The new version provides new features that facilitate and improve the way you create, edit, and publish DITA. These are the highlights of the features that you’ll find in DITAToo 1.7:

• DITAToo FrameMaker Connector is now provided as a part of the standard DITAToo installation. The installation wizard now asks you whether you want to install the connector, and if you are using FrameMaker 11 as your DITA editor, you can choose to install it together with DITAToo.
  
  
• Control how DITAToo generates the file name of a new topic. You can now specify how you want DITAToo to generate a file name for the new topic. You can make the file name to be the same as the topic title or the same as the topic ID. Alternatively, you can enter the file name manually.
  
  
• Specify templates for creating new specialized topics. If you created your own specializations, you can specify the template to be used, and DITAToo will create a new topic based on this template.
  
  
• Specify an additional DITA editor. You can now specify a plain text editor if you want to modify directly the XML source of a topic or map.
  
  
• Open a project in a DITA Editor.  Earlier versions of DITAToo did not allow you to open a project in a DITA editor. You had to download the entire project to your local drive first. Starting from version 1.7, you can open a project for editing in a DITA editor specified in DITAToo in the same way as you open a topic for editing.
  
  
• Open a topic in read-only mode.  Starting from version 1.7, you can select from the context menu whether you want to open the topic for editing (in this case, DITAToo checks out the topic) or open it in read-only mode. In the latter case, DITAToo does not check out the topic.
  
  
• Specifying advanced publishing parameters, like allocating additional memory for DITA OT, or using a custom XSL stylesheet for HTML output, in the publishing templates.

We’ve recorded a short video that guides you through these features:

Watch What’s New In DITAToo DITA CMS 1.7 from DITAToo in High Definition on Vimeo.

NOTE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS: If you purchased DITAToo directly from us, then in the next few days, you’ll receive from us an email that explains how to upgrade to DITAToo 1.7. If you bought DITAToo from one of our resellers/implementation partners, they will be in touch with you shortly.

Pavel Shulga, our CTO, has demonstrated how a combination of FrameMaker and DITAToo can give you an out-of-the-box integrated solution for authoring, publishing, and managing DITA content.

Pavel started with taking a Word document full of manual formatting and showed how DITAToo can convert this document to a standard valid DITA automatically in a matter of seconds.

Then Pavel showed how you can access the DITAToo content repository from within FrameMaker and work with the files. Attendees could see how to check-out and update DITA topics using FrameMaker, add images stored both in the DITAToo repository and on a local drive, add individual topics to the repository, create a new map from the topics stored in the repository, and publish the map to PDF – all this without leaving the FrameMaker environment.

Finally, Pavel demonstrated a “where used” feature which is very popular among DITA users. This feature lets you see where each topic is reused. In other words, you can see which maps and other topics are referencing to the topic in question. It’s very useful when you want to update a topic and want to understand how the change affects other content.

Then we had a Question and Answer session where Pavel answered the questions asked by attendees.

Click here to watch the recording.

Thanks very much to all who attended the webniar! Our special thanks go to Maxwell Hoffmann, a product evangelist at Adobe, who organized and hosted this amazing event.

For more information about DITAToo, please check out the official DITAToo DITA CMS website.

With our new DITAToo-FrameMaker connector, you can access the DITAToo content repository and work with the files directly from within the FrameMaker user interface. This gives you an out-of-the-box integrated solution where you use FrameMaker for DITA authoring and publishing and DITAToo for managing DITA.

It’s now time to show you how this integration works! Together with Adobe, the developer of FrameMaker, we are doing a webinar to demonstrate you how FrameMaker and DITAToo are integrated into a complete solution for authoring, publishing, and managing DITA.

Join us on Tuesday, April 16, at 9:00 am PDT and, among other things, you’ll see how to:

• Automatically convert an MS Word document to DITA and upload the converted content to the DITAToo content repository
• Access the DITAToo content repository from within Adobe FrameMaker
• Move and rename files and folders in the DITAToo content repository and let DITAToo automatically update cross-references
• Create new DITA topics and update existing topics in the DITAToo content repository using FrameMaker
• Publish and manage conditional content variations

The registration is now open. To register, please click here.

See you online!

Thanks to the FrameMaker connector that we’ve built, FrameMaker users can now access the DITAToo content repository and work with the files directly from within the FrameMaker user interface. In fact, DITAToo with the FrameMaker connector give you an out-of-the-box integrated solution where you use FrameMaker for DITA authoring and publishing and DITAToo for managing DITA.

