A large number of organizations have documentation in formats that either aren’t supported or are not widely used anymore. Some of this documentation is mission critical. Some of it needs to be kept around for auditing and compliance purposes. One way to ensure that information is usable now and in the future is to convert it to DITA.
This interview with JoAnn Hackos discusses moving legacy documentation to DITA. Something that I found particularly interesting in the interview was Hackos’ definition of legacy documentation:
There are two ways people define legacy documentation. When you are moving to a content management system, using DITA and XML, everything that exists at this point is legacy documentation. But there’s a second definition: Among your previously existing information, some of it we may call legacy because it documents products that are not changing much. Much of this information isn’t worth changing. There’s low value in converting or updating it.
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2 Responses
Gordon
January 30th, 2008 at 6:28 am
1I couldn’t agree more. We are planning our migration (to AuthorIT not DITA XML) and are staggering things according to both the latest time the information was updated, and whether or not it is still required.
We have a large documentation set which, once converted, should be slimmer, leaner and much better written, which in turn should give us more time to work on things later on.
Work smarter people!
one man writes » Recently Read
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:51 am
2[...] legacy documentation to DITA Scott pointed out this interview with Joann Hackos and, as ever, she offers sensible advice, particularly as [...]
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