Once again, we had a great time at DITA Europe 2011 meeting all the managers, information developers, technology specialists, and tools vendors as we learned how best to implement content management systems and the DITA standard across the organization. What a difference a year makes! Organizations that were at the learning about DITA stage have now completed their evaluations and have begun implementation. And these organizations are rapidly moving DITA beyond Tech Pubs to the enterprise at large.
The speakers shared their experiences and provided new insights, and we all benefited from learning about both the successes and pitfalls of others. With two tracks, demos, and specific needs discussions, we were faced with 2 presentations at competing times and were forced to choose. We wished we could have seen them all, but we especially liked:
 Marie-Louise Flacke of CI3M, Iconmania: Don't ruin the benefits of your DITA implementation!: Adding icons does not guarantee improved comprehension - and in some cases it hurts. She shared one dramatic study where children interpreted the skull and crossbones symbol for poison as "pirate food" and thought it'd be fun to eat.
Constant Gordon & John Walker of NXP Semiconductors, Topic Based Tech Author Website: Even if you can't fully support DITA with all the technology, try it anyway. Topic-based writing (even without all the bells and whistles of a full blown DITA implementation) leads to better results for both the user and the author.
Henrik Evanth of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, Implementing Structured Writing: How hard can it be?: Henrik aptly captured the opportunities and challenges of moving an organization to topic-based writing. We totally concur that this is the first challenge that most organizations must meet to move beyond the document paradigm to embrace information reuse and multi-channel publishing.
Mark Poston of Mekon Ltd., Innovative Ways of Taking DITA to the Next Level: We loved Mark's message about hiding the XML from the non-technical authors, with great real-life examples on how to use "the power of a DITA architecture to take our content to the next level".
 Don Day of Learning by Wrote, Integrating Social Media into New DITA Workflows: DITA is sneaking outside the Tech Pubs circle and this is good news for the masses. Don says, "Social media tools are implicitly Content Creation tools, and this content can be captured as DITA for all its standard benefits." Basic DITA editors can help bridge the gap.
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