Michael Priestley, IBM DITA Architect and Classification Schema PDT Lead
You have to break it down to build it up - Wednesday 3pm

Breaking your content and your architecture up into modules takes a lot of thought. The payoff isn't immediate: some case studies are showing investments recouped in about a year, but what about after that first year? Is it just about cost savings, or are there whole new kinds of opportunities that DITA opens up for its adopters?

This presentation will focus on some of the kinds of integration and reuse that DITA can enable, beyond just simple reuse of topics across different deliverables.

The basic kinds of DITA reuse include:

• Reuse of topics through DITA maps
• Reuse of design modules through DITA doctypes
• Reuse of processing modules through DITA transforms

But after the first year, new opportunities may emerge, including:

• Reuse of content across disciplines, such as training, support, marketing, and user assistance
• Integration of content throughout the product lifecycle
• Integration of content across products, sharing common background information or component descriptions