Session Details

Do you need the power of DITA but also need to get into this whole wiki thing? Don’t really know where to start, what it might look like, or how to build such a system?

Bring your notebook and join us for a powerful DITA2Wiki workshop - a model for mixing DITA and Web 2.0 to provide rich and dynamic content”. At the end of the workshop, you’ll walk out with a proof-of-concept system in which people can collaborate on DITA content and wiki content, side by side, managed by a repeatable business process and a few cool (and mostly, free!) tools.

We’ll cover:

1. Overview (30 mins)
   • History (why and how the system evolved)
   • Why open source? Drives new methodologies and best practices, standards, operating models for Info Dev. Engages a community of smart and dedicated people in contributing to the project. Some businesses - especially smaller ones - have open-source requirements or strong open-source preferences.
   • Why should you care? The Web 2.0-enabled model is a transformational wagon you probably need to jump on to stay relevant and funded. Web 2.0 and DITA is in its infancy - lots of potential, lots of interesting standards initiatives that this community can drive. Start to engage your community now, but do it with sound governance and a well-defined business process.
2. Hands on (1 hr 50 mins)
• Setup (download and install tools) (30 mins)
• Run the tool to import DITA content to the Confluence wiki
• Examine common patterns that the features enable (findability, versioning, profiling/dynamic publishing, reusability). Point out examples where you might need DITA vs wiki to source your content in.
• Examine the repeatable publishing life cycle. Discuss ways to handle comment and attachment life cycles.
3. Recap and discussion (25 mins)
• What to do when returning to the office
• How to get involved in the DITA2Wiki Project
• Questions and discussion

The DITA specification is silent on how to transform DITA into user-readable documentation. The DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT) fills that gap, providing a mechanism for transforming DITA content into multiple output formats, including HTML and PDF. The DITA OT formatting for both of these formats is basic, at best.  Usually people want more from the output: they want it to be more attractive or conform to their corporate look and feel (or both).

This session introduces the changes you can make to the DITA OT to customize output for your needs.  These changes include modifying OT CSS files, adding static and dynamic headers and footers, enhancing XSL transforms, and creating simple element-level specializations.  Along the way, the session covers the organization of the DITA OT and describes how to create a DITA plug-in to make your modifications portable.  The discussion focuses on getting things running quickly, but also describes strategies for making an implementation more robust and easy to distribute. 

The morning session focuses on the general DITA OT concepts with an emphasis on XHTML output. The afternoon session focuses on creating PDF output through XSL Formatting Option (XSL-FO), including an introduction to the basic concepts of XSL-FO. 

Attendees should be familiar with XHTML (including CSS) and XML; a basic understanding of XSL is useful.

You all have heard that the Adobe Technical Communication Suite provides new possibilities for single-source publishing and integrated workflows for producing print, PDF, and online information deliverables. During this workshop, we will cut through the hype and actually use the integration features in Adobe FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and Adobe Captivate, but this time in a XML / Structured FrameMaker Workflow.

This workshop will provide an introduction to using the components of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite for single-source and multi-channel publishing. Students will learn:

• How Using Structured FrameMaker makes planning for single-source a streamlined
• Basics of RoboHelp
Importing Structured FrameMaker documents into RoboHelp projects
• Mapping styles and importing FrameMaker TOCs
• Using FrameMaker conditional text and RoboHelp conditional build tags to customize published content
• Using user-defined variables in FrameMaker and RoboHelp to represent commonly-used names and phrases
• Embedding 3D (from Adobe Acrobat 3D) and multimedia content (from Adobe Captivate) into FrameMaker and RoboHelp projects
• Publishing RoboHelp projects

Products and processes are becoming more complex, while companies worldwide increasingly have to deal with different languages and want to use a standard like DITA to maximize reuse of content. DITA is the perfect opportunity to leverage best practices for data reuse. Adding a Controlled Language writing structure to your efforts will take you the final mile, improving the readability and translatability of your content. Berry Braster, Director of Tedopres North America, will show before and after samples of documents using Controlled Language and highlight areas of improved reuse with DITA and demonstrate translation costs savings, which can go up to 40% per language.

Controlled Language (also known as Controlled, Simplified or Global English) standardizes the creation of content as it improves readability, stimulating the (global) acceptance of technical documentation and preventing misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

Benefits include:

• Standardization and Consistency in Content Creation
• Quality Assurance and Control
• Efficient Writing and Editing
• Considerable Savings in Translations (up to 40% per language) and Overall Documentation Cost
• Reduced Time to Market
• Optimum Reusability for DITA

As today’s content creation is changing to structured XML and content management, it would only make sense to also adapt controlled terminology and good writing practice rules to improve reusability, efficiency and create additional cost savings.

Controlled Language will not only standardize the content, it will create efficiency, and further increase the many benefits XML already offers. Reusability is the key word here, which applies both to the English content, as well as to the translations, which can decrease the content up to 30% AND save translation cost up to 40% per language!

Berry Braster, Director of Tedopres North America, will show before and after samples of documents using Controlled Language and highlight areas of improved reuse with DITA and demonstrate translation costs savings.

Planning a structured content project is only the first step in a long-term documentation plan. Content creation and production is complex now, and will become more complex as it converges 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 anticipate being asked to use your content in more than one context, you’ll need to expand your knowledge of methods or technologies to enable syndication or collaborative creation with other departments or divisions, or incorporating content from other sites or user generated content, or building community or provide better support or get better feedback. The promise of content management is to solve the silo problem, but in many cases it simply creates a larger silo.
If you’ve 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. Before you find yourself 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, prevent yourself from being overwhelmed.
This workshop covers:

• The value proposition behind structured, portable content
• Principles behind content convergence, integration, and syndication
• How to use the potential of your content to create unexpected value
• Ways to engage management in the discussion

Laptops not required, but recommended.

