Survey: Considerations for Using DITA

Fri May 7 07:31:18 PDT 2010

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<title>DITA Survey</title>
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<h3>Survey: Considerations for Using DITA</h3>
<p>To help potential
users decide whether to use DITA and how much effort doing so would involve,
Text Structure Consulting, Inc. is conducting a survey to better
understand the documentation projects for which DITA is appropriate.
If you are using or considering DITA (or have done so), please take
the time to share your experience by completing the survey. Partial
and anonymous responses are welcome. You can send your response (embedded
in an email message, in Microsoft Word, RTF, Adobe FrameMaker, or
PDF) to <a 
href="mailto:dita.survey at txstruct.com">dita.survey at txstruct.com</a>. If you 
prefer to answer by phone,
you can write to the same address to schedule an interview.</p>
<p>Please
forward the survey to other documentation professionals you know
who might like to participate. If you are involved in multiple relevant
projects or would like to add to an earlier response, feel free
to complete the survey multiple times. Answers from different people
working on the same project will gladly be received.</p>
<p>Since
the survey is being distributed largely by forwarded email, statistically
significant results are not expected. Nevertheless, survey responses
should help existing users re-evaluate their projects and possibly
learn about new tools,
potential users evaluate the relevance of DITA, and consultants decide
when to recommend it. If an interesting
number of responses are received, the results will be summarized
on www.txstruct.com and submitted for possible presentation at Balisage:
The Markup Conference in early August, 2010 (see www.balisage.org).
If at all possible, please respond by June 15 so that information
can be prepared for the conference.</p>
<p>The survey questions are available at
<a href="http://www.txstruct.com/dita.survey/questions.htm">
http://www.txstruct.com/dita.survey/questions.htm</a> and are repeated here:
</p>
<h4>Personal Identification</h4>
<ol>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What is your name, affiliation, and name of 
your project?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What is your personal role in your project 
(e.g., author, editor,
manager)?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Are you an end user, consultant, or tool 
vendor?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Is this a new survey response or a replacement 
for an earlier
response?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do you give permission for your responses to be 
quoted in a
summary of the results of this survey? Do you want such quotations
to be anonymous or attributed to you?
</li>
</ol>
<h4>Project Identification</h4>
<ol start = "6">
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What industry does your documentation 
represent?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What type of processing does your project 
involve (authoring,
publishing, translating, indexing, analyzing, etc.)?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How many documents or pages do you process 
annually? How much
of this material is new and how much revised?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How do you publish documents (paper, PDF, Web, 
CD, etc.)?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How many document tool users do you have?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How many people use your finished documents?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Are your documents translated to multiple 
languages or localized
in any other form? Are all documents localized or only some? How
many languages do you support? </li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Are your documents revised and republished?</li>
</ol>
<h4>General software considerations</h4>
<ol start = "14"><li style="margin-top: 6pt">What documentation
software does your project use:? Consider DITA-specific tools, XML
tools, content management, word processing, desktop publishing,
text editors, database management, project management, spreadsheets,
and any other relevant tools.</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do you have software that enforces that writers 
follow your
organization's conventions?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do all groups within your organization use the 
same tools?
All people in your group?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Is authoring geographically distributed?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How are editing tasks assigned to individual 
writers or editors?
For example, is a writer responsible for a document or document
component through multiple revisions, or is an available writer
assigned whenever a change is needed? Do writers need specific expertise,
such as knowledge of a documented product, to maintain particular
pieces of content?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do you reuse all or parts or your documents? 
What size units
do you reuse? In how many documents does a typical reusable component
occur? What percentage of a typical document is comprised of reusable
segments?</li>
</ol>
<h4>DITA Considerations</h4>
<ol start = "20">
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">For what types of documents (user manuals, 
online help, test plans,
requirement specifications, journal articles, technical books, technical
reports, interdepartmental memos, etc.)
<ol type="a">
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Does your project use DITA?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Have you considered using DITA but decided not 
to?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Have you never considered using DITA?</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do you use DITA-inspired naming of element and 
attribute types
when you do not use DITA itself?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do you use DITA maps?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do you specialize (modify) the DITA tagging 
scheme? How extensive
are your changes? Which of the following do they involve:
<ol type="a">
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Rename existing element and attribute types</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Change the definitions of existing element and 
attribute types</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Add new element and attribute types.</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How many of the DITA element and attribute 
types do you use?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What were the primary factors in deciding 
whether to use DITA (for example, eliminates
need to define a tagging scheme, availability of DITA open toolkit,
a DITA deliverable is part of the project, wanted to use DITA- based
software, recommended by consultant, addresses usability, effort 
required)?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Who are the primary decision makers on DITA 
issues (for example,
customer, consultant, manager, tools group, writers)?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Do you transform your documents to or from DITA 
for different
types of processing? Explain.</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">In what circumstances would you recommend that 
an organization
consider DITA?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What have you found surprising about DITA?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How well have the effort, elapsed time, and 
cost of your solution
corresponded to your expectations at the beginning of the project?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">How well have the results corresponded to your 
expectations?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Given the experience you have gained, would you 
make the same
DITA-related decisions now?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What version(s) of DITA do you use? Are you 
planning to use
any others? When?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What changes to DITA or the Open Toolkit would 
you like to see?</li>
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">What changes to your processes do you plan?</li>
</ol>
<h4>Other comments</h4>
<ol start = "36">
<li style="margin-top: 6pt">Please make any other relevant comments.</li>
</ol>
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Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, 
and training
lprice at txstruct.com           http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505     cell phone: (510) 421-2284  