Systematic Documentation Lifecycle Management

*instinctools GmbH has decided to provide free-of-cost licenses for its DITA Visual Specialization Manager, an application designed to make complex DITA specialization tasks easier to work with. These free licenses will be valid for unlimited time period but limited to the development and maintenance of open DITA Specializations e.g. specializations under OASIS for different industries such as Machine, Pharmaceutical etc. This offer is aimed at lowering the barriers to DITA usage and adoption.

Stuttgart, Germany, November 5, 2009 — *instinctools GmbH, a company providing software solutions and services, has been previously instrumental in bringing an innovative structured documentation solution in the form of DITAworks Documentation Application in the market. They have also brought productivity enhancement benefits in documentation area like full Eclipse IDE integration with their documentation application DITAworks. Now, they have decided to make a contribution to the DITA community by providing their DITAVisual  Specialization Manager totally free of charge for the purpose of development and maintenance publicly available DITA Specializations. This will provide a much needed impetus to DITA standard by lowering barriers to DITA adoption as a result of simplification of the DITA specialization process.
The DITA Visual Specialization Manager contains comprehensive modeling functions that allow development and maintenance of project specific documentation models (DITA Specializations). This application opens a new dimension in the ease of customizing DITA to specific needs in a user-friendly way. It simplifies the DITA specialization processes while providing productivity benefits in terms of lesser time, optimal quality of deliverables, and single-sourcing of the model (export of DTD and XML Schema possible). Furthermore, it can facilitate an integrated environment with 100% DITA-based tools like DITAworks. The main features of this application are listed as follows:

• Wizard-based Visual Editor for DITA specializations with support of structural, domain and attribute specializations
• Import of existing specializations from DTD.
• DITA model validation (checking for validity of specialization)
• Export of managed specializations to DTD or XML Schema
• Export of Specializations in form of DITA OT plugin
• Integration with version control

All these benefits and functionalities have been developed to give substantial support to Information Architects and Documentation Project Managers in designing and maintaining their DITA specializations by providing wizard-based visual editor for DITA information types. The development of these functionalities has been made possible through a mix of technological expertise and practical experience gained from various DITA projects.

This free-of-cost license for DITA Visual Specialization Manager will be limited to development of or working with models available publically and prohibit any commercial use of the tool other than evaluation. The license will be made available starting from the first week of December.

For more information about DITA Visual Specialization Manager from *instinctools, please visit www.ditaworks.com/modeling

Tags: DITA, Export, Modeling, Specialization

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 22:17 by Alexej Spas and is filed under Coming soon, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.