Many of us fall into academic-speak when creating technical content, even for an English-only audience. The problems are multiplied by the number of target languages your work is localized into. Would you rather “deploy identified resources throughout the enterprise” or “use existing staff throughout the company?” Some extremely simple exercises and common sense can help you transform your content in order to leverage more existing work and avoid unnecessary expenses when sharing your message with an international, multi-lingual audience.

Preparing content for a global audience, (especially in multi-lingual form) involves 3 main areas: (a) text content and tone, (b) appropriate use of photographs and artwork and (c) flexible, non distracting layout and “containers.”

Whether your message is communicated via Web or Help based files, or paper/PDF based documentation, this presentation will cover the essential skills you and your team need to master.

• Find out how Martha Stewart, infomercials and a few good blogs can help you convey an effective message in as few words as possible.
• Learn how to shift gears to address an international audience while creating content. Surprisingly, this is a skill that you already have; you just need to be reminded to use it.
• Learn the dirty dozen of basic “no no’s” in English to avoid creating ambiguous content that can be translated multiple ways. Discover why English may give you a dozen ways to say something that can only be expressed one or two ways in a target language.
• Learn how to avoid “traffic jams” with text flow in translated, target language web pages or documents. There are hidden format and layout traps that can make matching page breaks to English originals nearly impossible.
• Some web page and document layout designs are just plain bad when it comes to anything beyond English. Found out what they are and how to avoid them.
• Discover how to use “neutral” yet effective images that will support your message and not offend other cultures.

Whether you want to make visually compelling, more effective content for an English-only audience, or have your content optimized for a broad, multi-lingual, global audience, this session is for you!

The best software user assistance is so elegant that users don’t need to look for it. In Doc-To-Help 2008, the embedded dynamic help window and expanded tooltips display relevant information as the user navigates the interface. This session will demonstrate this project and discuss how the interface was planned to include all-around user assistance, how the online Help was structured to work with the interface, and how mappings and other information were managed without the need for custom software development.

This session will also discuss:

• Planning for information layers
• Structuring your help project for embedded dynamic help
• Mapping embedded dynamic help to the interface
• Single-sourcing best practices and methodologies
• Managing the UA in the interface
• How you can duplicate the same sort of user experience yourself

Is your organization adopting agile software development methods? Learn how Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Laboratory Automation and Integration group used DITA to produce just-in-time software documentation for the next generation of lab automation software.

This presentation is for you if:

• Your organization is adopting agile software development methods and you want to know what this means for the documentation function.
• You are considering moving to structured authoring with DITA and want to learn from a successful, real world implementation.
• You want to learn how to monitor and measure documentation quality in real time, automatically, using DITA and Microsoft Excel.

You think you might need a new Help Authoring Tool (HAT), but there are a lot to choose from. You’ve read blogs and press releases and articles and forums and email lists, and you’ve noticed that a lot of people have a favorite HAT.

However, you need to focus on your needs when choosing the HAT that will work best for you. It wo’n’t matter how many other people use a HAT if it doesn’t produce the output you need or if it won’t run on the platforms your customers use.

During this session, you’ll learn about four features that matter when choosing a HAT:

• Outputs—We’’ll start with a really quick discussion of the outputs that are available from all HATs, and then move on to the important questions. What outputs can the HAT produce? Can you customize them to match your company branding? What platforms and browsers can be used?
• Development environments—The lines are blurring between traditional HATs, where all authoring takes place in the HAT, and publishing HATs, which reference the source documents. Which HATs have combined authoring and publishing? Which have their own authoring environments? Which let you mix-and-match? Will you want to leverage your existing knowledge or learn a new editor?
• Importing legacy content—While you will have some new projects, you will also likely have existing content that needs to be imported. What types of content can be imported? What issues should you watch for?
• Reusing content—In today’s world, reuse is big. (And content is king.) Some HATs let you reuse content within projects, while others let you reuse content across projects. Some let you combine deliverables within one project through the use of build tags or other types of markers, letting you publish both a User’s Guide and a Training Guide. Some HATs let you take advantage of variables, snippets, widgets, topics, and more, or a combination of all. What types of reuse should you evaluate? Can you reuse layouts, templates, and browse sequences?

  By the end of the session, you’ll have put together a checklist of features that matter to you.
  

  
  

  Getting Up-to-Speed on Eclipse User Assistance

  Speaker: Lee Anne Kowalski
  Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM   Date: October 29
  Track: User Assistance
  Experience level: Intermediate
  

  Has your development team just announced “We’re moving our applications to Eclipse!”? Are you wondering how on earth you’ll create the online help for these applications? Or are you asking “what the heck is this Eclipse thing?” If so, this session is for you! In this session, we’ll cover what Eclipse is, what user assistance and online help mechanisms it provides, and what you need to do to deliver content effectively in an Eclipse-based application.