The move to content management with a structured content environment can be a barrier to authors not used to topic-based writing, structured authoring, or the complexities of XML. The anticipated ramp-up may seem daunting. Yet if we look inside our existing practices and tools, there are many concepts already used by technical communicators that shorten the learning curve and ease the transition.
With popular industry tools such as FrameMaker and RoboHelp, this session uses transferable concepts to prepare technical communicators for working in a content management environment. From the basics of “what is DITA anyhow” to separating content from format to re-use, from elements to taxonomies, we can transfer enough knowledge to ease the transition to a structured authoring environment.

This session is for anyone that is interested in learning how to manage a transition to Specialized DITA including Content Management Systems, Editors and Publishing Server issues and resolutions. As a added bonus, we will also convert an Word Document To Specialized DITA and edit the content is FrameMaker 8.  There will be a question and answer period at the end of the session for both technical and project management issues.

Consider this: a company is producing several product families. Each product has something in common with other products within the same family and with products from other families. The products are sold to both customers and OEM partners. Each OEM partner gets product documentation with its own look-and-feel. Documentation is delivered as PDF and online help. Before moving to DITA, the documentation team used to spend almost 1 week to generate a documentation set for all OEMs. With DITA, they are spending less than 1 day for the same task. Attend the session to learn how they did it.

Attendees will learn:

• How information architecture was built to maintain heavy content reuse
• How complicated content variations are handled
• How different look-and-feel of the same content is generated without mapping styles and templates every time a document is produced
• What tools were used
• How the overall documentation process and responsibilities of the team members have been changed

The session is intended for technical writers and documentation managers who are considering DITA implementation and need help in building a business case for their needs. Familiarity with DITA essentials is helpful, but not required.

DITA is being touted in all corners as the key technology for all sorts of content. For anyone doing technical documentation, DITA recommendations will be coming from all directions. If you create technical documentation—user guides, help systems, and so on— you’ll see immediate possibilities. But DITA can be implemented in a lot of different ways for a lot of different kinds of content. Should you implement DITA straight out of the box? You can, and there are real benefits to be gained. Should you specialize DITA? You can, and there are also real benefits to be gained. But there are also risks with each approach.

We’ll tackle the issue by comparing two case studies so you can learn from what others have done. By understanding how two companies arrived at their decision, you’ll understand more. 

Specific topics include:

• Introduction of the two products
• Comparing the findings of content and process analysis
• Understanding your authors and your content and translating that into requirements for DITA
• Deciding on how well DITA really fits
• The issues and risks of DITA specialization

Writing modular content that can easily be reused is important not only when working in a content management environment, but also in the world of everyday technical communication. Technical communicators are being called upon more and more to create reusable content and to reuse content that others produce. There are several good reasons to adopt writing for reuse, among them:

• Writing for reuse is efficient. It’s costly for several people to create the same product description (or procedure or error message) over and over again. Instead, one person can create it for all uses, based on a standard that accommodates all uses.
• Writing for reuse helps to ensure consistency. When the same product description is used for the manual, the online help, and the brochure, you can rest assured it is consistent.
• Writing for reuse helps to make content more usable. When writing for reuse, it’s critical that you follow standards, which are based on usability. Standards ensure that similar types of content are structured in similar ways. Everyone writing a product description follows the standard for the product description, making it both reusable and usable.
• Writing for reuse helps users to navigate through content. Reusable content is written in modules with clearly defined labels identifying the content’s purpose. Modules can be arranged to accommodate different users and users; the modularity can also help users to easily identify and select the information they need.
• Writing for reuse is efficient for you, for the company you work for, and for your users. However, writing for reuse is different than “starting from scratch” or from writing a in the narrative form that many of us have learned and followed for several years.

This workshop will convince you of the importance of writing for reuse and show you how to do it!

Modular content is just that—content that is written in modules that are used to construct a document or other type of information product. Modular writing allows you to more easily reuse content, whether you are working in a content management environment or not. Modular content also helps to make your content behave. The structure governing modules can be thought of as the “etiquette of content”. Etiquette tell us how to behave in given situations so we don’t feel out of place; modules tell the content how to behave, ensuring it is not out of place in that particular module.

Modular writing makes sense for several reasons:

• The modular design makes it easier for users to navigate through content. Well-designed modules have clearly-defined purposes and substantive labels, helping users to find their way to the right content.
• Documents can be constructed from modules, allowing for content reuse. For example, a procedure module can be used in a number of different places, as specified in your information architecture. The entire document can also be a module that is part of a larger set.
• Modular units of content can be isolated and updated quickly and easily. Modules can be accessed apart from the document as a whole.
• Modularity allows you to rearrange units as required to accommodate different users—needs or different publications—needs.

Modular writing requires defining what your modules are, describing how they are structured, and writing content consistently. Consistency is key; modules must be structured and written consistently to support content reuse and to support usability.

In this half-day workshop, you’ll learn:

• What are modules
• How can they help you create usable and reusable content
• How to define and describe modules
• How to create guidelines to support modules
• How to write the content that goes into your modules

Tasks are the main building blocks of DITA’s user assistance architecture. Tasks provide step-by-step instructions describing to users exactly what to do and the order in which to do them. It may be far more effective to show your users exactly what to do and the correct sequence through video in combination with written descriptions and still graphics.

All across the Web, video has become a powerful learning tool. For video to be effective for online documentation and training, users need a way to search it with precision. As content creators, you will learn how to segment video sequences in a systematic way, which will allow you to ID each segment. Consequently, you will be able to video manage, remix, search, and reuse video segments across as many documents as you like.

Video within structured documentation systems has its place and you can learn how to take a systematic approach to DITA/multimedia integrations. In fact, you can even create an end-to-end system that works in tandem with your current DITA system – all with open tools and standards.

