DITA and SharePoint Integration--FM11 (TCS4)

[Guest]

We're moving to DITA and exploring our options for tools. We're currently considering TCS4; we'd use FM for authoring and publishing and RH for additional publishing outputs. We're also interested in using a DITA CMS, but since we're already a SharePoint 2010 site, we're wondering if we can leverage the new SharePoint integration instead. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks!

[Guest]

We're trying to use FM10 and SharePoint with DITA.  It looks like it can be done, but only with a lot of customization. And I mean a LOT.

The main sticking point (it seems to me after a few months of on-and-off work in the area) is that SharePoint lacks the concept of interdependent files. In the SP world, every file is assumed to be self-contained. When you work on a file, you're not concerned with how it relates to other files in the repository.

With DITA, on the other hand, relationship is everything. If you update a file or rename it or remove it, you care very much about the effect on other files that might be referencing it.  So you need to add something that SharePoint does not have, namely, a file relationships database of some kind.  And then you have to provide user controls for it.

FrameMaker has dependencies. For example, when you open a topic or an unstructured chapter, you need access to any referenced images. To reconcile this with SharePoint's lack of dependency awareness, Adobe's CMS Connector sets up a SharePoint field called "FMDependency" that lists all the files that are referenced by a file. This helps Frame keep track of dependencies, but compared to a database, it's a clumsy solution. In fairness, it's the best Adobe can do without seriously invading your SharePoint installation.  

The trouble I'm facing now is that, if I do decide to make SharePoint relationship-aware for the sake of our DITA implementation, and I want to continue including FrameMaker in our selection of DITA editors, I have to work with or around Adobe's less than optimal solution.

Another issue concerns metadata. Say you want to be able to select topics by title or shortdesc. First you have to get the metadata into the SharePoint list. (We've set up some code that runs at checkin to do this.) But then you want to use it -- and there's no provision for that in the CMS Connector. So now you have to use a browser to find your files, and then open the Connector and hunt them down from the full list in order to check them out and work on them. The same goes for audience or product metadata.

We're pressing on because the company is just rolling out SharePoint, and is hell-bent on using it for everything. If it's an option for you, I recommend finding a real DITA CMS.