  In this session, attendees will learn:
  

  • What Eclipse is and what their developers mean when they say “we’re doing an Eclipse product”
  • What the different Eclipse user assistance pieces are and how they are used by end users of an Eclipse-based application
  • Practical approaches for authoring their content and delivering it as Eclipse UA

  After this session, attendees can return to their jobs with a set of practical methods, tips, and tricks for producing content for delivery in an Eclipse-based application.

  
  

  The Next Generation Home Digital Experience

  Speaker: David Schlesinger
  Time: 8:00 AM - 8:45 AM   Date: October 30
  Track: Keynote
  Experience level: All levels
  

  The next generation home digital experience is about one essential idea: to deliver more and diverse media-rich content to the consumer by giving consumers access to their digital life when they want it, how they want it and where they want it. This experience revolves around a new generation of television sets, mobile devices, HD and games appliances, wirelessly connected homes as well as a host of set-top box options.
  
  As communications, broadcast media and broadband entertainment are continuing to converge, a major shift has begun in the connected home environment. The integration of the television experience with the complete power of the new end user technologies, from broadband to mobile, opens the door to not only an exclusive world of entertainment and information, it brings a next generation idea of full consumer interactivity within diverse mobile experiences. Personalized television and mobile will forever change the consumer entertainment landscape and will open the door to a consumer with more and greater control over his or her environment.

  As a mobile Internet pioneer, ACCESS has helped to develop and deliver technologies that have brought the Internet to a new generation of mobile devices and consumers. In this presentation, David “Lefty” Schlesinger will discuss the future of the mobile and beyond-PC markets, the next generation home digital experience and how this will affect the consumer in the era of convergence.

  
  

  APIs and SDKs: Breaking Into and Succeeding in a Specialty Market

  Speaker: Edward Marshall
  Time: 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM   Date: October 30
  Track: Professional Development
  Experience level: Intermediate
  

  Documenting Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) is a challenging but rewarding niche in technical communication. This session discusses what these products do, who uses them, moving into this area, benefits / drawbacks to working on these products, issues unique to these products, and commonly used help authoring tools. As the demand is often greater than the supply of writers, you can get higher pay than for other types of writing. You often get greater flexibility in telecommuting / working remotely in this area. Sample source code and the documentation produced from them will be shown.

  Attendees will learn about the skills needed to break into this area of technical writing, and be introduced to some of the tools commonly used to document APIs and SDKs.

  The following topics will be discussed:
  

  • Introduce APIs / SDKs, describe them and their function. Demonstrate several examples of APIs / SDKs and point out the similarities of information provided and format among them.
  • Typical documentation deliverables for both types of products.
  • The ideal information for SDKs.
  • The typical reference information for APIs.
  • Common programming concepts that writers need to be familiar with for this type of writing.
  • The benefits and drawbacks to doing this type of writing.
  • The knowledge / personality traits that work well in this area.
  • Sources of training to prepare you for this area.
  • Logistical issues faced by writers: how you get your information, tools you can use, common formats for online help, platform issues, build and deployment issues, etc.
  • Some common tools used to generate the documentation from the source code, “a single source of truth” will be demonstrated, showing the source code and the documentation generated from it.
  • Other advanced, powerful shareware tools tthat are very useful for documenting these types of products, such as tools to compare the contents of directories / files, search and replace tools, and advanced text editors.
  • Factors to consider in determining which help format to use.
  • Determining if context-sensitive help is useful and tips for making it easier to track your context-sensitive IDs / numbers.
  
  
  
  

  Navigating the Vendor Maze: Understanding XML Authoring Tools and Content Management Systems

  Speaker: Steve Manning
  Time: 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM   Date: October 30
  Track: Component Content Management
  Experience level: All levels
  

  It can be tough to work through the volumes of software vendor marketing and know exactly what products offer. What are the product strengths?  What are the weaknesses? They say the tools “support” DITA ... but what does “support” mean? There’s too much information or there’s too little. In this session, Steve will provide lessons learned from his participation in the creation of the CMS Watch Report, XML and Component Content Management Systems.

  
  

  Content Convergence: Trends in the Creation, Production, and Maintenance of Technical Content

  Speaker: Rahel Anne Bailie
  Time: 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM   Date: October 30
  Track: Professional Development
  Experience level: Advanced
  

  If you think content production is complex now, wait until it starts converging with content from other departments or groups. Or when users, dissatisfied with the quality of the documentation provided, start their own DIY documentation project—and it ranks higher in the Google rankings than your own support site.

  If you’re being asked to use your content in more than one way, you might be at the stage where the “more” part includes methods or technologies you’re not really familiar with. Maybe content re-use means syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user-generated content. It could mean figuring how to build community or provide better support or get better feedback.

