Group Wellesley Wire

Two notable DITA tutorials have come online recently. In the “getting started” category, the tutorial at http://www.lone-dita.com provides a introductory overview of DITA. It was compiled by a member of a small documentation team as result of their effort (successful, I presume) to deploy DITA. The tutorial is concise, yet surprisingly thorough, covering DITA topic types, maps, conrefs, metadata filtering, and the DITA Open Toolkit.

On the other end of the spectrum, fellow DITA Technical Committee member Eliot Kimber has created a tutorial on the subject of DITA specialization. I often find specialization to be more challenging in practice than in theory, and Eliot’s tutorial is a welcome resource.

The Society for Technical Communication held its 54th annual conference, the STC Summit, in Minneapolis last week. I was a member of the conference program committee, so I bore some responsibility for reviewing proposals in my area (Producing and Publishing Information) and choosing presenters to fill the program.

Overall, I think the conference committee and the STC staff did a great job. Past STC conferences had developed a reputation for serving the beginning to intermediate writer, while ignoring the needs of more advanced technical communicators. This year, the sessions were of much higher average quality than in past years, by predominantly well-known speakers in technical communication and related fields. The Summit included several new features, including topic-specific Institutes, certificate programs, and special vendor-sponsored sessions. For a look at some of the content presented at the Summit, session materials have been made available on the STC Web site.

The conference committee and STC staff took risks. In order to attract higher-quality speakers, registration fees were waived for full presenters. Conference registration fees were raised substantially. However, STC membership voted with their registration forms — the conference drew more than 1400 people, at least 200 more than the organizers expected. Vendors also supported the conference in record numbers, by selling out the exhibit hall.

I think the STC did very well with its 2007 annual conference. The conference committee is already preparing for further improvements in the STC’s 2008 Summit in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Look for the Call for Proposals on the STC Web site later this year.

At last week’s STC Summit, Adobe broke with long-standing corporate policy and demonstrated not-yet-released versions of FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and Captivate. Adobe has asked that the following corporate legalese appear in any mention of the STC Summit demonstrations:

The features presented during the Technology Sneak peak contain proof of concept features and features in the development pipeline. They are not final for the next release however we want to take this opportunity to show the general direction of where we are taking the products.

Unreleased FrameMaker features that Adobe demonstrated at the STC Summit include:

• Unicode
• DITA support
• Flash and 3D support
• Vista Support and docx import
• Track Text Edits
• Attribute based filtering /output
• Import of XML and CSS files
• Conditional Text Enhancements

We are pleased by Adobe’s new corporate openness, especially with respect to its tools for technical communicators. We have been hearing the “FrameMaker is dead” rumors for far too long, and hope that Adobe’s continuing presence at events like the STC Summit helps to put these rumors to rest.

At the STC Summit in Minneapolis last week, I was disappointed that MadCap Software was not yet demonstrating its print-centric product called Blaze (their “FrameMaker alternative”). New development of help authoring tools has been somewhere between slow and non-existent for much of this decade. MadCap Flare has helped to break this stagnation by motivating other help authoring tool vendors to increase their level of innovation. We look forward to seeing the effect of similar pressure on the Adobe FrameMaker development team. Competition is good.

For a tale of how a software project that should have been wildly successful can go awry, read Dreaming in Code by Salon magazine co-founder Scott Rosenberg. This book details the development of Chandler, a next-generation personal information manager (PIM). Chandler was the brainchild of Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3. Chandler was also creator of a highly innovative PIM, Lotus Agenda, nearly 20 years ago. Agenda was a free-form text-based information manager, with the capability to group related pieces of text and parse dates expressed in natural language (like “a week from Wednesday”).

From the start, the Chandler development team had difficulty making architecture, design, and feature decisions. When it did make decisions, it chose badly. For example, the development team eschewed Web technologies for its distributed, scalable, multi-platform application. Instead they chose to use the relatively obscure Python programming language with a multi-platform, and quite buggy, user interface toolkit. The team seemed stymied by minor feature additions, like the capability to support scheduling of bi-weekly events.

During the years spent in shepherding Chandler towards a 1.0 release (it’s currently at version 0.7), technologies like Google Calendar, which may not meet Chandler’s grandiose vision, are nonetheless becoming ubiquitous. If and when it is completed, Chandler will likely have an uphill battle to gain acceptance.