Attendees will learn:

• How to capture video with either screen-capture tools or video cameras
• How to take advantage of the MPEG-7 multimedia description standard
• How to create the major components of a DITA/video mashup
• How to integrate video with your current DITA documentation set
• How DITA information architects collaborate with videographers
• How easy it is for technical communicators to insert video segment references into DITA source using standard DITA authoring methods
• How to use XSL and XQuery as the basis for video segment retrieval

The DITA conref provides a mechanism for reusing nearly arbitrary chunks of DITA content—from entire topics to words and phrases. The conref provides a powerful mechanism for information reuse; but with power can come confusion.

This session will review the use cases for DITA conrefs and will provide tips for maximizing their effectiveness.

This session will provide an introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, from an expert in DITA authoring and publishing. This workshop starts with the basics—No background knowledge will be assumed.

Note: This session is a condensed version of the workshop “Introduction to DITA”.

This session will provide an introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, from an expert in DITA authoring and publishing. This session starts with the basics—No background knowledge will be assumed.

Key points include:

• How DITA was designed to meet today’s business requirements for creating, managing, and delivering technical content
• An overview of the DITA architecture, including:
  • A look at the DITA base information unit, the topic
  • Specialized DITA topic types—task, concept, and reference
  • How DITA maps are used to define topic collections for project management and publishing
  • DITA mechanisms for information reuse, including re-usable topics and content references
  • DITA mechanisms for managing multiple deliverables, including DITA content filtering
• A look at today’s tools for authoring DITA documents
• An introduction to publishing to multiple output formats with the DITA Open Toolkit

This workshop will provide an introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, from an expert in DITA authoring and publishing. This workshop starts with the basics—No background knowledge will be assumed.

Key points include:

• How DITA was designed to meet today’s business requirements for creating, managing, and delivering technical content
• An overview of the DITA architecture, including:
  • A look at the DITA base information unit, the topic
  • Specialized DITA topic types—task, concept, and reference
  • How DITA maps are used to define topic collections for project management and publishing
  • DITA mechanisms for information reuse, including re-usable topics and content references
  • DITA mechanisms for managing multiple deliverables, including DITA content filtering
• A look at today’s tools for authoring DITA documents
• An introduction to publishing to multiple output formats with the DITA Open Toolkit

The instructor will demonstrate DITA authoring and publishing. This workshop will be “learn by showing.” Although students will not work on laptop computers, the workshop will be highly interactive, with student participation encouraged.

This half-day workshop will introduce, and describe in some detail, the key components of a successful DITA project and the attributes of an effective DITA solution. The workshop will be broken down into three different modules: Project architecture, content architecture and solution architecture. Each of these modules will dig into one of the critical dimensions of a DITA implementation - the business, the content and the technology.
The workshop will touch on such considerations as building the business case for DITA, taking the first steps into a DITA implementation, keeping the investment profile of a project low during the learning phase, and progressively evolving a solution that delivers immediate benefits while also being sustainable with an organization’s technology infrastructure.

The objective of the workshop is to provide attendees a firm understanding of what is important to consider when adopting DITA or building upon past DITA investments. The workshop will be particularly relevant for people who are still in the early phases of DITA adoption or who are reviewing how DITA has been used so far. There will be a distinct management and business orientation to the perspective provided by this workshop and this perspective will be bolstered by numerous real-world examples. This workshop will constitute a useful complement to other workshops that introduce the more hands-on or technical aspects of DITA.

This workshop will get you up and running with DocBook. If you bring your laptop with you, by the end of the session you should be able to create and publish a DocBook document in html and pdf output formats. The workshop will include basic information about the DocBook schema, DocBook stylesheets, supporting software, and how to put it all together.

If you’ve wondered what DocBook is all about, if you are evaluating it alongside other schemas, or if you want to use DocBook for a new project, this workshop will get you started.

The convergence of greater bandwidth speeds, improvements and cost-cuts in video production workflows, and the development of better open tools and standards make it not only possible, but feasible, for your company—big or small— to use video in a more strategic way. High-quality video delivered over the Web has emerged as an effective means of explaining complex ideas. For the Web at large, this is an indisputable fact.

• Find out why you should harness the power of video and apply it to your DITA documentation
• Discover why text-based content and multimedia is such a formidable combination
• Learn what the experts in e-Learning and cognitive psychology already know about video
• Find out how video increases customer satisfaction, makes you an even more valued member of your work group, and may even bring a smile to your manager’s manager, who fixates on your company’s bottom line
• We will be discussing some of the real and perceived hurdles of using video and more importantly solutions to these hurdles

The latest release of DocBook, V5.0, is a significant break with earlier releases. While the differences between DocBook V4.x and V5.0 are quite radical in some aspects, the basic ideas behind DocBook remain the same, so moving from earlier versions to V5.0 is straightforward.

DocBook V5.0 includes new markup for annotations, a unified markup for information sections, and a new and flexible system for linking. In addition, V5.0 is more extensible; it can be more easily modified, and it can be extended in separate namespaces to allow you to easily mix DocBook markup with SVG, MathML, XHTML, and other XML-based languages.

This talk will start with a quick orientation to DocBook for those who have not seen it before, then look in depth at V5.0.

Many organizations have been attracted by the promise of DITA to help them save money while addressing new requirements. Unfortunately, these same organizations have frequently found that implementing DITA, especially on a large scale, can entail numerous challenges. Firstly, there is the fact that these organizations will start their initiative with truck loads of legacy content often in a number of different formats and in varying levels of quality. Secondly, once they have a significant amount of content in DITA, these organizations find that their publishing processes cannot be genuinely sustained by the DITA Open Toolkit. Included in this demonstration will be Stilo’s innovative new solutions for converting legacy content into DITA, and for sidestepping the limitations of the DITA Open Toolkit and publishing DITA content collections of unlimited size and complexity.

