RE: [dita-adoption] DITA 1.2 compliant CMS

["Grosso, Paul" <pgrosso@ptc.com>]

I'm not so much asking what DITA compliance means (though
that's a tricky enough question), I'm asking what it means
for a CMS to be DITA compliant.

In short, what does a CMS do--above and beyond what the
authoring/composition tool that is used to work with the
content stored in the CMS does--that could be DITA aware?

I fail to understand what it would mean for a CMS to 
support keyref.  I do not pretend to understand CMS
systems very well, so I may be off base here (and I'd
be happy to be corrected), but I didn't think it was up to 
data bases to resolve references that the editor/composition
system is going to resolve.

I am really over my head here--CMS systems are not at all
in my areas of expertise, so perhaps there are many people 
out there who will know what it means (or should mean) for 
a CMS to be compliant to DITA 1.2, but perhaps there are 
also many like me who don't know, so it would only make
sense if we could explain what it might mean.

Do we have any members of this TC who are--or who have
clients who are--asking for certain DITA-aware features
from a CMS that go beyond what the editor/composition
system handles for you, and if so, what features are they? 

paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joann Hackos [mailto:joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com]
> Sent: Thursday, 2010 September 09 17:01
> To: Grosso, Paul; DITA Adoption TC
> Cc: Nitchie, Chris
> Subject: Re: [dita-adoption] DITA 1.2 compliant CMS
> 
> In all of my recent discussions with CMS vendors, I've asked about
> support
> for DITA 1.2. The answer I've most frequently received is "We're
> studying
> the spec and deciding what we can and will implement." We have been
> told
> that a particular CMS, for example, will not have support for keyref
in
> the
> immediate future. Or, that there will not be support for all or
several
> of
> the 1.2 features. Quite clearly, there is work that CMS vendors must
do
> to
> conform to the new 1.2 features that is not simple or obvious.
> 
> We continue to find CMS vendors who claim to be DITA compliant but who
> do
> not support even the most basic functionality. All they do,
apparently,
> is
> import and export DITA files. Nothing happens between the ears. Yet,
> they
> are selling their products as DITA ready.
> 
> So what does DITA compliant then mean? We are, of course, working on
> this
> issue in the TC. Companies ask us how they can write their RFPs so
> ensure
> that they're not being fooled about DITA support in the CMS.
> 
> Is that what we intend by compliance? I think compliance is a much
more
> legalistic term but we do mean that something must be in place to
> support
> DITA satisfactorily.
> 
> JoAnn
> 
> 
> On 9/9/10 9:33 AM, "Paul Grosso" <pgrosso@ptc.com> wrote:
> 
> > Reading our DITA 1.2 Status article at
> > http://www.oasis-
> open.org/committees/download.php/38956/DITA12SpecStatus
> > Update.pdf
> > someone has seen the comment in the second para of the
> > "DITA 1.2 Readiness for Use" section that says that
> > certain CMS vendors have announced upcoming DITA 1.2
> > support and the comment near the bottom of the article
> > urging CMS vendors to move quickly to support DITA 1.2
> > and raised the question of what it means for a CMS to be
> > DITA compliant (much less support DITA 1.2 in particular).
> >
> > I have to admit I didn't think much about these statements
> > when I reviewed this article.  I don't think about CMS's
> > much at all.  They are just data bases to me, and the
> > ability to work with DITA in particular or XML in general
> > rarely has anything to do with the data base, it has to
> > do with the application that knows how to put things into
> > the data base and take it out of the data base.  In our
> > case, that's the Arbortext Editor and CMS adapter front end.
> >
> > In fact, on our "Fact Sheet" wiki page at
> > http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita-adoption/factSheet
> > in the "Support for management of topics within a repository"
> > section I long ago questioned the CMS section there, but we
> > have never discussed my issues with that page.
> >
> > So I'm back to asking what it might mean for a CMS
> > to be DITA 1.2 compliant.
> >
> > paul
> >
> >
> >
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