Benefits
DITA has many benefits to both business management and technical processes.
| Benefit | Description of Problem | Business Management Benefits | Technical Benefits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content Management | Content is stored in many "silos" and is difficult to find, update, or collaborate on. | DITA systems provide a single content repository that all team members can access. Multiple users can search, author, edit, review, and publish using a single source, so everyone's on the same page. | DITA has highly effective search capabilities with taxonomy and metadata. All changes are tracked so content is easy to find, use, and manage. |
| Reuse | Content creation is expensive and labor intensive. Reusing content often involves copying and pasting, which can result in errors. | Topic-based authoring in DITA makes it easy to reuse content. Reusing content ensures consistency in publishing outputs and also reduces costs. | DITA enables you to reuse content effectively without copying and pasting. You can easily update content in just one place and generate a global update. |
| Publishing | Publishing content to multiple platforms requires extensive styling work. Proprietary systems limit publishing options. | DITA content can be published to many different media formats and devices with the push of a button, reducing the cost of publication that's typically spend on formatting by 30-50%, as multiple studies show. For more information, see Formatting Costs. | DITA applies formatting when content is published, which eliminates the need for manual formatting and results in consistently formatted outputs for multiple media. |
| Translation and Localization | Localizing content is costly and can delay time to market. | With DITA, you can create translation packages of the content that you need and not content that has already been localized, significantly reducing translation costs. | Heretto CCMS tracks which content is up to date and because content is broken into smaller topics, localization is much more manageable. |
| Interoperability and Scalability | Documents created in proprietary formats cannot be opened or are not supported by other software. | DITA is an open standard, which means that content created in DITA can be transferred to other systems without a complex, costly conversion process. | DITA is an XML based standard, which is both human- and machine-readable. This enables connections with other software, like WordPress, Mindtouch, Sharepoint, and other applications. |
| Workflow | It's difficult to track and collaborate on large content development projects throughout an organization. Writing content to support products often comes at the end of the product development cycle. | In DITA, content development aligns with agile product development because content is broken into smaller topics. Simultaneous content development and reuse means documentation can be developed and released more quickly. | DITA systems provide a mechanism to assign and track work using workflows. A collaborative authoring and review process in a single-source increases efficiency. |