Your Lightweight DITA webinar questions answered by Steve Manning

On Sept 13th, 2017, Precision Content Authoring Solutions Inc. hosted a webinar with special guest Michael Priestley from IBM, one of the original architects of the DITA standard. Michael was joined by Rob Hanna and Steve Manning from Precision Content. Together, they discussed the evolution of Lightweight DITA, the subcommittee’s activities and plans, all with the goal to help you decide whether you should consider adopting DITA or Lightweight DITA. Listen to the recording.

Q&A with Steve Manning

Audience questions not answered on the call have been answered by Steve Manning and compiled here.

Q1: How do you connect the XML content to external properties like Twitter or landing page etc?
A1: Generally, you connect DITA output to a Web CMS. You transform the DITA content into a format that the target can consume and use the target APIs to push the content into the CMS.

Q2: How would lightweight DITA work with a CMS like Sitecore, particularly if that’s all you have and have authority to use?
A2: You transform the DITA content into a format that the target can consume and use the target APIs to push the content. For Web CMS, this typically means transforming the content into HTML files or HTML fragments that get wrapped in full page code by the presentation layer in the WCMS.

Q3: Can we see an example of what lightweight DITA looks like? I understand the concept, but what does it look like?
A3: We will get samples from the mixed lightweight DITA colleagues in our networks and share in an upcoming blog post.

Q4: Steve mentioned earlier about other companies doing Intelligent Content. Can he provide those examples?
A4: Good examples include Nikon, IBM, Microsoft, McAfee. Check out this growing list of companies using DITA.

Q5: Can you provide a list of lightweight DITA vendors?
A5: There are no vendors with specific LW DITA offerings yet. The following vendors, however, are participating on the standards committee:

Fonto Group BV
Adobe Systems
SDL
JustSystems
SDL
IXIASOFT
Bluestream
Precision Content
Boeing
and others.

Q6: So DITA could replace APIs or scripts to share/migrate content between systems?
A6: No. In fact, DITA implementations tend to rely on APIs for moving transformed DITA content into the target systems.

Q7: How likely is it that a DITA implementation will succeed in an organization without any technical writers?
A7: The success or failure of a DITA implementation is dependant on many factors:

Suitability of the tools to the writing skills of the contributors
The degree to which the implementation hides distracting complexity from the contributors
Management commitment.

Q8: I am very familiar with DITA but the company I now work with does not use DITA. Is there a name of the LinkedIn group to search for?
A8: Yes, the DITA Awareness Group on LinkedIn has over 6,800 members and is quite active. There’s also a newly formed Lightweight DITA Group.

These are great resources. And don’t forget to get connected with the presenters: Michael Priestley, Rob Hanna, and Steve Manning.

Resources