Astoria Software’s Move to DITA: An Interview with Chip Gettinger

In this exclusive interview, we asked Chip Gettinger, VP Services and Sales Support at Astoria Software, an XML content management software vendor, about his company’s experience moving to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Gettinger says of DITA, “It’s all about reducing the time, cost and risk associated with producing content.” Read the interview to learn how Astoria is using DITA to produce software manuals, online help and other deliverables. Download a copy of Calculating the Value of DITA to Your Organization, for tips on how to build a business case for DITA in your organization.

TCW: Chip, tell us a little about yourself.

CG: As VP of Services and Sales Support at Astoria Software I work closely with our sales team, customers and partners to coordinate the successful deployment of the Astoria Content Management System (CMS). I’ve worked with Astoria for over eight years. My education was in publishing and business and I’ve spent my career working in various aspects of this industry in management, sales, product management, training and course development.

TCW: Why did Astoria Software decide to adopt and offer support for DITA?

CG: It’s all about reducing the time, cost and risk associated with producing content. Utilizing an open standard like DITA in concert with the Astoria CMS, we’re able to provide 80 to 90 percent of what customers want from DITA right out of the box, and we recognized the significant and quantifiable return on investment this provides.
By adopting DITA, our Astoria Content Management System customers have an author-centric solution that supports a DITA-based approach to authoring, managing and rendering content. They don’t need to define their DTDs/schemas, style sheets, and XSLTs from scratch. Rather, they can author, review, revise and publish immediately using the DITA standard. They can also implement specializations to get that last 10-20 percent to cover their specific industry requirements.

TCW: What content - deliverables - did you create using DITA?

CG: Astoria adopted DITA internally in 2005 to manage Product User Guides, on-line help files, and internal engineering documents. All are being authored in DITA, collaboratively reviewed using the Astoria CMS and published using the DITA Open Toolkit. We are also in the process of migrating our training materials from PowerPoint to DITA to take advantage of the conditional processing to easily match the materials to various applications configurations.

TCW: Is any of this content available (can I point to it) on the web?

CG: Currently, the Astoria on-line help files are available only within our product applications. We are examining the use of a product knowledge portal for early 2007.

TCW: Did Astoria Software have to specialize (customize) DITA for its purposes? If so, what did you need to specialize and why?

CG: So far, we have not had to specialize DITA for our on-line help nor for our product documentation. Of course, we are a software company and IBM’s original development was designed for software documentation, so the fit is excellent.
For our training materials we have added specializations for a new infotype for a training module as well as some structural specializations to better match the Reusable Learning Object (RLO) concepts.

TCW: What lessons learned can you share with readers about specializing DITA?

CG: Stick with the open standard as much as possible, minimize specializations, and use industry specializations from the public domain when possible. In fact, Astoria is working with several of our industry-leader customers to place their specializations into the OASIS DITA.xml.org collection for public access.

TCW: How many Astoria writers were tasked with creating content using DITA? And, were the writers geographically-dispersed?

CG: About a dozen geographically-dispersed writers participate in our DITA publication process.

TCW: What content management tools did you use to help you manage DITA content and the writers tasked with creating it?

CG: We use—predictably, our Astoria Content Management Platform version 4.7 which includes our new Astoria DITA Map Editor for managing and creating maps. We also use our integration with the DITA Open Toolkit fully integrated with our Astoria menus and dialog boxes, which is frankly much easier to learn than running the Open Toolkit from a command line.

TCW: Did you say Astoria DITA Map Editor? I can’t find any mention of this new tool on your website.

CG: It will officially be announced in our next software release this September. But, since the cat is out of the proverbial bag, let’s just say we’ll be making some pretty interesting announcements in the near future that will have a big impact on the way content is created and managed—including some really useful DITA-specific features—and leave it that. Any more and the marketing folks will have my head on a platter.

TCW: No problem. We don’t want to see you in any more hot water than you already are. But, please let us know when the new DITA features are available, I’m sure our readers will be interested in seeing what your developers have conjured up. Until, then, can you tell us what authoring tools Astoria uses to create DITA content? If so, what versions? And why?

CG: We used PTC Arbortext Editor 5.2 for topic editing and for Map editing and management we use our new, previously mentioned, Astoria DITA Map Editor. This combination of products provided us with an Internet-accessible solution for our entire publication process: authoring, review, management, and publishing.

TCW: I think you may have just leaked some more marketing information. They’re not likely to let you do an interview again if you keep it up. So, let’s get back to safer turf. Did you develop any additional functionality or support for DITA that make creating and managing DITA content faster and easier?

CG: Good question. In addition to standard Arbortext content authoring capabilities, the Astoria CMS integration we developed provides users with access to the repository functions such as browsing and searching for DITA topics with IDs and sub-IDs. Also, we took advantage of the ability to use our “Where Used” menu to identify all the DITA Maps that reference a topic, hrefs, conrefs or other infotypes.