Now that DITA has a few miles on it, it is a good time to step back and survey the extent of its adoption and evolution, its strengths and weaknesses, and its successes and challenges. More importantly, given the current economic climate, it is time to probe the potential of DITA to save time and money and to enable compelling new products and capabilities. This presentation will first set out to situate DITA in this larger context and to evaluate its status and potential. The presentation will then introduce the elements of a successful DITA project—with these elements constituting a methodology for adopting DITA, adapting to a new way of producing and publishing documentation, implementing cost-effective technologies to facilitate DITA-enabled processes, and deriving the benefits that DITA makes possible. The traps that threaten to divert every DITA initiative will also be surveyed. Between the elements of success and the traps of diversion, this talk should provide organizations evaluating DITA with some practical help in planning their initiatives or evaluating those that they have already done.

As companies continue to expand and information continues to grow, one of the biggest discussion points is how to manage the information and how to develop information for different users throughout the world. DITA provides a solution for these growing dilemmas. However, without good processes and a solid globalization information management system, this is a hard goal to achieve.

Companies continue to present more and more situations where they need specific deliverables for a specific user type or locale. Not only does DITA provide help internally for managing electronic information growth and storage issues, process issues, and more, but DITA also provides the dynamic ability to produce deliverables for end user satisfaction.

This session provides information about important considerations when moving to DITA regarding multilingual deliverables and how to work with cross-functional teams to deliver usable, user-specific, and locale-specific information.

Specifics of this presentation include:

• Identifying key process steps for a global DITA authoring and translation environment
• Identifying stakeholders in a global DITA authoring and translation environment
• Identifying requirements for your content management system to handle storage of translated DITA content
• Identifying requirements for your translation management system to correctly handle DITA content
• Best Practices derived from Lessons Learned

The best software user assistance is so elegant that users don’t need to look for it. This session will discuss the planning, writing, and integration of an embedded, dynamic Help system. Embedded Help is an efficient way to give users the information they need exactly when they need it, and can serve as an important driver in a user assistance library. This session will discuss the advantages of embedded help, the various types and implementation strategies, and how to integrate it with other user assistance. It will then demonstrate the implementation of an embedded dynamic help system. It will discuss how the online Help was structured to work with the interface and other documentation, and how mappings and other information were managed without the need for custom software development.

Discussion Points:

• Types of embedded Help
• Embedded Help Strategies
• Planning for information layers
• Structuring your help project for embedded dynamic help
• Demonstration of a dynamic, embedded Help system and how it was implemented

Although a DITA authoring environment maintains a similar overall environment to a book-authoring environment, there are some significant changes that could occur. Making sure to identify the process you want before jumping into the change helps in many aspects. From your process definition, you can identify training plans for your stakeholders, how you want to organize your information and deliverable development, requirements you need for your content management system, and much more.

This workshop will break down how to work with your cross functional group to develop a working DITA environment process in which all can benefit. There are 5 phases that we will look at:

Phase 1: The DITA process as a black box. Identifying inputs and outputs

Phase 2: Identify the key project management sections in the process

Phase 3: Break down each project management section to include specific actions

Phase 4: Develop process swimlanes to relate each stakeholder in the process to their specific actions

Phase 5: Write procedures to provide details about the specific actions in the swimlanes

By taking this systematic approach to developing the process before implementation, you will make sure that the majority of critical issues are discussed before they actually cause problems.

This workshop is important for all managers, content developers, project managers, and any other stakeholders to attend. However, it is most important for the people who will be driving the change to the new DITA environment.

It doesn’t matter if you document software or hardware, or you write proposals or other types of business documents.  You’ve probably had a conversation or a few about whether or not you should be moving to DITA.  This workshop is for people who can spell DITA, but are pretty much limited in their knowledge of the subject after that.  This workshop presents the basics of DITA—hence DITA 101—with an intended audience of managers and writers who to understand what DITA is and what it can do for you.

This workshop will include the following:

• Why DITA … a history
• Why DITA … the benefits
• The topic based approach
• Topics and maps
• The DITA Open Toolkit … turning topics into PDFs and HTML

Please note that this workshop is not a sequential presentation of the elements and attributes of DITA. Instead it will focus on presenting the concepts of topic-based content, typed topics, and reuse, so you can understand the opportunities that DITA offers.

Warning: This workshop contains XML content intended for a technical audience, or individuals who are not technical, but are curious about DITA and aren’t frightened of angle brackets and things called elements and attributes.

Implementing DITA can be a complex task, and often the benefits and value can be lost in the technology. So why not use a fun memorable way to educate and inform people what you are doing?

DITA is full of acronyms and terms that are often difficult to understand, even for people who are well versed in publishing technology and XML. If discussing DITA can be difficult between people “in the industry”, it is even harder to communicate what DITA means to anyone else, such as mangers, engineers, or in our case as a software vendor, potential customers.

We could have focused our message on features and functions, but instead decided that the person with the most important story when it came to DITA was the DITA project manager, and the authors who would be using it.

Those are the people who are the true heroes of any DITA implementation.

In this session we will discuss how to make the DITA message easier to understand, and the idea behind producing the “Q-Man Tackles DITA” comic book, the feedback we’ve got on it, and how it’s helped sell the concept of DITA.

So you’ve got a bunch of DITA topics…now what? How do you turn a collection of topics into well-organized, targeted publications? DITA maps are the primary method of topic reuse within DITA. Not only do DITA maps bring topics together and establish relationships between them, they can also serve as the initial framework that shapes and guides your authoring plan.

This session demonstrates how to create DITA maps, how to use nesting to create hierarchies, and how to automatically create links and relationships using the attributes available on the various DITA map elements. The session also covers how to select alternate topic titles for contents and search results, how to tag topics for inclusion in various outputs, and compares metadata assignment at the topic and map levels. Time permitting, this session will also cover using ditaval files with DITA maps to filter output for multiple audiences.

