Release M8 (February 2016)

DITAworks CMS has taken a further step in its productivity climb by including inbuilt connectivity to web portals. This opens up a new avenue for the companies who want to offer their quality content in a personalized and interactive manner to its consumers. The whole process from mapping content to distributing it will be streamlined now.
Major new key function of this new release is the out-of-the-box Web Portal Connectivity for DITA content.

For a content strategy to be effective, distribution strategy plays as important a role as authoring and publishing strategy. This is where web portals really come in handy, they give your quality content legs to take it to the right places. A portal is a particular website which collects information from different sources and dispenses this information in the form of categorized and personalized content. Portals hold a definite advantage over some of the distribution mechanisms. Some of these advantages are:

  • Universal availability: Information is available to interest groups at the same point in time.
  • Selective distribution: Documentation can be provided on a “need to know” basis.
  • Topic level distribution: Content can be presented granularly for easier comprehension.
  • Collaboration: Actions and collaborative function related to content pieces can be enabled.
  • Collective library: Structured and unstructured documentation available in same place.
  • Personalization of information: Users can voluntarily personalize information.
  • Interaction and feedback: More feedback through messaging and notification.
  • Automated content adaptation: content can be automatically adapted based on personalization, location and other specific preferences.

Distributing the content to a particular portal can be accomplished by a few easy steps in DITAworks CMS. The portal publishing engine just has to be added to a project in the DITAworks settings and specific parameters for the portal have to be set in the publishing configuration. After running the publishing process, the content will directly appear in the portal where the users are able to work with this content dependent on their roles and privileges.

Release M7 (December 2015)

DITAworks comes now with even more fluid user interface by upgrading it to Eclipse RAP 3.0.
There are further enhancements and functional changes aimed at improving the user experience. The main improvements are:

  • Drag and drop supported in the Browse view as well as Upload and Import dialogs
  • Automated local backups to avoid unsaved content loss in network failure cases
  • Restructuring views added in Review perspective for a better overview and more convenient review work
  • History view and preview option added in the Review perspective to quickly check the changes made in different versions
  • Reusable content can now be created directly in the authoring component
  • Getting started assistant can now be moved to the bottom

You can also get a visual overview of these improvements from our DITAworks video channel on Youtube.

Release M6 (July 2015)

DITAworks is able to work with all CMIS enabled Content Management Systems and can be customized accordingly. With the latest release DITAworks provides a connector for Alfresco. Thus, DITAworks customers save tremendously in time and cost for implementing DITAworks for Alfresco.

Release M5 (December 2014)

Intensive hallway testing performed by external testers, who were not involved in DITA authoring before, helped to identify most critical areas of usability. Based on these results, a priority list of requirements has been developed to ensure more intuitive interaction with DITAworks.

Our last DITAworks release for this year is focusing on usability:

A complete overhaul of the DITAworks Map Editor is a major part of the new release and will ease the working with DITA content structuring:

  • user interface has been re-organized
  • drag & drop handling has been improved
  • object filtering for faster access to DITA objects
  • references inside the map can be tagged by conditional attributes
  • help information has been integrated in UI
  • Context switch is now more convenient.

Release M4.3 (November 2014)

This release brings new publishing options, a more effective integration with XTM Translation Management and a CMIS connector for offline editing. The following major new features were added:

  • Eclipse Help as a new output format. The result of the publication is a eclipse plug-in (.zip archive with meta XMLs and content HTMLs. An Eclipse web help engine is needed to see the result (or Eclipse application itself), DITAworks provides an embedded help engine for preview.
  • EPUB is now supported as an output format as well.
  • New option for publishing process: XMLmind has been integrated as alternative publication engine
  • Deep XTM integration supports seamless flow from content creation to localization / translation.
  • Offline editing: a CMIS connector has been developed to enable users to edite their content offline with oXygen standalone editor

Release M4.2 (September 2014)

This release applies to DITAworks Webtop and Cloud products. It has some major updates. The following major new features were added:

  • Reuse Management: Superior reuse mechanism based on the indirect addressing mechanism – key referencing (keyref) introduced.
  • Search Management: Custom metadata extraction introduced. Now, meta-information can be put directly in the content for more flexibility and convenience.
  • Search Management: Now, searching for locked objects and searching for objects modified by any specific user is possible.
  • Links Management: Moving copy/pasting the objects DITA objects with links refactoring from context menu is possible .
  • Administration: Changes in user management with advanced privileges to the administrator.
  • Possibility to specify custom templates inside a project for any information type of dependent DITA models.

Release M4.1 (July 2014)

This release applies to DITAworks Webtop and Cloud products. It has some major updates. The following major new features were added:

  • Version Control: Branch Management added.
  • Version Control: Baseline Management added.
  • Content Management: Content context concept introduced.
  • Revision History: Show History feature added.
  • Objects: Restore possibility for deleted objects added.
  • Review Process: Fast acceptance path added.

The video representation of the changes can be found here: Video: DITAworks M4 Release Overview.

Release M3 (May 2014)

This release applies to DITAworks Webtop and Cloud products. It has some major updates. Following is the list of the changes along with the videos describing the changes:

  • Administration: A new admin module has been added (Video).
  • Review functionality: The internal and external review process is separated. Now, the external reviewer can work through a simplified UI without system login (Video).
  • Publishing –Conditional publishing for different target groups added (Video).
  • Maps:  New functionality to open the maps in XML added (Video).
  • Conref: Handling of conrefs simplified, system now automatically generates the IDs for referenced content elements (Video).

The video representation of the changes can be found here: Video: DITAworks M3 Release Overview.