Review of DITAWORLD 2022
c-rex.net at DITAWORLD 2022
Three days packed with presentations on the topic of Intelligent Content for an intelligent world
. That was the slogan Adobe chose this year for DITAWORLD 2022.
According to Adobe, more than 6,000 attendees from around the world participated in the online conference May 10-12, 2022.
The program offered presentations, keynotes and practical reports on a wide range of topics. It was about DITA, structured editing, RoboHelp, Captivate, localization, microcontent, API documentation and much more.
We at c-rex were there for the first time as a Platinum Sponsor and participated with two sessions this year.
Building Content Bridges. Why Content Needs to Flow Like Water.
In his keynote Markus Wiedenmaier explains why content needs to flow like water, why two approaches are needed when it comes to content creation and that we need to think in terms of interfaces.
In the section Building Content Bridges Why content must flow like water.. there's a brief synopsis.
A recording of the keynote is available on YouTube.
Decouple development and documentation processes. API-Documentation - with OpenApi/Swagger, DITA, and AEM
In his second presentation Markus deals with development and documentation processes. Software development and technical writing are no longer silos. On the contrary, they are growing together more and more. People who develop software also write user documentation. Or the technical writing team is part of the Scrum team and accompanies the development. But is it good if the documentation is written by the development team?
Markus' answer and his suggestion on how to deal with this issue in a meaningful way can be found in the section Decouple development and documentation processes API documentation - with OpenApi/Swagger, DITA and AEM. and in the lecture recording on YouTube.
Build bridges to connect content silos. Why content must flow like water.
Brief summary of the content of the lecture.lecture recording on YouTube.
If companies sleep through digital transformation, they will also sleep through disruption. But how does an organization achieve transformation when it is in siloed corporate structures? Especially in the field of technical documentation - but also beyond? The purely technical breaking open of the silos is not enough. Perhaps breaking down these silos is even counterproductive in some places.
Rather, we need two "content operating systems" as part of our content strategy:
We need one for our internal data and editorial processes.
It should be structured, stable, fault-tolerant and transport information automatically.
And we need one for integrating our increasingly dynamic outside world.
This system must develop in an agile manner and adapt flexibly to the requirements of our customers, users and the market.
We have to think in terms of interfaces: From a technical and organizational perspective.
Corporate and product information - like water - must flow inside and outside the company to everyone who needs it, to people and especially to machines.
Decouple development and documentation processes. API documentation with OpenApi/Swagger, DITA and AEM
Short summary of the content of the lecture.lecture recording on YouTube.
Software development and technical writing are no longer silos. They have grown together and often the user documentation is taken over by the software development.
But is it good if the people who develop software also write the documentation? The answer from us is a resounding no. After all, it takes specialized knowledge in both disciplines. And guess who wins when the deadline approaches and software code and software documentation are written by the same person? Does the software version or the documentation win?
The best option is to have both: People who develop software and people who describe software and do the technical writing. Our task is to intelligently link the two areas so that they can work decoupled from each other and the exchange of information is as automatic as possible. If we also keep the target group in mind, we have a future-proof approach to creating software documentation.
The presentation will use the REST API documentation as an example to show how to leverage the OpenAPI specification (formerly Swagger specification) and DITA and integrate them with Adobe Experience Manager.
The goal is to decouple the documentation process, significantly reduce the need for communication between the two domains, and create a concept for user-friendly API documentation.
We would like to refer you to our blog post Flexible documentation with DITA, where we describe the power of the DITA Reuse mechanisms.