Attendees are writers, editors, managers, e-learning content creators—anyone who plans to work with DITA-based content and wants to take full advantage of its flexibility.

Many skills that journalists use can be applied to successfully develop and create user assistance. This talk will discuss the journalistic skill set and how to leverage it to provide superior user assistance.

The phenomena of “Convergence” Technical Communication and Journalism will also be discussed. With the emergence of Web 2.0, technical communicators and journalists now manage multiple deliverables (information plus videos, podcasts, links to related items and reference material) in a continuous publishing model, plus deal with the effects of “participatory media″ ― feedback on work via reader comments, blogs, etc. The layered deliverables enhance the experience for the audience, and the feedback can provide useful information and insight that can be used to improve deliverables. Feedback can also pose challenges and loss of control that must be planned for and dealt with.

Writing methodology and structure, information gathering, finding and working with subject matter experts, effective research, and time management will all be discussed. Highlights include:

Writing Methodology

•  The Inverted Pyramid

•  Don’t bury the lead

•  The Five Ws

Gathering Information
•  Working with Subject Matter Experts
•  Research

Commonalities
In addition to convergence, a few issues that are common to both professions are worth mentioning.
•  Style Guides
•  Deliverables
•  Attribution
•  Knowing your audience
•  Knowledge Management
•  Control (or lack thereof) of formatting

This presentation is for anyone who would like to improve the quality of corporate information, and/or reduce localization costs and time-to-market.

This hands-on session will demonstrate how a formal focus on quality drives down costs (especially translation costs) and time-to-market. That’s right: cost, quality, timeliness—you can finally have all three—at the same time! 

You will learn how investments in Information Quality Management tools and processes produce cost and time reductions of 10% - 25% or more.

With a vocabulary of over 900,000 English words, we can express anything in many different ways—ranging from easy to understand and translate, to extremely difficult, to incomprehensible. And (surprise!) content that is difficult for a native English-speaker to understand, is even more difficult for a non-native speaker to understand, or to translate.  Even if your content is ‘English only’, this workshop will give you insights, and introduce you to tools and processes that will help you to communicate more effectively to diverse audiences.

This session will describe and demonstrate the application of Natural Language Processing Technology and well known Quality Management principles and practices, used by forward-looking enterprises to build quality into all forms of customer-facing information from the very beginning. 

Specifically, you will learn about: 

• Proven, Quality Management principles that have been successfully applied across many manufacturing, engineering, and software development processes (6-Sigma, ISO 9000, Kaisen)
• The application of these principles to the content supply chain
• Information Quality Standards and Metrics
• Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and how it is applied to analyze content for:
  • Correct spelling, grammar, and terminology usage
  • Conformance to Corporate and/or Industry Information Standards
  • Reuse opportunities at the phrase- and sentence-level

• Tools that enable:

  • QA - Real-time feedback in native authoring, editing, and localization environments
  • QC - Automatic, independent generation and tracking of meaningful, objective Information Quality metrics and reports

NOTE: The session will also include discussion of real-world applications of these tools and processes, and the resulting impact on quality, translatability, and overall cost and time-to-market.  Attendees are encouraged to bring electronic copies of real documents (.txt, .htm/.html, .xml, .doc, .docx, .fm.) for personalized demonstrations of tool capabilities.

Content creators and producers have the worst of all worlds—incredible time pressures, regulatory requirements and oversight, litigation risk, intense competition, and a global, multilingual customer base.  Information Quality—accuracy, readability, clarity, consistency, conformance to corporate/industry standards, and translatability—is mission critical.  So is the conflicting requirement for speed.  But help is on the horizon. 

Decades of R&D in Natural Language Processing and Automated Linguistic Analysis have resulted in real-world tools that enable reuse of approved phrases and sentences—without adding to writer or editor workload. Forward-thinking global companies in a variety of industries have discovered that this capability has far-reaching ramifications not just in terms of quality, but in terms of cost and time-to-global market as well.

The Problem: How many ways can you say “the end date must be after the start date”?  In one large, sophisticated software system, we found 51 variants of that simple statement in the UI messages that appeared on various screens.  In the documentation for a complex mechanical system, we found an amazing 129 variants of an even simpler sentence: “turn the switch to the run position”.  We’ve analyzed dozens of large document sets, translation memories, websites, and knowledgebases and found that in any given corpus, anywhere from 10% to 15% of the content is expressed an average of 3.5 different ways.

The Impact: So what—who cares?  Variety is the spice of life, isn’t it?  Maybe … but that spice can be quite expensive if you’re writing to a global audience.  In a corpus of a million sentences, if you consistently used a single, approved sentence instead of 3.5 variations on the theme, you could avoid translating 250,000 sentences.  At an average cost of $2 per sentence.  Per language.  And reduce your time-to-global-market by 10% to 15% or more while you’re at it.

Even if you’re not translating, there are substantial benefits to be had.  Chances are your audience consists of a significant number of non-native speakers whose vocabularies and knowledge of English sentence construction isn’t as extensive as the average professional writer.  Or if your product goes to average American consumers—80% of whom read at a tenth grade level or less.  Can you spell litigation risk avoidance?

The Solution: Natural Language Processing and Computer Aided Linguistic Analysis has been a research topic practically since the introduction of the first computer.  The concept of having a machine analyze text like a human being has been appealing, but very difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to apply in a practical, real-world environment.  But things started to change at the turn of the century in the NLP Lab at the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI—Saarbrucken). 

This session will describe and demonstrate how linguistic meaning-based matching enables effective term-,  phrase-, and sentence-level reuse, including:

• Terminology and phrase harvesting and validation
• Reusable sentence harvesting (micro-clustering) and validation
• The writer/editor user-experience
• Auto-generated metrics and reporting

The session will conclude with examples of real-world applications and results, and an interactive Q&A free-for-all.