We are now preparing a joint webinar with Adobe to show you how the DITAToo FrameMaker connector works. The registration to the webinar will be opened in the next few days. Meanwhile, I want to share with you a few screenshots so you can get an idea of how it works.

First of all, in the FrameMaker’s menu, you go to CMS > Connection Manager. This is where you set up a connection to the DITAToo repository (I faded out the IP address of the server for security reasons):

Once the connection is established, you can browse the DITAToo content repository in the Repository Manager pane:

You can right click on a topic and use commands in the context menu:

You can open a topic for editing and then, after you finished doing modifications, you can check in the topic back to the repository:

By the way, link management works with the FrameMaker connector exactly in the same way as it works in DITAToo itself. This means that whenever you move or rename a file (you can do it in the Repository Manager pane) or a folder, all cross-references are updated automatically.

We’ll be showing these and other features at our joint webinar with Adobe. Like I said, the registration will be announced soon so stay tuned!

For more information about DITAToo, see the official DITAToo DITA CMS website.

Then join us for a free webinar on DITAToo DITA CMS organized by STC-India Chapter. The webinar is conducted by Intuillion Ltd, the developer of DITAToo, and Metapercept Information Solutions & Consulting.

During this Webinar, we will guide you through the process of creating, managing, and publishing DITA content. We’ll show you how you can create DITA content using Oxygen XML editor and then manage this content using DITAToo DITA CMS.

DITAToo DITA CMS is an excellent light-weight content management system that can help you effectively manage and publish DITA content and automate many DITA-related tasks.

We’ll show you how to:

• Automatically convert an MS Word document to DITA
• Author content in Oxygen XML editor and upload the content to DITAToo DITA CMS
• Automatically manage links between DITA topics, DITA maps, and other relevant files
• Arrange DITA topics into DITA maps using DITAToo
• Produce various output formats from the DITA source
• Filter conditional content to publish customized documentation
• Manage versions of DITA topics, DITA maps, and other files stored in the content repository
• …and much more!

The presenters are Alex Masycheff, CEO of Intuillion Ltd., and Amit Siddhartha, Proprietor at Metapercept Information Solutions & Consulting.

The webinar will take place on Thursday, April 4, 2013 at 2:00 PM India time.

So hurry up! Registrations are open from Friday, March 22, 2013 till Monday, April 1, 2013. To register, please click here.

Looking forward to seeing you online!

This year, as a part of pre-conference master classes, we’ll be conducting a full day workshop for those of you who have a zero experience with DITA, but want to get started quickly.

We called it “DITA in One Day”. This is an intensive full-day workshop packed with practical information and valuable advices that you can start using right away. By the end of the training day, you’ll be able to author and publish DITA content, as well as implement basic single-sourcing techniques in DITA.

But you get not just the knowledge. Together with Syncro Soft, the developer of Oxygen XML Editor, we’ve prepared an amazing offer that lets you immediately start using the concepts you learned.

Each attendee of the “DITA in One Day” workshop receives a FREE DITA tool package that includes:

• Free 6-month subscription for Oxygen DITA editor (value of $199)
• DITAToo DITA CMS with a free 6-month maintenance plan (value of $950)

You can find a detailed syllabus of the workshop here.

The workshop will take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on Wednesday, June 12, 2013 (the day before the Information Energy 2013 conference starts). The cost is 395 euro per attendee.

To register, go here and register for “Master Class DITA in One Day, June 12″. Your free DITA tool package with Oxygen XML Editor and DITAToo DITA CMS is waiting for you!

In early February, Keith Schengili-Roberts, the author of the DITAWriter blog, updated his list of DITA output samples. You can see it here to get an idea of what you can achieve. Publishing tools used to generate these outputs are not specified, but my guess is that different publishing engines were involved. Maybe it was DITA OT, DITA for Publishers, DITA2Go, and FrameMaker (for PDF).

DITAToo DITA CMS also gives you various possibilities of how you can publish DITA. One option is to use DITAToo’s integration with DITA OT. In this case, not only you can publish to any of the formats supported by DITA OT, but you can also apply your own DITA OT’s customization folders. The screenshot below shows how you can select a customization folder to be applied for the PDF output.

A good thing is that DITAToo DITA CMS doesn’t impose any special requirements on how you should build your DITA OT’s customizations.  In other words, you just create a customization as usual, point DITAToo to the customization folder, and DITAToo will do the rest.

