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Bigger and Better: Scaling DITA Content in a Brave New World

**Contributed to Lavacon 2020 by Peggy Sanchez **

Overview

This talk explores the challenges and opportunities preseneted when your team is tasked with migrating between DITA content systems.

Peggy uses the metaphor of a home move to guide onsiderations for such a process, namely:

  • How much will it cost?
  • Will your stuff fit?
  • What will you take?
  • How do you get it there?
  • When do you have to be out?
  • How long do the animals take to become familiar with the new home? (i.e. the humans using the new content environment)

Peggy's presentation takes each of those questions in turn, and highlights the general sorts of choices that make the transition process smoother.

Key Takeaways

In general, this talk emphasizes how important long-term planning can be in aiding in this kind of transition. The house move model is used effectively to capture the intimate and complicated nature of this sort of change in workflow. I would point to three major points of emphasis that are applicable to various projects:

  1. Over communicate, especially within your team
  2. Know both systems as much as possible
  3. Think longitudinally at every step

Reflection

How does the presentation connect with or extend your work in this class?

I think this talk resonated with some of our lessons about agility. We've discussed numerous tools that suit different purposes for digital writing, and while tinkering with each has been fun and enlightening, the major lesson really has been that we need to be able to think deeply about our content in order to make it useful regardless of the toolset we're using. I think this talk, with its discussion of finding commonality and translatability between systems, captures a very direct application of that kind of thinking.