Latest Ixiasoft's DITA CMS Improves Search and Usability

By David Roe | Published Aug 20, 2009

Montreal-based Ixiasoft (news, site) has just announced the general availability of the new version of its DITA content management system. Version 2.6 comes with several enhancements to v2.1 released in October 2008, when Ixiasoft added two new important features: the CMS Project Manager and the DITA Map Editor.

This time around, they have focused on improving search and search results interface, as well as strengthening the relationship map editor and overall CMS usability.

DITA For Beginners

Just quickly, for those who haven’t been paying attention: DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard that breaks content into small bundles of information that can be used and re-used at will across a company.

DITA is made up of maps and topics. Maps are like tables of content that link to topics in the sequence they are to be displayed in documents. An XML-based architecture, it was introduced in 2001. In 2005, it was ratified as an OASIS standard and is becoming increasingly popular in the creation of all kinds of documents.

Thing about DITA now is that whether you want to or not these days, you’re going to have to get to terms with it, as it's popping up everywhere.

DITA-Based CMS

Ixiasoft has been doing DITA since the beginning of 2001, offering a number of standard global content management features. They include:

Out-of-the-box authoring through integration with a number of XML authoring tools such as XMetal, or Oxygen.
Localization capabilities that enable concurrent authoring and mapping of global content, as it is UNICODE compliant and enables organizations to support any language.
Numerous content management features, such as:

                     1.Version control
                     2.Link management
                     3.Collaborative review tool (PDF-based)
                     4. Workflow management and task assignment

Multi-format publishing that includes an Output Generator module, which out-of-the-box allows users to publish their content to any format including PDF, HTML, XHTML and Eclipse.

Beefing Up 2.6

With v2.6, there is a number of improvements that will give this CMS a lot of kick and will be particularly attractive to companies with document management needs across international markets.

This is what's new in the latest version:

An enhanced relationship table editor that can create relationships between topics with easy-to-use drag and drop functionality. This also comes with a relationship overview that enables easy system-wide searches.
This is complemented by the enhanced interface for searches, which will list quickly list content as well as where and when it has been used, for easy re-use.
General usability improvements to navigation, drag-and-drop improvements, and increased application loading and use times.

If you’re in the market for a new CMS, you like DITA and all it can do, then this solution could be "the one." After all, Ixiasoft has been doing this from the start and has probably made mistakes most others haven’t come across yet.