Building a DITA-Wiki Hybrid

The April 2008 issue of the STC Intercom magazine is dedicated to DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture).

I’m pleased that the Building a DITA-Wiki Hybrid article that I co-authored with Lisa Dyer and Michael Priestly is available online for free to anyone, STC member or non-member. The article discusses these three ideas for merging DITA and wiki technologies:

• DITA Storm, an online DITA editor with an edit button on each page. While it’s not quite a DITA wiki, it seems like it could become one with some RSS notification and comment or discussion ability on each page.
• Wikislices are a cross-section of a wiki such as Wikipedia, currently created with school curriculum in mind. Michael Priestly and I are working on a team to find ways to use DITA maps to manage and build wikislices.
• Lisa Dyer has implemented DITA as a single-source with wiki as output for a documentation site housed behind a Lombardi customer support login.

I’d love to hear your comments on the article here and any other ideas you have seen for a DITA-wiki hybrid.

April 16 Central Texas DITA User Group meeting

From http://dita.xml.org/book/central-texas-dita-user-group

Using DITA Content for Learning Content Development

John Hunt, of IBM, will give a presentation regarding the use of DITA for learning content. He’s been working on a new Learning and Training Content specialization that will be part of OASIS DITA 1.2 release. If you’d like to do a little pre-work, check out this article about using XML (such as DITA) for learning content: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita9a/

Presenter

John Hunt, DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization SC chair. John is also DITA Architect and Learning Design Strategist in the Lotus Information Development Center at IBM.

I’m also looking forward to Mike Wethington’s presentation to the DITA user group for the May 21 meeting, where he will talk about Agile development and its affect on technical communications. Mike’s the manager of technical communications at Troux Technologies here in Austin.

How to sign up for BSM International Airport Simulation

Sign up for the BSM thrill ride is a few clicks away.

I thought I’d offer some sign up information for the BSM International Airport Simulation I wrote about yesterday. The BMC education site has other locations as well that you can get to with a few clicks. Class details for U.S. locations. Click the “Change your country” button to get information for other locations.

And don’t forget to check out the movie clip! (.wmv file)

The catering’s down! Flights can’t take off!

BSM International. Where we all get to stare at fancy mock network diagrams, solve logic puzzles, and pretend to feed hungry airline passengers.

Ah, yes. Atwell Williams’ podcast brings back memories of the BSM simulation course.

A few weeks ago, I also stumbled across this review of our BSM International training class. The article is titled ” Riding the Fright Simulator” and it’s a first-hand account of the BSM International airport simulation course that BMC offers that helped me understand the connections between IT services and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a common set of standards first developed by the UK government. I know I sure learned a lot there.

Here’s an excerpt from the article, which absolutely nails the way you feel during the course:

Clive Ford was looking forward to a quiet day at the office. After all, there was nothing complicated about the outfit he was running — just an ordinary four-terminal international airport.

But then all hell broke loose. The sky started falling, the wheels were coming off and he knew it was going to be one of those days.

The airport went ballistic, he recalls. The radar tower malfunctioned, emergency services were out of control, poisoned food was being loaded on to aircraft, the sky was dark with banked-up planes and the media were hammering on his door.

As soon as one problem was sorted, another slammed into view. So far no one had been hurt, but it seemed like time would soon take care of that. And meanwhile the crises were eating dollars — millions of them.

All rattling good fun, Mr Ford says in retrospect. The best day’s training course he has ever attended.

This course is a great introduction to why the heck you’d want to manage your business services through IT technology. I won’t give away too much of the course, but I will brag that my group was one of the first to come up with a display board for a knowledge base. Leave it to the tech writer to be excited about a fake knowledge base. Solving problems efficiently was actually an adrenaline rush, which is suprising, since the course was also a first introduction to BSM and ITIL for me.