  Maybe “more” means creating or incorporating help from the technical side, sharing the content in a knowledge base, putting it on the Web, maybe with automatic updates, and adopting XML, perhaps figuring out how the new DITA standard works for you in all of this.

  No matter what your situation, you’re in the position where you’re supposed to figure out the XML stuff and the Web stuff and the quality stuff and the stuff around RSS feeds and copyright, how it all fits together, and why you need any of it, anyhow. After all, if you’ve even tried to coordinate content creation between departments, or track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, or just share content between a CMS and LMS, you’ll recognize how hard it is to find two systems that “play nice” together, let alone get an entire corporate strategy in place. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.

  Where is your next content coming from? Are you thinking about your next content strategy? Call it content management meets Web 2.0, content convergence and integration, or simply staying ahead of the curve. Hear some of the trends taking the industry by storm.

  
  

  Reaching Untapped Markets in the US: Targeting the Hispanic and Other Non-native English Speaking Markets

  Speaker: John Watkins
  Time: 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM   Date: October 30
  Track: Localization & Translation
  Experience level: All levels
  

  There is no question that as the immigration of foreign nationals to the US is changing the landscape for product marketing. Over 100 languages are spoken in the US today, with Spanish being the most common language amongst non-native English speakers. Of these 100 languages, there are 11 languages that correspond to populations greater that 500,000 people in the US (ranging from Arabic with 0.6 Million US residents to Spanish with 28 Million residents). Communicating effectively with these consumers, especially the large US Hispanic market, brings the need for effective localization and translation strategies to further increase market opportunities in the US.

  John Watkins presents an overview of the evolving demographic trends, especially in the Hispanic community, within this rapidly growing market and highlights effective strategies used to communicate with the target audiences. Real-world examples highlight relevant considerations and effective strategies for translating and localizing content for this market.

  Topics include:
  

  • Identifying a growing market through demographics
  • Knowing your audience to communicate your message effectively
  • Understanding when you must translate your message
  • Implementing effective strategies for targeting the non-English speakers
  
  

  Paths to Success: Networking and Contributing (It's All About Relationships)

  Speaker: Linda Urban
  Time: 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM   Date: October 30
  Track: Professional Development
  Experience level: All levels
  

  What does it take to be successful as a technical communicator? Often we focus on skills and abilities. There is always so much more to learn! But there is another set of factors that are equally important. This interactive session focuses on the relationships, attitudes, and actions that can make all the difference. You will have an opportunity to think about your own experiences and discover ideas to help you move in the direction you want.

  Linda Urban has been a technical communicator for over 25 years. When she thinks about what has mattered most when it comes to finding and keeping work, it boils down to these principles:

  First: Do good work. Write well. Understand your audiences, and write for them. Know your company’s goals and priorities, and keep them in mind. Care about quality and pay attention to detail.

  Second: Build your network. Not the calculated “get out there, meet other people, and exchange information” kind of network, but the day-to-day kind that comes as you work with people and build relationships. Your base for networking is created whenever you work with people. People will remember when you were reliable, when they enjoyed working with you, when you helped them out of a tight spot, when you shared your expertise. They will also remember when you didn’t. Strive to have the kind of interactions you want them to remember.

  Third: Keep learning. Build your skills, learn new and better methods, and pursue what interests you.

  Fourth: Make a contribution. How you choose to contribute will depend on your interests, skills, personality, and time. Be guided by what you enjoy and what gives you satisfaction. Your niche may be participating in a professional organization such as STC, ISTC, or SIGDOC, it may be a special project at work, it may be mentoring friends who show an interest in what you do, or it may be presenting at conferences such as this one. You may be in front of the room, presenting, or behind the scenes. Don’t worry if you don’t like to be in the spotlight. You do not have to be out front to be a valued resource.

  
  

  [Case Study] EMC: The Design, Creation and Maintenance of Content in a Corporate-Wide XML Authoring Environment

  Speaker: Paul Masalsky
  Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM   Date: October 30
  Track: Component Content Management
  Experience level: All levels
  

  This session describes how EMC uses content management, coupled with XML-based strategies, to collaborate on the design, creation, and maintenance of technical content in its corporate-wide XML authoring environment. By managing and publishing all its content through a central infrastructure that includes a content management system, EMC’s goal is to significantly improve the reuse of its content across its internal organizations and external partners, while reducing translation, localization, and maintenance costs associated with its current authoring environment.

  This session is for content authors, information architects, developers, and managers who want to:
  

  • Learn how to significantly improve the reuse of content between your internal organizations and external partners while reducing translation, localization, and maintenance costs associated with current authoring environments.
  • Understand XML-based strategies for document management.
  • Learn how to use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) to create topic-based content that is easily “chunked” and managed.
  • Examine the dynamic customization of documents through various applications and the automatic publishing of rendered copy to company Web sites.
  
