Review process support for DITA content

Hi,

I have been tasked with identifying requirements for a long term solution for a review process that supports SMEs (subject matter experts) and IDs (information developers) to collaborate as content goes through the DITA content creation and evolution process to publish to multiple form factors such as PDF, Eclipsehelp and other formats in the future.

Content is created in many different ways using disparate tools such as Word, Framemaker, Visio, Doxygen etc. by thousands of engineers (who may have a rudimentary awareness of DITA) from a design focus (meaning this product shall have this feature or be designed thusly) and is converted to DITA to become user documentation with a use case focus (do x to make the product do y). This requires robust tools, and methodology that can support the reviewing, adjudicating, editing and publishing process. Although we are using shared review PDF for this currently, the interests of the SMEs are quite different from those of the IDs and putting all comments into a single PDF is not proving very practical (also, some of our PDF documents may be 6000 pages).

We are looking to see if there are better tools, and methods that will ease the burden on the SMEs as well as the IDs. In this regard, I was curious to know if the TC has discussed the following topics:

1. DITA specialization elements that could assist the review process – e.x., comment-status, comment-type, reviewer, comment-date etc.

2. Annotation tools in the marketplace that play well with DITA content that is published as Eclipsehelp

3. Plugin architecture that tool vendors can use to enable a collaborative editing, and reviewing workflow

Regards,

Jayaram

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