When you implement a DITA-based workflow, you face myriad new challenges, such as getting accustomed to topic-based writing, exploring reuse strategies, and specialization. The most difficult technical obstacle is usually setting up a PDF/print publishing workflow. The DITA Open Toolkit provides very basic PDF output, but for organizations who require attractive, professional-looking PDF content, extensive and expensive customization is required. FrameMaker is easier to configure than the Open Toolkit and produces lovely PDF files, but can you work around the limitations of the DITA support. And finally, InDesign offers the highest quality typography but has significant limitations in working with structured content. This session discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to extracting PDF from DITA content.

This session is intended for individuals who are considering a DITA implementation and expect to need PDF output. Basic familiarity with DITA, XML, and related technologies is helpful but not required.

While it’s important to choose the right tools for each job, it’s also important that content is properly prepared before you try to use the tool. This presentation will begin with a case study of a DITA implementation gone horribly wrong (names will be changed to protect the innocent). We’ll look at the problems encountered and discuss ways they could have been avoided, including review of organizational elements of data structure and conventions for files, conrefs, and ditavals. Attendees will leave with a list of practical suggestions for avoiding data duplication and other disasters in their own DITA implementations.

This session will help anyone who is considering moving to a structured system for content reuse, particularly those who may need to move legacy data. Though based on a specific DITA implementation, the concepts and techniques discussed will apply to any structured architecture.
 
Attendees will learn to assess their current data structures with an eye toward re-use, and discuss how to create naming conventions that allow their specific work groups to store, find, and retrieve content more efficiently.

Far too often, technical communication and training professionals become isolated in their own little worlds, seemingly unaware of the technological progress going on in the world around them. This presentation is aimed at uncovering some of the coolest, most useful free and inexpensive tools available on the web—tools that are changing the way we create, manage, collect, share, rate, sort, synthesize, visualize, and analyze content of various types in an increasing array of formats. You’ll discover tools you can use today to improve the way you work, as well as interesting services you may find useful in your personal and professional lives.

The Content Reuse Assessment allows you to analyze a significant cross-section of your document collection and get back objective reuse statistics, as well as specific identification of duplicate and “near duplicate” instances.

Want a free sample analysis of your content? Contact me before May 22nd and we’ll work with you to do a sample analysis and present the results at this session.

You may have heard that it’s impossible to have an automated migration of unstructured legacy content to DITA XML. Before we de-bunk that urban legend, there is some homework you need to do first. Like understanding if DITA will address your business issues. And then once you convince yourself you’ll have to convince management to give you the resources to make it happen. This presentation will address some of the issues associated with migration of content to the DITA XML standard. The presentation will address:

• Understanding if DITA is good fit for your situation
• Convincing management
• Determining an approach that works best for your situation
• Enhancing the migratability of your legacy content

You’ve read all the papers on ROI for XML and you get it. You’ve already concluded that moving to DITA will save you tons of time and money. But management says prove it. This presentation helps you determine the cost portion of the ROI calculation. What are my costs now? What will my new costs be with DITA? And what is the difference—my savings? This presentation discusses the cost metrics, reuse metrics, in a case study of one company’s journey to DITA. In the end, you should be able to speak the financial language of managers and prove to them in dollar signs the value of moving to DITA.

Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you’ve got simple text documents to deal with. DITA and other compound documents, introduce an increase in difficulty—by two or three orders of magnitude—because you’re looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks.

This session will provide participants of all technical levels a perspective on how to approach classifying content when working with compound document formats like DITA. Attendees will learn about the Metadata Maturity Model, a road map designed to help you get started—and continuously improve—content tagging within your organization. The ebenfits are many, including meaningful improvements in content findability and content reuse.

This session will be most useful to content authors and others who work with modular content for publishing, localization, and reuse.  You’ll discover:

• How to start creating and managing a taxonomy (or classification scheme) for tagging your documents
• Taxonomy examples and you’ll learn how they are represented within technologies for content authoring, content management, and search engines
• How to work with the tags you’ve already got—whether they’re derived from a folksonomy, miscellaneous tags supplied by authors, a mish-mash of legacy tags
• How to use taxonomy to integrate content authoring, content management, publishing, workflow, knowledge management, and search technologies
• How using the Metadata Maturity Model can help you maximize content reuse and end-user success

A primary reason for migration from unstructured to structured content is the superior organization of data that a structured environment, by definition, offers.  But an equally-important advantage of working with structured documents is their ability to contain information about the data in your documents using explicitly-defined methods that are not possible without structure.  While there are countless applications for, and reasons to include, metadata in your structured files, the localization process is one such area where the inclusion of metadata can greatly improve and streamline the process.  These improvements can be seen with applications used in every stage of the localization process: the authoring/publishing environment (such as Structured FrameMaker), processing tools (such as the ENLASO-developed, open-source Rainbow/Okapi tools), and in Translation Memory tools, both for translation work (such as Trados’ TTX tagged text format) and translation memory management (using the standardized Translation Memory Exchange TMX format).

This presentation will describe the general ways these improvements can be implemented, as well as providing specific examples in each these areas of the localization process.  Metadata in XML (or other structured) source files can provide information about the translation and localized content of documents in numerous ways.  Do your documents need to include country-specific regulatory statements?  Custom iconography for different locales?  Special layouts for certain languages?  Those are all things that can easily be automated by custom applications as long as the documents’ metadata specifies the target language/locale.  Are your structured files used as database files, where text associated with certain elements or attributes is UI text that requires translation, while other elements or attributes contain coding or other non-translatable information?  By using the appropriate tools to prepare those files for translation, you can clearly define contextual rules that will determine which text contained in a structured file should, or should not be, translated.

Some specific examples that will be quickly covered include:
• A plug-in to automatically localize numerous aspects of a FrameMaker file (or template) based on the file’s language attribute.
• Automatic insertion of locale-specific text in a translated FrameMaker document.
• Using both general and document-specific ITS (Internationalization Tag Set) rules to control what text in a structured document is to be translated (or not).
• Specifying attribute values in a TMX file in order to improve usability and consistency of Translation Memory.
... and possibly more, if time allows.

Many XML systems don’t leverage legacy content because it’s considered too painful and/or too expensive to bring older unstructured content to the structured requirements of the new system. Even though the legacy content is technically sound and has application for years to come. The presentation will show what can and what can’t be reasonably done at a minimal expense to impart structure where there wasn’t any before. The tips and techniques discussed can be implemented as part of in-house or outsourced migration efforts as business drivers dictate. Beyond migration, the presentation will also show how reuse can be evaluated on a micro and macro level to build a solid ROI story for funding an XML system.

eWeeks Labs selected Adobe AIR as one of the top 10 Products of the Year in 2008, and Adobe announced that in less than a year after its initial release, there have more than 100 million installations of Adobe AIR. In this session, we will explore what Adobe AIR is and why companies around the world, such as eBay, FedEx, Nickelodeon, Yahoo, Salesforce.com and others are using AIR to build the next generation of Rich Internet Applications.

You will also see first-hand how Adobe AIR and the new Technical Communication Suite 2 can be used in your own documentation to deliver the same level of Web 2.0 experiences that Rich Internet Applications are delivering today.

Whether you are new to Author-it or have been using the product for some time, this course will show you how to maximize use of the product. This course comprises lectures and demonstrations by an experienced Author-it trainer, as well as hands-on self-paced exercises and discussion.

Key topics covered include:

• Author-it interface and features
• Authoring objects
• Reuse and conditionality strategies
• Managing content
• Importing
• Unstructured vs Structured authoring*

*Structured authoring is a method of creating content that allows an organization to control and enforce the way in which a document is written to help control consistency, format, and style. This course introduces you to how you can implement a structured authoring approach to facilitate this in your organization.

After you have completed this course, you should be able to:

• Explain the differences between a structured and non-structured topis
• Create structured templates using the Structure Builder
• Understand the validation process
• Use release states to enforce structure validation
• Modify a template’s structure
• Publish validated content

You are invited to join as a writer in the BookSprint. In return, you learn about writing in a collaborative authoring environment (a wiki), learn more about the FLOSS Manuals toolkit, single sourcing, and topic authoring, and offer your knowledge of Firefox and web browsing so that others may benefit from using free documentation to learn about free software. Each writer brings his or her own laptop to the sprint. Since the FLOSS Manuals tool is completely web-based, it does not matter if you use Windows, OSX, or UNIX. The key here is that your participation matters. We have set up the online tools so you can contribute from anywhere around the world.

The support team consists of members of FLOSS Manuals writing community with Adam Hyde, the founder and Janet Swisher leading this workshop-style event. Chris Hofmann, Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation is joining us as well.

The outline for the Firefox manual will be completed prior to the Book Sprint, offering a scaffolding for the book. We have gathered documentation wants and needs from the Firefox team and a real book will be available by the end of the two-day Sprint.

To contribute you must register and then select a manual and a chapter to work on. if it is not marked ‘complete’ then press the edit button! It’s as simple as that.

Contributions can include cleaning up layout, spell checking, adding images, proof reading, or taking responsibility for writing one of more chapters. You don’t have to be a technical writer or a super geek, you just need to know how to write.

If you need to ask us questions about how to contribute then just ask us. We look forward to your contribution! For more information on using FLOSS Manuals you may also read our manual at http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManual.

You are invited to join as a writer in the BookSprint. In return, you learn about writing in a collaborative authoring environment (a wiki), learn more about the FLOSS Manuals toolkit, single sourcing, and topic authoring, and offer your knowledge of Firefox and web browsing so that others may benefit from using free documentation to learn about free software. Each writer brings his or her own laptop to the sprint. Since the FLOSS Manuals tool is completely web-based, it does not matter if you use Windows, OSX, or UNIX. The key here is that your participation matters. We have set up the online tools so you can contribute from anywhere around the world.

The support team consists of members of FLOSS Manuals writing community with Adam Hyde, the founder and Janet Swisher leading this workshop-style event. Chris Hofmann, Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation is joining us as well.

The outline for the Firefox manual will be completed prior to the Book Sprint, offering a scaffolding for the book. We have gathered documentation wants and needs from the Firefox team and a real book will be available by the end of the two-day Sprint.

To contribute you must register and then select a manual and a chapter to work on. if it is not marked ‘complete’ then press the edit button! It’s as simple as that.

Contributions can include cleaning up layout, spell checking, adding images, proof reading, or taking responsibility for writing one of more chapters. You don’t have to be a technical writer or a super geek, you just need to know how to write.

If you need to ask us questions about how to contribute then just ask us. We look forward to your contribution! For more information on using FLOSS Manuals you may also read our manual at http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManual.

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

Content models define how information products are structured. They indicate what a particular document—or website, or brochure, or newsletter—contains, and in what order. They impose structure on the writing process so that whoever creates a particular document does it consistently, eliminating discrepancies and the guesswork that often characterize writing. Content models are the specification that writers work from.

Content models are critical in a content management environment; the structure leads to more opportunities for reuse. In a content management environment, content models are implemented in DTDs (like DITA) and modeling your content helps you to determine how to implement the DTD effectively. However, content models also help to support the writing process even if you are not currently in, or considering moving to content management. Content modeling helps you to create your desired structure; you analyze and deconstruct your content to figure out an ideal way to put it back together.

Designing effective structures through content modeling allows you to construct with content more effectively, ensuring consistency, usability, and also allowing for modularity. This workshop will show you how to:

• Analyze your content as a first step to modeling
• Document your desired structure
• Describe your structure in more detail
• Assess your desired structure against existing ones, such as DITA

During this half-day workshop we will look at several sample models, and work on building some of your own.