  

  Social Media in Organizational Communication: How It Affects Technical Communicators

  Speaker: Rich Maggiani
  Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM   Date: October 30
  Track: Professional Development
  Experience level: Intermediate
  

  Social media is being used every day by numerous people throughout the world. Business is starting to take heed of this emerging method of communication. Social media is rapidly becoming a strong method of marketing, allowing customers and companies to engage in a dialog (instead of the standard company-to-customer methods).

  Established technical communicators can learn about the various social media, their benefits and drawback, how they are currently being used, and how they are changing the face of communication. Attendees will also learn how some companies are using social media for internal communication, how this is a burgeoning method of clear communication, and how it creates a dialog between all levels of employees, from executives to managers to staff. Attendees will learn how technical communicators can help facilitate this type of communication to the benefit of their colleagues and their companies.

  
  

  Theory of Constraints and Project Management: Challenging the Dominant Paradigm

  Speaker: Bob Donaldson
  Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM   Date: October 30
  Track: Localization & Translation
  Experience level: Intermediate
  Laptop computer required for this session

  The localization technology landscape is changing rapidly, and the pace seems likely to continue. Customers expect improved productivity as these technologies mature, and LSP’s are counting on technology to help them meet those expectations. But have our processes evolved to take advantage of the new potential? Traditional project management is (at its root) cost-based. In contrast, Bob Donaldson will discuss an approach that focuses on overall throughput, maximizing value per unit of time, addressing client demand for shorter turn times and maintaining margin through increased volume.

  Attendees can expect to learn about the five-step continuous improvement process derived from the Theory of Constraints:
  

  1. Identify the constraint (Select the best leverage point)
  2. Exploit the constraint (Focus the process to gain maximum leverage at that point)
  3. Subordinate everything else to the constraint (often involving counter-intuitive choices at other stages of the process)
  4. Elevate the constraint (Invest to increase capacity/leverage, further improving throughput)
  5. Evaluate the results (when done successfully, the process constraint will have “moved”)

  Each of the above steps will be applied to practical problems in localization project management in the context of emerging technologies.

  
  

  Producing Quality Documentation In An Agile Development Environment

  Speaker: Christine Sigman
  Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM   Date: October 30
  Track: Professional Development
  Experience level: All levels
  

  Agile programming methodologies such as XP and Scrum are well-known for freeing engineers’ productivity. Less well publicized is the confusion that technical communicators can feel when first faced with this new way of working. In an Agile environment, you may not be able to rely on extensive design documents or specifications. You may suddenly become much more accountable for your time and your actions, and to a larger number of people. Release schedules may become much shorter than you are used to. At times, it can be hard to figure out exactly where documentation fits into the picture.

  Whether you and your team are facing the immanent arrival of Agile development or are struggling to adjust to it, this presentation will help you look at Agile clearly and find your place in it. You will learn the basic tenets of one particular Agile methodology, called Scrum, and explore proven strategies for the following:
  

  • Gathering essential information in new ways
  • Coping with frequent releases
  • Building your self-management skills
  • Managing day-to-day interactions with your development team
  • Maintaining relationships within the documentation team
  
  
  
  

  Localization Makes Strange Bedfellows: Three Companies That Eat Their Own Dog Food

  Speaker: Richard Sikes
  Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM   Date: October 30
  Track: Localization & Translation
  Experience level: All levels
  

  Translation and Localization are intrinsically pragmatic endeavours. They also require a good deal of human effort that can be aided by technology. Numerous companies have developed solutions to help themselves, then realized that they were onto a good thing, so they have productized their proprietary solutions for more generalized usage. Well-known localization expert Richard Sikes will paint the background and evolution of three such stories, featuring products for visual software localization, translation workflow, and translation business management, and showing how they are used today.

  PASSOLO is a leading software technology for visual software localization. Used worldwide to create software products in many languages, PASSOLO is itself available in several languages. Pass Engineering, a wholly owned subsidiary of SDL International, has automated PASSOLO so as to use itself recursively to build alternate language versions.

  At Nero, the manufacturer of popular media creation software that is available in many languages, the localization management team sought, and failed to find, a workflow system to connect Nero’s in-house resources and external service providers that met their needs and desired price point. Deciding that this was a market opportunity, Across GmbH was formed to develop the Across Language Server. Still in use at Nero, the Language Server platform is now available as a mainstream linguistic asset management platform that is continually gaining traction in a highly competitive market.

  Several years ago, translation service provider Eurotext approached a neighboring company, EDV-Konzepte, to tailor a system that would manage the business side of translation projects. The resulting application, Plunet BusinessManager, and the company formed to develop it, Plunet GmbH, has increasingly taken on a life of its own, becoming a 100% independent company that has learned from the needs of its customers as it has developed the BusinessManager from a proprietary solution for one company to a customizable solution adopted by a wide palette of clients.