TCW: You know I have to ask the obligatory, “Why didn’t you just use Microsoft Word to create DITA content?” question. So, why not MS Word?

CG: While Word is certainly the most popular document authoring package, it isn’t able to create structured, valid documents with metadata. Over time, we expect that DITA plug-ins to Word will become available and make this a viable strategy for our internal use as well as for our Astoria CMS customers.

TCW: Yes, I know of a few vendors who have already created Word Plug-ins and you’re right, they are saying it is a viable strategy for some content creators. But, they also admit that getting folks to change how they are usedd to working is difficult. You have to be ready to demonstrate the benefits to those who create your content. What benefits did DITA provide Astoria Software over the old way of creating content?

CG: Formerly, we used a proprietary Word-based product for authoring product documentation. Pre-processing and post-processing workarounds were required to produce the desired output. This was costly to maintain and very fragile. Our engineering documents were previously authored using a modified DocBook DTD where we had to maintain both the DTD and style sheets. DITA has flexibility and power “out of the box” that allows us to spend much more time developing quality content (and much less time messing around with the tools we use to create it).

TCW: What “lessons learned” can you share with others interested in considering a move to DITA?

CG: We learned a few things. First, authoring for reuse is different than traditional documentation creation. Each topic must be written as a standalone. Second, traditional cross references don’t work. Instead, you’ll want to learn to use a relationship table in the map. Third, focus on information value, not style or formatting. Delivery devices vary and are configurable by end-users, so don’t focus on line breaks, esthetics, etc. That’s just a big waste of time – and an even bigger waste of money. Finally, keep things brief and use a minimal approach when creating topics.

TCW: What advice can you share with others who are considering DITA, but aren’t sure it’s right for them?

CG: Complete a pilot project of something not on the critical path so you can learn from your assumptions and mistakes. Also, keep specializations to a minimum and focus on creative ways to create Topic Maps.

TCW: Did writers have any difficulties or issues using DITA? If so, what were some of the common ones?

CG: Writers unfamiliar with XML required training to become familiar with total separation of content from style as well as to defocus on presentation. It also took time to determine which DITA elements produced the desired transformation results.

TCW: What challenges did you encounter?

CG: Mostly building acceptance that DITA had the ability to support our requirements without extensive customization. I think that DITA inheritance, a critical feature, took us awhile to fully appreciate. It’s powerful, but it’s not obivious at first.
Also, I’ve seen many standards that required too much customization, thus were branched and so you would lose the ability to easily keep in sync with updates to the original standard.

TCW: Can you think of any content types that would not lend themselves to DITA and why?

CG: Our take is that DITA today is very focused on product based information. This is a good thing because there is so much value and ROI associated with managing product deliverables for configurability, language translation, and frequent updates.
An area we don’t see DITA working today would be with novels or legal transcripts where re-use potential is very low.

TCW: Are there any issues with using DITA for print output?

CG: Quality of the Formatting Objects Processor XSL-FO engine is limited and does not work for very complex pagination and page layouts. This is especially true when you need to match complex composition requirements of your customer – i.e., you have little control over the look and feel of the pages. Astoria has added support for commercial XSL-FO to support these more complex requirements.

TCW: How much content (%) were you able to reuse when you moved it into DITA?

CG: In user documentation, object descriptions and menu commands have heavy reuse. One publication has approximately 315 topics with 667 graphic references and 214 other references. Overall, we achieved about 30-35 percent reuse with our first help file delivery. We are targeting up to 50 percent reuse with future product help file updates.

TCW: Was the content created using DITA also translated?

CG: Not today, for internal Astoria documents. However, for our customers, our translation capabilities are in place, working with our partners in Europe and Asia. Managing the translation process is a big requirement for our customers, and Astoria provides a robust integration with translation memory servers, such as SDL/Trados, as part of our solution. The translation cost savings will accelerate exponentially with DITA.

TCW: Does Astoria Software plan to use DITA for other projects?

CG: Yes, we will use DITA for more engineering documents, product deliverables and marketing requirements documents in the future.

TCW: If you had a DITA wish list, what functionality would you add to DITA and why?

CG: The ability to easily identify text within a topic that becomes a Tool Tip within a product application. Right now, we have to manage Tool Tips separately which duplicates content.

TCW: Thanks for helping us understand your move to DITA. Where can our readers learn more about Astoria Software?

CG: Visit our corporate website to learn more about our products, and by reading our recently released Astoria Blog to get our take on DITA, XML and other emerging technologies. To learn more about DITA, and for help building a business case, your readers should download a copy of our newest whitepaper, Calculating the Value of DITA to Your Organization.