maturity Model in this webinar coming up.

We hope you enjoy working with SDL Xopus!

Improving customer experience is a driving business factor for organizations adopting structured content. Odds are a majority of your customers access content online with the goal of quickly finding specific information to answer a question, solve a problem or learn more about your products.

Help topics can be difficult for customers to find specific information unique to their situation. Generally a user can select help within an application or web site where generic content is displayed. With an exposition of platforms, devices and operating systems not all combinations are covered or too much information is provided. This can lead to confusion, lost time, and a frustrated customer calling a help center to gain assistance.

I'm sure that most technical communicators today would list 'working with subject matter experts' among their top 5 biggest gripes about getting their job done. With departmental silos and colleagues that are 'just too busy' to bother reviewing or contributing to documentation, technical communicators find themselves fighting a battle for people's attention and struggling to convince the SMEs that their input is invaluable to supporting the customer. But that's only half the story. 

How many of you remember the robot B-9?  (by the way, it's pronounced "benign" for those of you who missed the pun).  Remember how he nearly kills the people on the space ship because of the evil doctor who reprograms him?  That's kind of what I'm seeing out there in technical publications land at the moment.  "DANGER, DANGER Will Robinson!" Scary at first glance.  Hilarious after the shock wears off.

I'm seeing a lot of pain in the streets lately due to cut backs in spending across all areas of business and the military.  DO MORE WITH LESS!  IMPROVE QUALITY BUT DON'T SEND ME A BILL!  (imagine B-9 waving his arms and rolling around the set here).  I must assume this is what is getting the technical publications community running around with their arms in the air screaming for Will Robinson to shoot the vegetables chasing after them (a little joke for you Lost in Space fans who remember the final season).

There really is a solution to all this though.  For the industrial technical publications groups, it's S1000D.  For solutions that don't require the heavy lifting power of S1000D, it's DITA.  Really, these two standards can make life a whole lot easier.  Both are proven to make life better in tech pubs land.  They address "structured content development".  If you didn't get the memo lately about XML being a great foundation for structured content development, I can understand – what with your arms in the air and running around screaming to be saved - it can be hard to hear or read anything when you're in that condition.

If you haven't had a chance to study S1000D, there are plenty of resources out there now to bring you up to speed. This video gives you a good overview:

There are plenty of resources on DITA too.  There are documented cases of 50% cost reductions when S1000D is adopted.  More if an eye towards recycling of content for later projects is also added into the design.

If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to know what's out there so you can make intelligent decisions for new projects.  Or maybe you have an older project that needs to grow legs and stretch a whole lot.

If your project is within 5 years of shutting down, then S1000D is probably not worth the effort.  However, if you are running around with vegetables chasing you, I seriously suggest you find a cave to hide in and crack open the S1000D specification (after all, it's free and available from the web at www.s1000d.org).  Sorry, there are no instructions in the spec to build a laser gun or particle beam weapon to nuke the vegetables, but you sure as heck could document how to use a laser gun and do maintenance and repair on it.

Just a few moments ago, our very own Chip Gettinger chatted with Amber Swope of DITA Strategies on one of our most successful DITA webinars ever - we had over 240 attendees. It seems the hunger for learning about DITA best practises and the future trends for strutured content will continue to grow through 2012. We certainly hope so.

If you missed it, don't fret - the recording will be available on our website as soon as possible. And here are some highlights of what our two 'gurus' discussed today, as well as some of the great questions asked.

• The Product Content Maturity Model and the DITA Maturity Model
  • You don't have to mature your DITA usage in any exact order. If you're particularly spry, you can take on more than one step at a time.
• Searching for content to reuse
  • Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should (such as reusing entire maps)
• Implementing a Component Content Management System
  • You can only reuse content that you can find. CCMS makes content easy to find.
• Intelligent sharing of content
  • Focus on content that is already designed for reuse, such as a glossary.
• Complex versioning
  • The classic use case for complex versioning is product name changes due to updated releases, re-branding, or concurrent releases
  • Keep referencing simple
  • Start small and build up over time
• Refining content models
  • Customize your authoring environment to show only supported elements by implementing DITA 1.2 constraints
  • Optimize for localization
  • Take a step back from the printed visual representation and think about what existing visual queues mean
• Provide authoring templates and automation
  • Provide boilerplate examples to get your writers started
  • Automate publishing!

With such a large group of attendees hungry to learn, there were a lot of questions for Chip and Amber. Here are some of the ones that we thought you might like to read. You can comment on this post if you want to ask any more and we'll answer them as soon as possible.

Q.) What is an example of a Component Content Management System?
A.) SDL Trisoft is an excellent example. With its unique baseline capability, support for conditions and variables, and integrations with popular desktop editors such as XMetal and FrameMaker 

Q.) Should authors recommend content for reuse?
A.) Yes, absolutely. One major benefit to deploying DITA within the organization is making writers more efficient, and by recommending reusable content they can participate in making their job easier. 

Q.) Is taxonomy a prerequisite for DITA?
A.) Actually, no. Metadata is important for reuse, and DITA 1.2 introduces a mechanism for capturing a taxonomy. However, taxonomy implementation typically doesn't materialize until the 3rd or 4th stage of DITA maturity.

Q.) What authoring tools are commonly used by SDL Trisoft customers?
A.) SDL Trisoft supports SDL Xopus, an exciting browser-based editor for any contributors (even the casual ones) within your organization. Additionally, SDL Trisoft integrates with JustSystems XMetal, PTC Arbortext, and Adobe FrameMaker.

Q.) How can we improve our review process, bringing in reviewers across the enterprise?

A.) This is a very pertinent question for 2012 and the future of structured content management. One that many organisations are asking themselves as they look to bring subject matter experts into the workflow but without putting a burden on the publishing process. One way to facilitate the review process is to reduce the complexity of authoring by allowing reviewers to access structured content for review without having to understand XML or the tools that are designed for XML. SDL Xopus is designed for such a scenario, as an online XML editor for non-technical authors and reviewers.

Q.) Where do we find the DITA 1.2 constraint mechanism?

A.) Look in the DITA 1.2 specification for the basics and search online for resources, such as tutorials on applying constraints.

We'll be updating this post as new questions come in. Thanks for attending!