I don’t want to seem all doom and gloom, especially after the previous post on technical writing jobs in general, but I want to talk about some interesting trends that I am seeing. And one of those is a distinct drop in job postings for technical writers with DITA experience. Right now, they account forRead More
Tag: FrameMaker
DITA Takes Flight: Some Evidence of DITA Maturity
As mentioned in the previous article there is steady growth in the job market for technical writers with DITA experience. What’s interesting is that there are further signs that DITA usage within firms is maturing, indicating that DITA is now out of the “early adoption” phase. The last time I did a DITA jobs surveyRead More
DITA Experience Rules, FrameMaker Usage Declines Further, DocBook is Dead
Job postings seeking DITA experience continue to grow while FrameMaker usage continues to decline. DocBook as a viable technical writing standard in the job market is dead. While it is clear that the majority of firms out there are still asking their writers to create their content in an unstructured manner, there is a clearRead More
DITA in the Healthcare Sector: An Interview with Mike Kocik of Carestream
DITA is seeing increasing use outside of the original computer software and hardware sectors from which it was born. One of those areas where DITA has taken off is in the healthcare technology sector, and recently I had the pleasure to interview Mike Kocik, who is the Information Architect at Carestream, where he has ledRead More
Upcoming DITA Webinars
Time to catch up on some DITA-related news items, all having to do with upcoming DITA-related webinars: Content Management Trends: Understanding DITA Date: August 14th at 1PM-2PM EDT Speakers: Dan Taylor, Paul Wlodarczyk and Kris Eberlein More companies are utilizing DITA standards to represent reusable content components. A component content model enables companies to efficientlyRead More
A Final DITA Tease from DITAToo on Legacy Content Conversion
I’m sure that the phrase “DITA tease” is more commonly associated with the other famous DITA out there, but the people who make the DITAToo CMS have released what they promise is a final teaser ahead of an upcoming survey on how people convert legacy content to DITA. When asked what tools people are usingRead More
How Many Technical Writer Jobs are Looking for DITA Experience?
4% …and growing. About half-a-year ago Mekon colleague Rachel Johnson asked me whether I knew what percentage of technical writing jobs out there are DITA-related. I said I didn’t know, and became intrigued with finding the answer to that question. While I have a lengthy list of companies using DITA, I wondered what percentage thatRead More
Interesting Preliminary Results in Legacy-Content-to-DITA Survey
The folks at DITAToo have been running a survey asking people how they convert their legacy content over to DITA. The preliminary results are interesting if not terribly surprising: the vast majority of users are converting their content over from Unstructured FrameMaker, and after that, from Word: From the structure of the survey questions itRead More
Moving from One DITA CMS to Another: Lessons Learned from Migrating from a First-Generation to a Second-Generation DITA CMS
One of the most interesting presentations I saw at the Ixiasoft DITA CMS conference back in June was presented by a Documentation Team Lead at Research in Motion (RIM). While these days the beleaguered firm is better known in the news for its revenue woes (though it is good to see some wins as well),Read More
The Latest Trends in DITA XML Use in Tech Writing (Part 2)
In the previous article I looked briefly at the numbers from the latest Microsft’s Visio survey of technical writer tools, taking the raw data and showing where the DITA-OT appears in the list of the overall top 20 Technical Writer’s tools (#18, up from #20 in 2011) and where it appears in a listing ofRead More