The postings on this site are the contributor's and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Business intelligence, intelligent content and devices, games, and noise.
January 20th, 2010 Lisa Dyer
I suppose we’ll soon agree on a name for the era we’ve entered. The confluence of artificial intelligence, business intelligence, intelligent devices and networks, intelligent content, and open platforms seems to suggest “”The Era of Intelligent Systems” as offered by many scientists and industry leaders.
Just for fun, here’s a tagcloud I generated from a blog post by Jack Mason of IBM:
Point being, humankind is acutely aware that we are simultaneously drowning in useful information and lacking it, and there are more initiatives and ideas attempting to solve this problem than you can shake a web browser at. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Leadership, User Assistance | 3 Comments »
Theme Builder, free at last. (Good news for the DITA2Wiki community.)
July 30th, 2009 Lisa Dyer
The Lombardi Wikis use a few core plugins to the Confluence wiki that provide the general look and feel, and many features that go beyond the out-of-box wiki experience. One such plugin, the Theme Builder by Adaptavist, has been with us since Day One, and is a critical system component. But, it’s a commercial plugin, and therefore extending it and fixing the occasional bug has not really been an option.
Also, the open-source DITA2Wiki Project, which the Lombardi Wikis implement, uses Theme Builder to provide optional but very popular features. Theme Builder has been the only commercial component in this open-source project, and for users with very limited budgets, this can be a blocker.
Adaptavist recently announced that the Theme Builder plugin will be open source. This is good news for the DITA2Wiki community for a couple of reasons:
- We can now fix any bugs we discover and extend it without necessarily engaging a third party. And, we can give those improvements back to the open-source community. The community can continue to fund Adaptavist’s innovations by buying their support services.
- The Lombardi Wikis implements the open-source DITA2Wiki project, with heavy use of the Theme Builder. A free Theme Builder will likely grow the adoption of the DITA2Wiki framework, and hopefully increase community contributions to the plugin this way.
Posted in User Assistance | No Comments »
Using community equity to attract and develop talent
June 1st, 2009 Lisa Dyer
This past year, the Information Development team at Lombardi has been thinking a lot about community equity, and the powerful role it can play in attracting and developing talent. I think this is especially topical with our recent launch of Lombardi University.
Active community participation is clearly a good goal, but it’s been difficult to measure. To quote OnDemand Beat: “There are a number of arbitrary measurements that Enterprise 2.0 solutions providers and end users have cobbled together but up until recently there has not been a tried and proven method to calculate community participation.”
Here’s a quick look at an emerging community equity specification, and why I think it’s a very important tool for attracting and developing talent, in addition to growing a body of expert knowledge. People need effective ways to find the right information and mentors so that they can succeed with their BPM projects. And people need tools to develop their careers, especially in industries where new career paths are evolving. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in User Assistance | 4 Comments »
The open-source DITA2wiki Project releases DITA2Confluence 1.2
March 2nd, 2009 Lisa Dyer
I’m very happy to announce the general availability of DITA2Confluence Release 1.2! You can download it now from the the open-source DITA2wiki Project at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita2wiki/
DITA2Confluence Release 1.2 delivers many new features and enhancements requested by the growing DITA2Wiki community. A special thanks go out to Brendan Patterson and his fantastic Multi-Excerpt plugin (which DITA2Confluence implements for content reuse) and JoAnne Grey of Maxiscale, Inc. for her help in testing this release and contributing to the new design.
For Lombardi’s Information Development operations, this release enables a major step forward for the Lombardi Wikis. It powers features that we think will make finding and using the available information much easier:
- Logical navigation of task-based topics
- Rich landing pages into the different areas of content
- Efficient reuse of content across the wiki spaces (less duplication or jumping around)
It also gives the community more opportunities to enrich the content with their own experiences, for example, in the area of installing and configuring third-party components – which, in the world of enterprise software, is usually highly specialized and variable subject matter.
And, from an operational standpoint, we are excited about the %15 operational savings DITA2Confluence 1.2 is estimated to deliver with each future product release. Read the rest of this entry »
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Lombardi and the DITA Maturity Model
October 23rd, 2008 Lisa Dyer
This week, the Central Texas DITA User Group was back in session after a sanguine summer break. The topic was “The DITA Maturity Model: A Stepwise Approach to Enterprise Content”.
In this excellent article, Michael Priestley, lead IBM DITA architect, and Amber Swope, principal consultant for JustSystems (makers of the popular xMetaL DITA authoring tool), discuss how the DITA Maturity Model can drive new value across a corporation’s information ecosystem. It also explains how DITA fundamentally parallels SOA with its architecture of self-contained and loosely-coupled (content) objects that address specific functions. This architecture enables organizations to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time in the right language – the ultimate goal of information engineering. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in User Assistance | No Comments »
DITA2Wiki project update: DITA2Confluence Release 1.1 is out
October 16th, 2008 Lisa Dyer
I’m excited to report that we’ve just released an update to the DITA2Wiki project on SourceForge with DITA2Confluence Release 1.1. You can download the distributions at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita2wiki
DITA2Confluence Release 1.1 includes some nifty new features and enhancements, as well as bug fixes and contributions from Jan Wicher Draijer and his team at Every Angle Software Solutions bv in the Netherlands.
Every Angle is one of the early adopters of the DITA2Wiki project I mentioned in my previous post. Within two hours of releasing DITA2Confluence 1.0, I got an email from Jan Wicher with thoroughly detailed testing results and suggestions for improvements. I was impressed:)
Go ahead, try it out. And let me know how it works for you! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in User Assistance | 2 Comments »
Announcing the DITA2Wiki open-source project
September 22nd, 2008 Lisa Dyer
If your vision is to tap the knowledge of your online user community and weave that knowledge into your content, but you lack the tools or resources to build such as system, read this.
Announcing the DITA2Wiki open-source project
The DITA2wiki project:
- Provides tools and best practices for integrating DITA content with a wiki environment
- Enables the user community to extend DITA2wiki distributions with features such as full round-tripping (from DITA to wiki to DITA) and support for any open-source or commercial wiki
Go to SourceForge.net to learn more about DITA2Wiki and to download the project distributions.
(What is DITA? In brief, the DITA OASIS Standard it is a widely adopted XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing information. To learn more, visit DITA XML.org.)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in User Assistance | 7 Comments »