By the way, in the upcoming release of DITAToo we are planning to let users easily specify additional settings, like memory allocation, for publishing via DITA OT.

Another possibility is to download the files to a local computer and then use a third party publishing engine, like FrameMaker or WebWorks ePublisher. In this case, DITAToo DITA CMS not only download all the required files, but it also convert publishing profiles to standard .ditaval files that you can also use to filter conditional content when publishing. This screenshot shows how you can specify a location where the files should be downloaded and select the publishing profiles you want to use:

Those DITAToo users who have FrameMaer as a DITA authoring tool especially like this feature. It allows them to set up a publishing template for the PDF output in FrameMaker (modifying EDDs and templates instead of tweaking DITA OT), retrieve the files from DITAToo DITA CMS, and let FrameMaker do the rest.

For more information about DITAToo, see the official website of DITAToo DITA CMS.

We want to thank everyone who participated in the survey and shared experience with converting legacy content to DITA. We believe that the answers you gave and the comments you posted can help everyone who is still in the conversion process or is just planning to move to DITA.

The survey is now done, and today we are happy to share with you the results. You can download a complete report here.

Here are some highlights.

Legacy Content Format

First of all, we asked our respondents in what format their legacy content is stored (multiple answers could be selected).

The State of the Legacy Documentation

Almost any conversion from unstructured formats is based on styles. As long as legacy documents are styled consistently and no manual formatting is applied, there is a good chance that the conversion will be fairly smooth.

To understand if the legacy content is consistently formatted, we asked our respondents to choose the statement that best describes their situation.

Restructuring and Rewriting Legacy Content

In rare cases, conversion to DITA involves just wrapping existing documents to DITA elements. Quite often, legacy documents have to be rewritten or restructured to fit DITA requirements in terms of content organization and writing principles. We asked our respondents to select the statement that best describes their situation.

Challenges

To understand whether the conversion was smooth or painful, we asked our respondents about challenges they faced (multiple answers could be selected).

Conversion Tools

Conversion needs tools, and we asked our respondents about the tools they used (multiple answers could be selected).

What If…

There is always “what if” in such cases. So we asked our respondents if they would do the conversion now, when they already know all pitfalls and issues, what they would do differently (multiple answers could be selected).

For a complete report, including answers to the rest of the questions and comments that our respondents posted, please download the report here.

During the webinar we briefly talked about key DITA concepts and then did a live demo of DITAToo. We focused at some DITAToo’s key capabilities, including:

• Automatic conversion of a Word document (which was completely unstyled and full of manual formatting, by the way) tom DITA
• Uploading an existing DITA map from a local computer to DITAToo
• Automatic update of all links when files and folders are being moved and renamed
• Metadata-based search
• Arranging topics to maps
• Publishing, including filtering conditional content and using publishing profiles
• Translation management
• Version control

The recording of this webinar is now available to everyone. You can watch it online (no need to download anything) right here:
 

00:00:00 – approx. 00:15:50: Brief introduction to DITA (Amit Siddhartha, Metapercept Information Solutions)
00:15:50 – till the end: DITAToo DITA CMS live demo (Alex Masycheff, DITAToo)

To learn more about DITAToo and request a free evaluation copy, please visit the DITAToo website.

We asked our respondents about tools they used to convert legacy content to DITA. The answers split between:

• FrameMaker conversion tables: 37.2%
• A home-grown tool: 37.2%
• We don’t know. The service was (or is) provided by an external consultant as a “black box”: we just provided the legacy content and received DITA: 23.3%
• Mif2Go: 25.6%
• Stilo: 9.3%

The chart below demonstrates the results.

We also asked people what would they do differently if they would do the conversion now, when they already know all pitfalls and issues. You’ll see the numbers in our final report, but let me share with you some comments that the respondents left:

“Allocate resources and time for analyzing the content and developing the target information architecture and reuse model. Then develop the conversion process to match that target model.”

“Invest more time on data modelling/analysis”

“Costs are regularly underestimated because the problems grow as you get into the details of the content”

“More test runs to catch all the gotcha’s before the global conversion.”

“I think we go the same basic route.”

“None. We were aware of most of the pitfalls going into the conversion.”

If you still haven’t participated in the survey, then this is your last chance! Please click here and share your experience with us.

After it’s done, we’ll summarize the results and make them available for the community.

Stay tuned!