Dita News & Articles

The cat’s outta the bag—we’ve got a birthday in the house!

Yesterday JustSystems (news, site), provider of XML and information management technologies, announced that their flagship product has been around for ten whole years.

XMetal is a powerful solution for structured content authoring and collaboration. It can be used as a stand-alone solution or as an integrated application with various content management and publishing systems including EMC's Documentum, IBM's FileNet and Microsoft's SharePoint. Using industry standards including Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), XMetaL enables content creators to create, collaborate, and reuse information that can be repurposed into the languages and formats customers need.

With a little bit going on for everyone, XMetaL boasts user-friendliness and ease of use for the technically challenged as well as powerful features for tech fanboys and fangirls.

"XMetaL has been one of the industry's top choices for the last ten years because customers can easily achieve a measurable return on investment as a result of their XMetaL implementation," said Aaron Deitcher, vice president of North America and EMEA for JustSystems.

Cut yourself a slice of cake, break out the bubbly, and learn more about XMetal here. 

Call it rubber-necking or whatever you want, but when one company buys another company in this business we want to know the details.

Such is the case with the announcement that Pennsylvania based Really Strategies (news, site) has just bought out DocZone (news, site), a Dutch-based SaaS XML content management provider under -- you guessed it -- undisclosed terms.

Ready for more Enterprise Content Management acquistion news? SDL (news, site) has acquired XyEnterprise (news, site) for consideration of US$ 14.7m. The acquistion of XyEnterprise will add deeper xml and component content management capabilities to their global information management solutions.

Just because DITA authoring tools are coming onto the market at the speed of a runaway train, does not necessarily mean that A) companies understand what it is they are actually using, or B) they do not want to understand it.

And it is this segment of the market that the latest publication from Toronto-based content management consultancy the Rockley Group (TRG) is targeting with DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers.

While the authors (Anne Rockley, Steve Manning and Charles Cooper) never claim that the 148-page overview of DITA will make an expert out of you, they do say that it will help answer the $40 million question: Is DITA for you or your company?

Just to put it in perspective: 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 through company- or group- specific information.

An XML-based architecture, it was introduced in 2001. In 2005, it was ratified as an OASIS (news, site) standard and is becoming increasingly popular in the creation of all kinds of documents.

Initial reviews of the book appear to be good, but then they would because they appear on the publisher’s website.

But then that shouldn’t put potential readers off. A quick search across the Web shows just how confusing the subject can be, and anything that can untangle the mess of ‘explanations’ out there should be worth a look.

Download or buy it from publisher on Lulu.com, or flip through a free chapter online before you actually buy.

For MadCap (news, site), it looks like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) initiative is still a go. The company, a software provider with a serious thing for integrated applications of the content management variety, first announced its support of DITA late last year.

This week, MadCap unveiled proof of that support in the form of updated versions of two of their offerings: MadCap Flare 5.0 and MadCap Blaze 2.0. According to the company, the newest versions of Flare and Blaze are” the first authoring software products to support transformation and publishing from the DITA standard—without requiring Java development or third-party toolkits…”

Let’s take a look, shall we?

"We have to know about our customers better because by 2012, it's likely that 75% of the content we interact with will be delivered to us based on what is known about us." says Whit Andrews, Vice President of Enterprise Search at Gartner.

The latest version of SDL Trisoft – Trisoft 3.7 - has just been released, and if the UK-based vendor of this Component Content Management (CCM) system has got it right, then this solution will dramatically increase the speed and quality of targeted technical writing.

Responding to the need of companies to provide customized content to users in their own language and over the web, Trisoft 3.7 has a number of new feature.

With out-of-the-box DITA functionality, this solution gives companies the ability to handle thousands of variations in technical content that can be integrated dynamically and according to customer needs.

It has often been said that necessity is the mother of invention. In current times, with recession depriving many businesses of the barest survival necessity – cash - invention is key to getting through the next 12 months.

In this respect then, the recent announcement from XML and Information Management software vendor JustSystems (news, site) that Keyence Corp, a developer of sensors for factory automation, is to take a 44% stake -- worth US$ 44.7m -- in the Japanese vendor is logical.

The logic in this case being take the money where you can find it.

A new version of an XML and DITA authoring tool that can be used with SharePoint (news, site) has been unveiled by JustSystems (news, site), the Japan-based vendor of enterprise software for information management.

Extending the SharePoint platform, XMetaL Author Enterprise provides an easy-to-use content creation solution that utilizes XML and DITA to manage content more efficiently with an interface that even novices can use.

Another new coupling in the Content Management industry has just been announced. This time it's between IBM (news, site) and Quark, a vendor of publishing software. This partnership, they say, will see the adaptation of XML across entire enterprises by integrating Quark XML Author in the IBM FileNet Content Manager.

This new integration is designed to eliminate existing problems surrounding the creation of enterprise-wide DITA-based XML and allow any user working in Microsoft Word to author content that can be used and reused in multiple channels or formats.

MadCap, a company whose passion is to provide integration solutions for publishing multilingual online content, recently released version 2.0 of their translation and localization tool. MadCap Lingo 2.0 updates expand translation support and facilitate the process.

As promised, the company also added support for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), along with more familiar tools like Microsoft Word. 

XyEnterprise, the creator of the Contenta Content Management System, recently took a bold step and changed the name of their flagship XML product ContentaView. They spoke of concerns centered around a misleading brand title. With the new name of LiveContent, will this XML based information management and delivery system also have new features or enhanced functionality? Or did XyEnterprise simply decide that after nearly three years the name of their product no longer fit with the changing industry?

Bruce Sharpe of JustSystems gave us some great examples on how some businesses are leading the way by using structured content to improve revenues, reduce costs and mitigate risks. Now, he continues that discussion with some approaches to structured content, ones he argues that can drive business efficiencies and profitability.

MadCap Software, a company madly caps-over-heels about integrated applications for content management and delivery, released MadCap Search Optimizer and free MadCap Toolbar.

In addition, the vendor added support for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard to its roadmap in order to provide users with authoring and publishing tools for creating, managing, translating and publishing DITA content.

JustSystems, a Japanese software vendor specializing in XML and information management technologies, announced that XMetaL, the company’s XML-based software for structured authoring and content collaboration, has been selected as a 2008 KMWorld Trend-Setting Product.