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Subject: Keith's Notes from the Seattle DITA Listening Session
Here are my notes from the Seattle session earlier this week. Am hoping Scott will make additions/changes/corrections as needed:
Seattle DITA Listening Session
January 24, 2017 In attendance:
Scott Hudson (Jeppeson), Anthony Apodaca (XEditor), Tracy Baker (F5 Networks), Clarissa Feist (Amazon) Virtually: Joe Storbeck (JANA), Kathy Madison (ComTech), Kim Wickens (Paccar), Keith Schengili-Roberts (IXIASOFT) Scott Hudson (Jeppeson)
- works at a large company (Boeing) but DITA is only used within small pockets in the company; there are 3 groups of maybe 3-4 people apiece who work with it, along with a few others who do their work using an older version of the DITA OT - the language of aviation is English, so not a lot of content is being translated on the Boeing side, but on the Jeppeson side they work with pilots and have recently translated some content to Simplified Chinese; this will likely be followed by audiences for South America, and will likely see more for this going forward - work mainly with DITA 1.1 and some DITA 1.2; one group is looking to do DITA 1.3 at Boeing; Jeppeson works in DITA 1.3 - using oXygen 18.1 - Boeing is using DITA OT 1.8; Jeppeson is using 2.3, but hopes to move to a more recent version shortly - content management is more of an issue, Jeppeson is using Subversion; Boeing is using an in-house CMS built on top of Alfresco, as they use S1000D as well - what's worked well: biggest win in moving from unstructured frame to DITA, topic-based content is great for the audience of pilots who need info in a just-in-time environment - Scott has spent a lot of time bringing people up to speed in terms of DITA training - keyscopes are often over the heads of writers; if he can get them to use conrefs / keys it is useful - would like to see some help in terms of change management; what are the key use cases and set the business cases to help drive change that he can take to upper management? - would also like to have more get-togethers with other DITA users to share the knowledge, perhaps also work more from the STC - later mentioned that they spent 6 months in meetings to create and then implement Schematron rules that are used Tracy Baker (tools and technologist at F5 Networks)
- been using DITA for 10 years - starting in 2008 helped company move from Frame to structured authoring environment (DITA) - "have to get rid of book brain" in the writers; also mentioned that it is easier for younger/new writers to work natively in DITA than those with experience in non-structured “book building” - no translation except for some hardware that has to be translated into Simplified Chinese - two years since they first started publishing in DITA, took 5 1/2 years to fully convert over to DITA/XML; flagshop product has 140 deliverables; old Perforce repository had 180,000 objects in it so they had a large volume to work with - currently using DITA 1.2, and a very old version of the toolkit as the CCMS they are using has not kept pace - have 35 writers total plus a few managers and are globally dispersed; with people in San Jose, Boulder, Tel Aviv, etc. - mainly document hardware and software - has been an oXygen user for 15 years - all publication outputs used to be handled on her laptop at one time ;) - is concerned that DITA doesn’t move fast enough, and feels like it is now falling behind; did not know how to change this - moving into XML has worked well, particularly in terms of reuse and selling componentized content, mostly built from conrefs - it is now easy to work with the marketing people, in that her team can easily gather info and package it up for them - tools are expensive - she does all of the training for the team; this is expensive and it means she is not planning for the future - DITA Users List on Yahoo is her lifeline; there's not much in the way of a DITA community here in Seattle - she is willing to put herself out there and pay it forward - they chose not to specialize as she didn't want to stray from the specification; there are times when she would like to constrain things but she doesn’t have the time - even if we could just templatize things that would be helpful - not using L&T; have a large Training Group and they paled when they looked at DITA as they are not technical writers; currently they reverse-engineer the PDFs her group puts out for their own purposes - learning the technology has a steep learning curve - is aware of Markdown - there is a parallel XHTML and Markdown documentation process which by-passes DITA; for those using this process it is currently not cost-effective at the moment to bring DITA into the picture - would like to round-trip to Confluence wiki - frustrated by having PDF as default output tool as people still review based on style - is hoping