UK Based
Here in the UK the Congility event is going to take place on June 19th and 20th in Crawley with pre-conference workshops on the 18th.In the past these Congility events have been very well received and the feedback around the S1000D material has been of high quality. Of course part of attending these events is not only the presentations but the networking that goes on. Over the years old acquaintances have been seen as well as those new to S1000D. I think that it is in the latter area that Congility is so good, people are very happy and indeed keen, to share their knowledge and experience. S1000D will be more quickly adopted in the civilian sector with the mystique removed. Your will need to have a look at the programme to see which days you need to attend because as in the past it is a Joint DITA and S1000D programme.
No doubt you will remember me waxing on about just how good S1000D is for a wide range of non-defence projects and in these days of globalisation of development and manufacture, and the increasing use of common parts, S1000D is the obvious choice for many of these.
One big stumbling block that we have come across is the management of projects. Expensive engineers being used to produce the maintenance documentation in MS Word (oh yes!) instead of using an industrial strength standard on a choice of several platforms with guaranteed reliability and re-use with Authors doing the work. But that is a perennial problem which has been running for years and years and is likely to take many more years until it has become a miniscule problem with a small handful of companies.
So for those in the UK and wondering if you should dip your toe in the S1000D world and with an increasing confidence in the future, see if you can get funding to visit Congility and quickly ramp up your knowledge and confidence.
You can find out more about this by visiting the Congility website at www.congility.com but I will keep an eye on the programme and find out more details and let you know items of interest.
In the US
In the recent past S1000D and ATA have go in bed together to present a single conference which covers the AeroSpace industry. This year is no exception. We have the ATA e-Business Forum and S1000D User Forum taking place in San Antonio, Texas from June 23 to 25, 2014. their byline is Driving Value Through Effective Information Sharing and this is definitely what happens there. The programme is not so advanced as that for Congility but generally they manage to put on an informative set of presentations with a number of the S1000D influential members taking part or attending.When I find out what is being presented I will update you but in the meantime you can have access to the programme as it is at present by going to the User Forum.
1 comment:
You put your finger on it: MS Word. Typically the Contractor Document Management System will be a SharePoint server and the authors will be writing in Word and tossing it over the wall for tagging. Templates for such systems take weeks to build and more if changes are required. Using S1000D, if one correctly creates the predecessor to the DMRL, eg, Excel worksheets aligned with the preceding logistics analysis product, it is straighforward to use an XML data map and XSLT to generate those same templates in valid S1000D in under a minute. The disconnects in S1000D are typically which information codes map to which XSDs (not a difficult mapping but if there is a different content specification, there are some hard choices required). The second is the lack of a widely available formatting specification and/or stylesheet system such as is provided by the US Army for 400051 as either the FOSI (long in the tooth but working) or the newer XSLT library. A wall-to-wall XML system is a better option technically, but the lack of authors trained in XML much less S1000D is a very real problem and here the universities in the US fail us.
Still, yes, MS Word is the turd in the punch bowl.
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