[Sigia-l] Best Tools/Processes for Structured Doc?

[Chris Thompson]

The company I work for has tens of thousands of topics that have been
written in XML against a complex proprietary system of custom XML schemas
that are largely based on DITA. The problem is that we've lost the
programmers who supported the system. The build process that our programmers
managed involved XSLT, XSL-FO, and supporting applications, including SAXON,
to generate WebHelp and PDF. Unfortunately, there's a lot I don't know about
what the programmers previously did to maintain our doc system and schemas,
and budget won't allow for hiring on another team of programmers.

Our options as writers are:

(1) Hire a single programmer who may eventually be able to resurrect the
elaborate help-build process that apparently required a team of programmers
to maintain and customize in the past.
(2) Abandon our legacy processes and import our XML source files into a
simpler, well-supported DITA-based authoring- and build-process environment
(e.g., FrameMaker 7.2 and DITA).

In particular, I'm curious about the following:
- How much infrastructure is required to deliver help builds using a
straightforward DITA model (though I'm not sure how well our XML sources can
be transposed from their custom schemas into DITA).
- Which tool would be your top pick for authoring with DITA (FrameMaker
7.2., XMLspy)?

Any advice you may have will be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris