So, new job, and I have the opportunity to design their software and hardware documentation workflow from scratch.
Has anyone used the DITA or Docbook formats in an enterprise-wide situation? Small scale is all I've ever done.
Would like to know if anyone prefers one over the other if you've used them. I'm leaning towards Docbook but only because I'm more familiar with it.
Here it is, several months later.
I now have a single docbook XML file with a structure of a a general manual.
In each machine we sell, the software has several different components that may or may not be included.
So, I made each of those software components (called "tools") a seperate docbook file, as a section. In them, I leave spaces for customer specific screenshots, etc. So I Xinclude these in the main template as needed.
The short of all of this is I can now put a customer-specific operations manual together in 3 hours, complete with screenshots of their specific use, starting parameters for their tool settings, etc. I know this because I just did one for the first time today.
It used to take them/us about a week to put one together, so I scored big points today.
GO DOCBOOK. I think I am going to make a whitepaper about the process and publish it. Why the hell not?
Interesting. What editor do you use?
Wondering if this format would be suitable for creating docs that could also be broken up for inline help popups.
hmm I can't say...
In my limited experience, the Docbook format is well suited for standardizing and updating printed material. For example, O'reilly books are formatted and published using the docbook format.
You can publish html, but the examples I've seen are little more than just a printed version online; pretty boring looking and straightforward. You've probably seen a lot of sites that use Docbook to output an html manual that look like that. Here's the Docbook online help for example: bleh.
http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html
But for organizing, standardizing, updating, exporting to pdf, etc, it's working pretty well for me.
For my editor, I'm using Serna Free. I tried XMLMind but it had issues when importing its HTML to Word (yes, we'll still be using Word for finalizing content and formatting; not a perfect world yet) 
Thanks for the reply. I'm pondering if I could have a custom tool write help blocks for a CMS and insert them into a DocBook document which could then be published as a collected instruction manual -- or rather, a tailored manual for each client since the CMS would be customised for different clients.
Anyway, some food for thought.
ponders