Before you begin – a few considerations . . .

This topic provides an overview of some show-stopper issues for organizations considering a DITA migration.

At the end of the day, most DITA migration proposals seek to "close the deal" with a few critical selling points:

• Industrystandards content consistency (markup and metadata)

• Content reuse

• Lower translation costs

• Long-term writer productivity gains – do more with fewer people

• Content management and sharing

• Output consistency across product lines and deveolopment sites

• Integration with corporate publishing portals

Although these tend to be compelling business drivers for most companies, you may be working in or for an organization that has an alternate set of values and priorities. Before you invest your evenings and weekends in developing a migration proposal, you should pause for a moment to consider the following potential show-stoppers.

• Home-grown tooling

• Home-grown processes

• Special snowflakes

• One person's concept of waste . . .

• Feathered nests

• Tail of the dog

• The Maginot line

• zero-cost migration

• zero-attrition migration

• zero-disruption migration

• bad content miracle cure