that DITA 2.0 will better handle the needs for documenting software code Clarissa Feist - Sr. Information Systems Architect, Customer Service Global Knowledge Management at Amazon - recently moved to digital device team - have about 150-200 writers around the world - produce help for the various retail sites in 12-20+ languages - publications are help, which are published to the retail site, apps like Alexa, - migrated help from HTML to DITA which was comprised of thousands of help pages; this took about a year to accomplish - are using an older version of DITA (1.1) - with migration to DITA were able to reduce time to launch from months to often the same day; now do simultaneous ship in various languages - use in-house publishing tools to publish the online help - are using an old version of the SDL CCMS - don’t have a lot of communication between the teams, so having a set workflow is not a strong requirement - what's proven to be expensive are the third-party tools - have had to implement lots of workarounds; many people started out not as tech writers but support people who only knew HTML - not using constraints; she is the only IA for (external, customer-facing) help and they have another one for internal help - currently use an old version of XMetaL for authoring - would like to see new ways to move away from static help and move to string-based material for more conversational purposes, have thousands of strings that does not fit into a DITA architecture - customers are less and less inclined to wade through the help pages, so customers are beginning to skip our content - would also like to see more of an associative metadata model, in order to apply it in bulk after the content has been published - need little pieces of DITA for the conversational format; full DITA topics are too heavy for what they would like - we are planning to migrate to DITA 1.3 later this year; while we like the troubleshooting topic, want something more dynamic and conversational - DITA doesn’t map very well to conversations - one element request: in a code block there is no way to highlight what needs to change from one example to another; code highlighting would be a great addition Kim Wickens - Knowledge Management Manager at Paccar - just getting into DITA in her group, though other divisions in her firm have been using DITA for a while - for our engines we have to submit a 2,600 page document to regulatory agencies in North America and Europe - her team also writes tech docs for the software that monitor emissions - big challenge is finding people with experience DITA, XSL, Information Architecture; it is hard to find people in Seattle who have actually worked with DITA: “now I look for people who I can train and who are open to learn” - she and one other person are learning DITA right now, plus some people in the Netherlands location - group that is currently using IXIASOFT is in another division - since we don't have a lot of experienced DITA writers, we will be leaning on content contributors to use the DITA CMS - not planning to use any translations - their current CCMS uses DITA 1.2 but they want to use DITA 1.3 so that they can incorporate MathML - “unfortunately” will be heavily specializing due to their table data needing to be semantically marked up - content reuse is at the element level rather than the topic level - what would she like to see added to DITA? Would like to see a running change / diff to content added - are currently using oXygen 18 - would like to see a local DITA user group, would be nice if the local STC got more involved in that DITA Usage Survey: DITA 1.1 = 2 DITA 1.2 = 1 DITA 1.3 = 2 Specializations = 2 Constraints = 2 want to, 1 (Jeppeson) has ("would love to", "writers get overwhelmed by the [tagging] possibilities" "the job of being a writer using DITA is not easy") Filtering = 3; also use otherprops a lot; want to be able to categorize and label the filters more easily Branch filtering = no, one using SDL condition model? OR filtering needed (current is include/exclude) Content libraries (conref/keyref libraries) = 2 are, 3 plan to Keys = 2, 3 planning to Troubleshooting = 1 yes, 1 plan, 3 no Release management = 1 yes, 3 plan (internally), 1 no MathML = 1 yes, 4 no Translation = 2 yes, 2 no Linking videos = 2 (hack/workaround), 3 (no) Learning and Training = 3 no, 1 maybe, 1 yes Machinery task = 5 no Hazard statement = 2 yes, 3 no Highlight element constraints = 1 yes, 1 would like to, 3 no Separate DITA vocabulary release schedule? = 5 DITA 4 Publishers = 2 aware (none in production), 3 no Dynamic Publishing = 2 researching …
Cheers! -
Keith Schengili-Roberts
Market Researcher and DITA Evangelist
IXIASOFT
825 Querbes, Suite 200, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H2V 3X1
tel + 1 514
279-4942 / toll free + 1 877 279-4942
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