I went to the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America 2008 conference (put on by CIDM), which took place in Santa Clara last week. While I went to support our co-founder’s speech on DocBook versus DITA, I also used this opportunity to catch up with software vendors and single-source users. Here’s my top #10 take-away list. Enjoy!

#1 DITA is magic
DITA seems to be everywhere in the documentation news today and this conference confirmed the strong interest for such technology. CIDM attracted over 200 people (personal estimate) and a plethora of software vendors.

#2 DITA CMS is magic… too
The words DITA and CMS seem inseparable… I came back with a pile of vendors’ leaflet promoting the benefits of single-sourcing… and the benefits of buying a DITA-based CMS solution to manage documentation

#3 DITA adoption is… yet to become magic
Talked to a few software vendors about DITA’s market. Thanks to the strong support of IBM, client adoption in the US market is picking up, even though it seems that it still remains a multi-million dollar market only… In Europe and Asia, things get more complicated for DITA…

#4 DITA: open-source or open-wallet?
I went to my first NBA game yesterday and realized how Americans like free stuff. DITA is open-source; open-source is free; therefore we like DITA : Wait a second: are you telling me that the DITA CMS platforms come for free? Not really… So here’s the $1 million question: what ROI do you need, over which period, to break-even on your DITA investment? Feedback from DITA’s users is welcome!

#5 DITA’s cousin, DocBook, not to name it
Oh yes nearly forgot about this one… Did you go to any DocBook conferences recently? Being new in the US, I decided to Google it and searched “DocBook conference”… Does not look good. I would love to see a DocBook conference. Anyone interested to spend marketing dollars to promote and support the unspoken DocBook?

#6 DocBook versus DITA, or the other way around…
Teresa Mulvihill gave the only non “100% DITA dedicated talk”. She has been working with both for few years and gave an insightful presentation from the writer’s perspective. Interestingly, there were more Docbook users than DITA users in the panel.

#7 “Getting out of the DocBook closet”
A quote from a gentleman who admitted using DocBook at a DITA conference and thanked Teresa during her talk for letting him out of the closet… the DocBook closet. Perhaps there are more in the DocBook closet? Do not be ashamed, DocBook is XML too. If you’ve invested time and money in your DocBook system, DITA is not the answer to any problems you are encountering. What DocBook needs is its own forum, see point #5.

#8 Word rocks!
I talked to this Indian fellow who told me that they maintain a 1000-page document in Word… and it works! Being the type of person who believed that Word could not scale over 50 pages, this guy proved me wrong.

#9 Single-source fade
Since I am a big single-source content management fan, I moved this point at the bottom of the list. My Indian fellow (see #8) made a very good point: the documentation industry is promoting single-sourcing as THE SOLUTION to all their problems. However, for smaller companies the costs of moving to single-source (or XML, or both) may outreach the benefits. I could not agree more…

#10 Thank you CIDM!
A big thank you to the CIDM team for their great job! The event was convivial, well organized, and attracted quality speakers and industry insiders. Such conferences do a lot of good to help companies new to the single-source world. Keep up the good work guys!