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RE: Flare or Frame as an intermediary for migrating to DITA?
Subject:RE: Flare or Frame as an intermediary for migrating to DITA? From:"Janoff, Steven" <Steven -dot- Janoff -at- hologic -dot- com> To:Rebecca Officer <Rebecca -dot- Officer -at- alliedtelesis -dot- co -dot- nz>, Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 17 Oct 2014 23:29:08 +0000
Hi Rebecca,
This is *phenomenal* and is *exactly* the kind of information I was looking for. Thank you so much for sharing this.
It is great to know that this is the kind of thing that is being done "in the trenches." (And I'm there too!) 20,000 topics is impressive! I salute you for the work you've done, which sounds like a tremendous accomplishment.
I will follow your advice, and toward that end I will post another note to the group seeking information on available resources that would help me learn structured writing and also how to teach it to my group.
I can't thank you enough for this great summary of your work! Have a fantastic weekend.
Best wishes,
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Rebecca Officer [mailto:Rebecca -dot- Officer -at- alliedtelesis -dot- co -dot- nz]
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2014 5:23 PM
To: Janoff, Steven; Chris Despopoulos; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Flare or Frame as an intermediary for migrating to DITA?
Hi Steven
We're in the process of converting about 20000 topics to DITA from unstructured Frame, so I'm finding this conversation very interesting.
I've got a few thoughts to add.
First, you do need to do information architecture, at least enough to figure out what your structure is going to look like and which DITA elements you're going to use. Depending on what your documentation's like, that may not be a big deal.
Learning structured writing is quite a change, but you're right that it's independent of DITA. If people are still working on the docs you might convert, get them doing structured writing ASAP. It'll make converting those docs much easier.
That said, I'm finding that there are at least two distinct roles in a DITA conversion: developer and author. Two of us are sharing the developer role, and that's complicated as. Between us, we've had to figure out the structure, learn MIF2Go, script various things to fix the files, edit the EDD, figure out how the CCMS works, and figure out publication processes and tools.
The others in the team have just started writing new docs in DITA, and that's much simpler than the development, even though it's a new paradigm. DITA emphasises simplicity, so as writers we're not finding the authoring side as hard a change as I expected. We did get decent training (thanks, Matt Sullivan :-)), and we haven't gone live on the CCMS yet, so we've separated out that from learning DITA authoring. But from a writing point of view, it's pretty good.
Cheers
Rebecca
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