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, Albert Chu 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.

XML applications for publishers have largely failed to realize the full potential inherent in the technology. While larger publishers could make the investment necessary to realize significant return on the use of XML technology, smaller enterprises simply could not, for a number of reasons, but fundamentally because the startup costs and ongoing costs of ownership were simply too high. The DITA standard fundamentally changes the equation, bringing several unique features that, together, serve to lower both the startup cost and ongoing costs, making the use of XML for publishers much more affordable than it ever has before. At the same time, advances in supporting technologies important to Publishers, such as improved support for XML in Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, powerful new XML search and retrieval systems such as MarkLogic, and a new generation of lower-cost XML editors, as serve to make the use of XML for Publishing applications more attractive than it ever has been before.

The most common mistake found in content management projects is rather surprising. The reason most CM projects falter is that the project team, and frequently its stakeholders, become unduly enamored with some piece of technology and assume, or hope, that one or two applications will erase all of the challenges surrounding the creation, management, reuse and delivery of content. When a particular collection of applications fail to deliver on the expectations, the usual response is to insert even more applications. With each new application that is introduced, a number of connectors and patches are also added so that one tool can work with the others that are already in place. This continues until, with seeming inevitability, these projects crumble under the weight of growing system complexity. These projects fail, in short, because, in becoming fixated on technology, they essentially forget about their content.

This presentation will use a number of project cases studies, some older and some exceedingly current, to illustrate the downward path that most CM projects follow. While this might sound ominous, this journey will actually arrive at a hopeful conclusion. If CM projects place content at the center of their solution designs, adopting in effect a Content Oriented Architecture (COA), it becomes possible for projects to use technology, even exploit it, in ways that emphasize helping authors, publishers and content users. Under this model, the quality and usefulness of the content assets becomes the overriding focus and where automation is introduced it is to either further improve the quality of the content or to reduce the cost and effort needed to achieve the desired results. Examples of successful projects will be used to prove that Content Oriented Architectures are not really new and that they do deliver results that endure over time.

The technical communication landscape is changing rapidly. New tools, techniques, expectations and opportunities are making it necessary to expand the definition of what a technical communicator does and the Society for Technical Communication is at the forefront of communicating these changes to government and industry. Susan Burton, Executive Director of the Society of Technical Communication (STC) will discuss efforts to broaden the definition used by the U.S. government Bureau of Labor Statistics to describe technical communicators and the work they do. She’ll explore the implications of such changes implications, and how the STC is changing to address the changes in the field of technical communication.

Community documentation projects are on the rise and represent many interesting shifts and challenges for technical writers. If you are interested in how community documentation is growing and what the tools and processes are then this session is for you. The session uses the fast growing and innovative FLOSS Manuals as a case study.

FLOSS Manuals was launched in October 2007 as a platform and community dedicated to creating free documentation about free software.

Since that date the technology has been extended to include many interesting new features and continues to grow. The growth however is determined by demonstrated need mixed with a little speculation to ensure FLOSS Manuals is a platform people can use while at the same time being highly innovative. Recent development cycles have included the implementation of:

• translation workflow tools
• localisation tools for creating FLOSS Manuals in new languages (eg. Farsi)
• print on demand source file creation
• content remix tools

FLOSS Manuals is now moving into developing tools to support our Book Sprints and remote collaboration. Book Sprints are a model we are continually refining which involves bringing writers together in online and in real space to produce unusually high amounts of content in a short period.

In addition to the technology the community is growing and flourishing. We have several hundred contributors and are now the official documentation repository for many free software documentation teams including the well known One Laptop Per Child software projects.

This session will look at the tools, technologies, and community of FLOSS Manuals and investigate where Founder/Manager Adam Hyde believes the emergent free documentation sector is heading.

If we are honest with ourselves, as an industry, it must be said that so far we have largely failed to deliver on the promise of open information and single-source publishing. There are exceptions, happily, and these successes help us to understand what strategies we should build upon and which, conversely, we should avoid. On that less positive side, the many failed CM projects, and the reasons for their failure, should remind us that there are many traps that need to be sidestepped. What is most important, however, is to consider what content really is and why its creation, management, reuse and publication has historically posed so many challenges. Once we establish a clear picture of what content is, we can get down to the business of managing and leveraging content on a level, and to an extent, that can fundamentally change how organizations grow, adapt and succeed. Although this all may seem a little abstract, in reality, by looking more closely at content and the historical trials of the content management industry we in fact unearth with some very practical lessons. One of these lessons is the fact that content is inherently complex and that projects endeavour to shoe-horn it into artificial containers at their peril. A related lesson is that working with content involves people whose time and knowledge is supremely valuable and solutions must work overtime to leverage these assets instead of encumbering them.  Another key lesson is the importance of practitioners and implementers sharing their experiences and collaborating on extensible, reusable standards the type of which we are starting to see emerge with DITA.