DITA vs. Non-Technical Authors: Why and how?

Date: August 11, 2010, 11:00am EDT(GMT -4:00) and 8:00am PDT(GMT-7:00)

Length: 1.5 hours; 45 min presentation time and 45 min Q&A time.

Fee: $75.00
(Free for CIDM members and CMS 2010 conference attendees. See details below.)

Abstract:

DITA comes with many benefits, but creating valid DITA content and getting the right text in the right tags can be hard. Visually oriented authors are less likely to form a mental model of the underlying document structures. This problem is relevant today as DITA specializations like Learning and Training move DITA outside the scope of trained technical writers.

This session will show approaches to have non-technical authors directly write DITA content including improving discovery of available tags, preventing abuse of tags for styling, and promotion of inline tagging.

Enabling business users to create DITA content opens a wide range of new use cases. We will discuss how DITA's typical benefits like content reuse and referencing can be leveraged for compliancy, policy, and marketing materials.

Presenter:

Laurens van den Oever is SDL Director of Structured Authoring Solutions. Before that Laurens was CEO and Co-Founder of Xopus BV. Laurens has over a decade of experience with internet technology and structured content management. With a firm understanding of underlying web technology and the intricacies of XML authoring he lead the success of Xopus resulting in the acquisition by SDL in 2010. Being Dutch, he likes to cover some distance on his bicycle to stay in shape.