The highlight of last night’s meeting of the PDX DITA User’s Group was Keith Schengili-Roberts’ presentation on The State of DITA 2015. Using the crude metric of “more people to feed at our meetings” over the last few years, we had observed that interest in DITA is growing, but Keith provided a more expansive view of the subject based on his research from the last decade. Here is a sampling of data-based observations drawn from his analysis of job postings, case studies, presentations, LinkedIn references and individual reports:

• Many hundreds of companies worldwide use DITA, with a concentration in the United States and specifically in California.
• Computer software might still be the largest individual industry using DITA, but a large array of industries outside software make up the lion’s share of users.
• DITA is the dominant flavor of XML cited in technical writer job postings (DocBook appears rarely these days)
• In United States job postings, demand for XML experience is trending up and demand for traditional tech writer tools that don’t require structured authoring is gradually trending down.
• DITA experience is increasingly required or preferred in job descriptions.
• Job postings asking for DITA expertise are offering higher starting salaries on average than job postings requiring FrameMaker expertise.

The Q&A covered DITA and aerospace standards, demand in the DITA-based CMS market, how review processes work in a DITA-based documentation organization, and how to get better PDFs out of DITA. And Mark Giffin, who called in from California (he is on the OASIS Lightweight DITA committee), alerted us to the existence of an open-source Markdown-to-DITA plugin. This should be of interest to DITA users who work with programmers who see DITA as an obstacle to collaboration.

Thanks to Keith for providing such a great and engaging talk! You can read more about Keith’s work at his blog, Ditawriter.com. Keith’s presentation was sponsored by Ixiasoft who happen to be his employer as well as a maker of DITA component content management systems. (Thanks to Leah d’Emilio for setting up the tech side and making sure everything went smoothly.)

We were especially pleased to see a handful of new DITA users turning up to explore and network: if you’ve been dithering about coming to a meetup because you’re not yet using DITA, please consider this an invitation to show up and find out more. Also, we discovered proudly that one of our regular attendees found a new job by networking at one of our meetings! We like to be socially useful as well as charming so this was very gratifying news. Maybe you will be next.

We’re very excited to be able to feature a remote presentation on “The State of DITA 2015” at our March meeting (see the sidebar on our main page for time, date, and location details). In-person attendees will gather for dinner as usual at 6:30, with the presentation starting at 6:45. If you want to attend remotely, please drop a line to pdxdita@gmail.com.

Keith Schengili-Roberts, DITA Information Architect for IXIASOFT and the writer behind the popular “DITAWriter.com” blog, has been doing extensive research on who is using DITA, where they are using it, what tools they are using and why. He has surveyed the technical writing marketplace in the United States and the role that DITA skills and experience have come to play in it. If you want to get a better sense as to who is using DITA, what software tools are popular and the many ways in which DITA is being used worldwide, come to this presentation!

We’re accepting submissions for a short presentation at our March 18th meeting, so if you’ve had the stirrings of a DITA topic in your back pocket, please pull it out, brush off the lint, and turn it into a 20-minute talk. We would love to hear from you on any topic related to DITA XML.

To accept the mantle of grandiloquence, just drop a line to docs@jivesoftware.com before March 1st.

A quick and enthusiastic report on last night’s PDX DITA holiday potluck with special guests from the WritetheDocs PDX Meetup Group. But first, a picture of happy documentarians.

We packed 30 people into our largest conference room for a delicious potluck (thanks Puppet team for the buffalo wings!) and a short presentation introducing DITA to prospective users. Leona Campbell and Melanie Jennings enthusiastically described the benefits and challenges of DITA as well as sharing experiences about what it’s like to get up and running with DITA when you’ve previously worked with different toolsets. Because we had a range of experiences at the table, from DITA consultants to working DITA writers to total newbies, there was a great ensuing discussion about why you’d want to use DITA rather than another tool. We also covered the need for different kinds of tooling depending on scale, the challenges of converting existing content versus writing topic-based content in DITA from scratch, and the always popular question of just how challenging it is to teach yourself DITA.

Another great outcome was the robust audience recommendations of resources, both print and online. We’ll be adding to the Resources section of this site soon, so stay tuned.

A big thank you to Mike Jang of WritetheDocs Meetup PDX for the opportunity to join forces, and to Melanie and Leona for a wonderful presentation. We’re looking forward to hearing more from our attendees, especially those who are starting up their DITA pilots soon.

Our annual Holiday Potluck and final meeting of the year is upcoming on December 3rd. This year we’re featuring a special presentation aimed at new and prospective DITA users, which will also be a joint gathering with members of the WritetheDocs PDX Meetup Group. (We Jivers had a great time attending the WritetheDocs conference this past year, but DITA was not talked about in the presentations. That made us wonder why, and this event is one of the results.)

If you’ve been waiting to show up because you feel like you don’t know where to start learning about DITA, this would be a great time to dip your toes in the water. If you’re a grizzled veteran of DITA and/or PDX DITA, we want to see you too! We’d love to hear about your year in DITA and talk about what you’re doing next.

After last year’s potluck we feel confident in promising a delicious holiday feast. (Please bring a dish! We’re two blocks from Whole Foods and the carts, if you need inspiration.). Then Jive’s Melanie Jennings and Leona Campbell will present a brief introduction to writing in DITA XML, followed by Q&A and general conversation. As usual, we’ll provide beer, questionable witticisms, and stunning views of the Portland skyline.

Looking forward to seeing you!

Last night’s meeting was almost entirely devoted to discussing conditional filtering, with a few digressions into conrefs, content management systems, and the local taco carts. Melanie Jennings shared her detailed planning process for tagging and filtering a set of DITA files that will currently support six different filtered outputs for different audiences and platforms, but in the future may have to support many more. We also heard about how other PDX DITA members are using conditional filtering in different ways to get the most out of their files, and discussed some of the challenges of ditamap inheritance, enforcing consistent tagging, and, especially, educating all the writers in a group who need to understand not only the tagging model but how and to whom the final output will be delivered.

We were excited to have Toni Mantych join us for the first time. Toni teaches DITA over at Portland State and is planning to teach a DITA workshop in May through the local STC chapter. Stay tuned for more news about that workshop in a future post.

If you’d like to attend the next meeting in June, please check back here for the date or contact us to be added to the email list for reminders.

Hi DITA enthusiasts! We have an opportunity working on developer onboarding docs here at Jive Software (the current meeting place of the PDX DITA group): you could be based out of Portland or Palo Alto, reporting to our documentation team but collaborating heavily with our platform API team. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to apply directly via JobVite.

Senior Documentation Engineer at Jive

Anyone who has been to a meeting has probably already raved about our beer, snacks, and view of Powell’s Books! We’re also very modest and charming.

The work for this position will not primarily use DITA, but the rest of the Docs team authors in DITA and you’d almost certainly get the opportunity to use those skills.

Reminding all DITA enthusiasts that PDX DITA’s annual potluck and Year in DITA roundup discussion will take place at Jive Software next Wednesday, December 11th, from 6:30 to 8:00. Make something to share, run by the carts on your way in, or just have a beer and some pretzels on Jive.

We’re hoping to discuss breaking events in DITA world, talk about what we learned at LavaCon, and brag about our conversion to Oxygen Webhelp. What’s up in your world?

At last week’s PDX DITA meetup, we were able to Skype in LA area DITA consultant Mark Giffin as an honorary Portlander. (He’s even planning on growing some interesting facial hair for future Portlandian meetups.) There were some great informative discussions and on learning that he’s attending the CIDM Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference this week, we were able to sign him up to report in from DITA Central. We’re looking forward to hearing about what you’re learning, Mark!