DITA—The Emerging Standard Whose Time Has Come

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (better known as DITA) can help documentation groups automate their workflow, achieve reuse of content and deliver that content through multiple delivery channels. When used together with a content management system (CMS), DITA provides efficient coordination of dispersed teams, allows improved authoring support to shorten writing cycles and handles growing volume and complexity of content.

Because DITA is based on standards and is extensible, adopting DITA is a good investment for the future. If your CMS supports DITA as well as other standards or file types, your DITA solution can evolve to accommodate new content and requirements without disruption.

DITA’s strongest reception has been among high-tech companies who provide end users with information on consumer devices, software applications or IT hardware. Adobe, IBM and Sybase are some of the well-known adopters of DITA. However, many others are using DITA for product documentation, delivering online help, Web documentation and paginated information in many formats.

DITA Addresses Key Business Challenges

DITA is ideally suited for communicating technical information in short, self-contained topics. DITA applications vary from company to company, and often from department to department, but the business problems are fundamentally universal:

• Increasing number and complexity of product versions and releases; 
• Expanding product portfolios;
• Time-to-market pressure;
• Global markets, requiring more languages for product information; and
• Multiple distribution channels requiring customized content.

One reason product documentation departments have embraced DITA is because of its topic-oriented, component-based structure. With a CMS, DITA delivers sets of individual topics so that only changed topics need be translated. These translation efficiencies alone can more than justify the investment. Software documentation groups—whose requirements include multiple products, in multiple languages, for multiple partners—have seen tremendous process improvements over traditional methods.

One manufacturer of electronic devices chose DITA for its minimalist approach; DITA’s topic orientation supported and reinforced the best practices they were moving toward. They liked that DITA content could be easily managed in a CMS and processed with automated tools. And they realized a significant savings by sending only modified topics through the translation process.

The Promise of DITA

Content reuse provides not only process efficiencies, but also the ability to produce versions of content tailored to specific audiences or markets. This can be called “verticalization.” One provider of automated business process solutions uses DITA to create customized documentation for its vertical suite of solutions. By creating content in self-contained DITA topics, they extend the value and applicability of the content, while at the same time eliminating redundant content authoring and updates.

XyEnterprise customers have reported savings of 50% to 75% in translation costs and productivity gains, not to mention a substantial reduction in time-to-market for global products when using DITA with a CMS.

DITA also offers the DITA Open Toolkit, tools for processing content for delivery. Perhaps its most attractive feature is the cost—it’s free! The DITA Open Toolkit transforms content into various delivery formats, including online help, Web delivery and PDF. Documents can be published in multiple formats, versions and languages quickly; one company has been able to reduce its publishing cycle from days to just minutes. Product can get to market quicker, and the customized, branded publications create more durable relationships with customers and partners.

Many companies are beginning to plan the specifics of their DITA implementation. The savings in time, money and personnel make DITA a solid business choice. Productivity improvements mean writers and editors spend less time on process and more time on content. And as an open standard whose foundation is based on extensibility, DITA provides investment protection in a scalable solution. The question is not “Why DITA?” but rather “When DITA?”

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