DITA Europe Conference - enabling the successful integration of content management and advanced publishing

02 November 2006

Stilo International, provider of solutions for Product Lifecycle Management, Document Management and e-Publishing, shared its extensive knowledge of adapting DITA frameworks at the recent DITA Europe Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. The conference was arranged with the intention of sharing implementation experiences with the emerging DITA standard. Over one hundred delegates, drawn from industry sectors as diverse as publishing and semiconductors, met to understand more about DITA and learn best practices for introducing DITA into their publishing processes.

Over the course of two days, presentations were made on such topics as: Successful DITA Implementations, Complex Publishing, An Engineering Case Study, Getting Started, Information Modeling with DITA maps, The Role of Content Management and the Value of Open Standards.

Marc Speyer,VP, Enterprise Solutions, Stilo Europe, delivered a case study recounting how Stilo has adapted the DITA framework for use within the Aerospace sector and for meeting the content management and publishing requirements of technical documentation which are far more complex than that for which DITA was originally designed.

Les Burnham, CEO of Stilo International, commented, "The level of interest shown in this event is significant and proves that there are many organisations that are attracted by the promise of simplified content management and publishing process that DITA offers. The most important aspect of a conference like this is that the knowledge of experienced implementers, such as Stilo, can be shared with organisations that are just setting out. Experience counts for a lot and it will help the new adopters to realise the real benefits of topic-based content management and e-publishing quickly and successfully."

In the event's keynote presentation, titled "DITA Evolves", Michael Priestley of the IBM DITA team outlined the reasons why the DITA standard is proving to be such a successful investment both for IBM, as its originator, and for organisations adopting it. He also commented that the general concepts underlying DITA can be used to realise comparable benefits in a number of areas of standardisation effort.

Burnham concludes, "Among the key challenges for companies adopting DITA is to understand what technology tools should be used to migrate their content to DITA, to progressively enrich the content through modularisation and markup enhancement, and to implement publishing processes that will meet the level of demand that can be expected when in full production. Although one of the real attractions of DITA is the availability of a reference implementation in the DITA Open Toolkit, there were many in attendance at the event who observed that this open source tool could not come close to meeting their requirements for performance and reliability. This is why some of the most ambitious implementers of DITA have been using Stilo's Content Processing Platform, OmniMark."

Ends

About Stilo International plc

Stilo (LSE:STL) provides leading solutions for Product Lifecycle Management, Document Management and e-Publishing to customers in Aerospace & Defence, Manufacturing, IT, Telco, Publishing and Government. Stilo's e-Publishing solutions help organisations to leverage the power of XML in their publishing strategies - reducing production costs, shortening cycle-times, and improving the quality of published information.

For further information please contact:-

Stephen Smith
itpr
Tel. +44 (0)1932 57 88 00
E. stephens@itpr.co.uk
www.itpr.co.uk

Ismail Evren
Stilo International
Tel. + 44 (0) 1793 441 444
E. ievren@stilo.com
www.stilo.com