DITA Features: Overview

SiberSafe offers a wide range of productivity features that help content authoring teams procude and maintain DITA content more efficiently.

DITA Authoring

SiberSafe is fully integrated into the most popular DITA authoring tools, including XMetaL, FrameMaker, Arbortext and XmlMind. In these and other DITA authoring tools, SiberSafe supports both DITA Topic and DITA Map authoring, helping the author to find and insert illustrations, topic cross-references and index terms.

When authoring topics, reusable chunks of content can be inserted using both DITA conref and SiberSafe cluster techniques. When authoring content maps, SiberSafe makes it easy to find topics and add one or multiple topicref references to a topic map, as well as navigate such references and open referenced topics in the authoring environment. 

SiberSafe also has a mechanism for unstructured content in-take, so that content contributors unfamiliar with DITA and XML can contribute procedural and descriptive content with tables, illustrations and bulleted/numbered lists using unstructured authoring tools such as Microsoft Word.

DITA Collaboration

SiberSafe collaborative authoring allows DITA authors to check out, edit and then check in DITA topics and maps so that changes being made by one author cannot be accidentally overridden by another one. Authors can also check out individual parts of DITA maps or sub-topics or sub-sections of hierarchical DITA topics so that a number of authors can work in parallel on different parts of the same map or the same complex topic.

Once authored, DITA content can be submitted for online review. SiberSafe's built-in online collaborative review mechanism allows multiple concurrent users to access the same topic or map and annotate their content. Annotations made concurrently by different reviewers to the same topic at the same time do not override each other and are all properly stored with the content and presented to all other reviewers. The review workflow mechanism automatically generates e-mail notifications that are sent to all the relevant workflow participants, including SMEs, editors, authors and managers.

To review content online, reviewers do not need any special software installed on their machines but a standard Web browser, such as IE or Firefox. No ActiveX controls, Java Applets or other active components are required. To open a topic for review, all the reviewer needs to do is click a link in the e-mail notification automatically sent by the SiberSafe Workflow mechanism when the review assignment becomes active.

SiberSafe Workflow engine can be configured by the end user to support virtually any business process. The workflow configuration can be done using the easy-to-use user interface and the workflow diagram is automatically generated and presented to the user for review.

DITA Repository

SiberSafe is a highly specialized DITA/XML repository. It natively supports DITA link management, ensuring integrity of illustration (image), topic (topicref/xref), index term (indexterm) and reuse (conref/cluster) references. When a new edit is made, the historical version of the DITA topic or map is also stored in the repository, which allows the user to roll back to any historical version of any content piece at any time after one or many edits have been made.

Traceability is another important aspect of the SiberSafe Link Management functionality that clearly indicates what bits of content are referenced by a given bit of content and, on the contrary, where a given bit of content is referenced from. This applies to topic references, cross refereces, index term references, image references and reuse references.

SiberSafe maintains the central catalog of all project index terms, ensuring the consistent use of the terminology and making index terms easy to find and deploy. Index terms are automatically discovered and added to the index term catalog as new or legacy content is added or checked into the repository.

Based on the conditional tagging or content chunks, SiberSafe will automatically include or exclude such conditional chunks from different publications, based on the conditional variant defined by the user for each such publication. Content chunks, such as paragraphs, sections or individual phrases can be conditionalized using both labels and numerical values.

When DITA is used to document complex hi-tech products that have long life cycles and multiple subsequent releases, SiberSafe's Release Management functionality helps to maintain multiple different project branches that correspond to different releases of the same documentation set. Content updates can be selectively or collectively applied across different branches, conflicting changes can be both manually and automatically reconsiled and difference reports can be generated.

SiberSafe's full text search engine keeps up-to-date the search index for the whole repository enabling users to run keyword-based queries that will find content in user-specified contexts, such as within certain element types. Queries can be created on the fly by end users or they can be pre-defined by the system's administrator.

SiberSafe will automatically generate glossary topics that will only include glossary definitions of the terms actually used in any of the topics included into your DITA content map, making your glossaries relevant to the specific publication and eliminating the manual work for filtering out the terms definition unreferenced in the publication's text.

DITA Publishing

SiberSafe is tightly integrated with the DITA Open Toolkit for those who want to publish DITA content using the out-of-the box DITA Open Toolkit capabilities. SiberSafe Styler with its DITA template is a good starting point for those who need to heavily customize the look-and-feel of their printable output without any complex and costly programming. Shops that have in-house XSLT expertise will benefit from SiberSafe's integration with FO-based rendering engines, such as RenderX, Antenna House FO and FOP. SiberSafe's tight integration with FrameMaker on the publishing end will help those with FrameMaker structured application development skills.

SiberSafe will generate your online help system or your online knowledge base based on a DITA topic map in either CHM (Microsoft Help) or HTML formats. In both cases, the knowledge base or online help system will feature the TOC, the index table and the fully text search catabilities in addition to rendering DITA topics' content in a web browser-based environment.

Using SiberSafe, training materials can be produced in form of SCORM LMS packages and PowerPoint slides. Out-of-the-box, SCORM Packages and PowerPoint slide decks can be generated from DITA content for both live and Web-based training modes.

DITA Translation

SiberSafe's translation workflow is designed to automaticaly incorporate your reviewed and approved source language content modifications into multiple foreign language projects ensuring that the content that you do not modify in the source language won't need to be re-translated.

If a single phrase, bullet or table cell is modified in the source language, only that single phrase, bullet or table cell content will need to be translated into all the foreign languages that you support and, once translated, all the foreign language publications can be re-published without any additional manual work.

Combined, side-by-side source/foreign lanugage publications can also be generated by SiberSafe for regulatory compliance in the airline and other similar environments where the same publication has to be rendered in two languages using the two-column format.