SDL Innovate Conference Buzz

March 10th, 2010 Posted in Conference Buzz, Electronic Publishing, XML/SGML

Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler reports:

The SDL Innovate conference was well attended, with just over 300 participants involved. Presenters from around the globe spoke on structured authoring, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), and component content management. They introduced some very cool global product marketing initiatives as well, including some useful marketing analysis tools that take advantage of both structured and unstructured content to provide a complete view of product marketing and sales.

Mary Laplante of Gilbane Group gave an outstanding presentation that focused on a common problem faced by organizations today: each new information product organizations create (eBooks, iPhone app content, translated documentation) is merely tacked onto the end of an existing inefficient, manual, and error-prone print paradigm-based publishing process.

Mary explained that most organizations are not managing their information assets in the most efficient way possible, and encouraged attendees to break down content silos, adopt content standards, and admit there’s a better way of doing things today—especially in a global marketplace, where every productivity gain can help an organization better serve existing customers and find new markets in which to grow its market share.

XML authoring (in particular, DITA) was another hot topic. The sessions on these topics were always full and audience members came with lots of questions about how to get started, how to handle legacy content, and what to do to ensure projects were a big success. The sessions I attended were solid and chocked full of valuable information, although in one or two sessions, the presenters did share a few tidbits of inaccurate information — usually comparing apples (authoring tools) with oranges (content standards).

For example, one presenter said she couldn’t imagine doing some task in Adobe FrameMaker, but because she had DITA, now she could. This, of course, makes no sense. FrameMaker is a robust authoring tool that can do far more than a traditional editor (including publishing content without having the nightmare of messing with the DITA Open Toolkit) and it supports DITA. But other than these types of missteps (which were really just minor snafus), the DITA presenters told great stories of success about tight timelines in which fairly major projects were accomplished in very brief time frames.