It seems obvious that the application of quality management principles and processes in a company’s information supply chain would result in improved quality of delivered information products. Less obvious, but equally important, is that a formal focus on information quality can generate time and cost savings that attract positive attention in the executive suite. This case study presents one company’s approach to managing quality in the information supply chain.

Attendees will learn about the deployment of formal quality management principles, best practices, and tools in the information supply chain of a large global enterprise. It will cover all aspects of the deployment (at a high level), including:

• General quality management principles and their application to authoring, editing, translation, and localization functions
• Information quality standards and metrics
• Helpful tools
• Deployment successes ... and lessons learned

ILOG’s OneContent project was recently awarded the “Rare Bird Award” by the Center for Information Development (CIDM). This behind the scenes presentation tells the story of what it was like planning, managing and doing the migration from FrameMaker to XML resources in a new OneContent management system.

It is a true story about preparing and migrating nearly 4000 pages of FrameMaker documentation into XML files in a content management system with a custom model. It describes how we moved from a familiar FrameMaker and WebWorks tool chain to producing documentation in multiple output formats using Arbortext Epic editor and XHive’s Docato.  It explains how we continued to delivery product documentation during the migration process and the various trade-offs we had to make. It shows how we adapted to a changing release schedule and an unexpected delivery. It also presents the work of documentation architects and their fundamental role in this type of project: leading the way and supporting the team.

It describes the phased approach we took to migration: pilot, pet projects, partial source preparation, branching, more disruptive preparation, migration and clean up. It discusses the reuse we did and that which we did not do. It describes how we used workshops and wiki to share knowledge gained from formal and informal training. It shows the delicate balance between working to establish department-wide solutions and best practices while still meeting our local, and very immediate, needs for an answer five minutes ago.

Finally it looks back at the migration project to assess what was difficult, how long it took, how much it cost, the issues that we are still facing and the benefits we can already see. It gives some recommendations for other teams who are thinking about doing this kind of migration and it ventures some suggestions as to what, if we were to do it again, we would consider doing differently.

Attend this one day workshop to learn how to organize your projects, documents, meeting agendas & minutes, and tacit knowledge on a wiki. Discover how you can help your team make the change from trading emails and attachments to gathering, building, and editing information on the wiki. Find out how you can manage everything related to your projects, including background research, notes, URLs, meetings agendas and minutes, action items, and finished documents, presentations, and files.

Topics covered include:

• Your Wiki Isn’t Wikipedia: Six Ways To Use It At Work
• How to Use Your Wiki for Project Management
• Wiki Adoption Strategy: 4 Steps to Success

Technical writers rely on structured content to keep large amounts of information organized. Business workers gravitate less highly structured, flexible tools like wikis. So how can you bring content out of a wiki in a structured way?

We’ll look at what wikis and structured content have in common. For example: wikis promote reusability of content, structured standards like DITA ensure that content stays consistent. Wikis promote flexibility in authoring, structured standards promote flexibility in the output and use of finished content.

We’ll look at how wikis are evolving as content management tools, examples of success and failure in using wikis for structured content applications, and explore how you can get great content…in with wikis, and out with structure.

Since the 1980s and the adoption of desktop publishing as the dominant workflow, authors have been responsible not just for writing and editing but also document formatting and production—the process of finalizing content for delivery. With XML, production responsibilities are stripped away, and authors focus solely on writing and editing their content. XML also enables the creation of enforceable document templates. The decrease in authoring responsibilities results in increased efficiency and productivity for authors.

In an XML-based workflow, content is formatted automatically when the final output is produced. Instead of formatting content as it’s written, formatting is added as a separate layer. From a cost perspective, this results in eliminating an ongoing cost (formatting while authoring) and replacing it with a one-time cost (development of automated formatting). The cost savings realized from automated formatting are multiplied when you have multiple output formats and especially multiple output languages.

Content customization is a thorny problem in traditional workflows. The best possible solution has been to use conditional text or build tags to flag information as conditional, and then generate several versions of the output files. With XML, it’s possible to ship a single set of content and then display different information depending on the requestor’s profile.

Automated formatting and more sophisticated conditional processing are important but incremental steps forward in publishing. XML technology can also provide the foundation for a new approach to technical content where user-generated content, such as wikis, blogs, and forums, is integrated with the documentation created by professional technical writers. Here, XML can serve as the enabling technology that makes it possible to mix content from many different sources and deliver is to the end user in a unified presentation. Provided that each type of content is stored as XML, we can build software that reaches into the various types of content and extract the relevant chunks of information. This content integration is the new frontier for XML-based information delivery, and I look forward to seeing it evolve over the next few years.

In this session, we will look at two publishing advances separated by over 500 years and consider what lessons we might still have to learn from Gutenberg and movable type.

Moving from unstructured to structured content is like replacing the engine on an airplane in flight over the Pacific. You have to swap out critical components, test the new pieces, train your pilots, and keep the plane in the air at all times; if you fail, your passengers better know how to swim.

While no airline would do something as crazy as replace an engine in flight, no documentation group will ever have the luxury of stopping its current work to complete a content conversion. You will need to choreograph your conversion with your ongoing work, manage conversion partners, train your team, manage two delivery processes (old and new), and stay sane.

Although the technical aspects of conversion usually get the most attention, the management job is more challenging and much more vulnerable to missteps.  Even if you had a perfect conversion facility, the management tasks would be daunting, and you will never have a perfect conversion facility.

This session will focus on management strategies to help you keep your ongoing work “flying” while moving to structured content.  You will learn management best practices for:

• Selecting and managing conversion services
• Scheduling conversion with ongoing work
• Tracking and evaluating progress
• Training your team
• Managing your delivery processes

This session discusses structured authoring and how the design of DITA helps you move from an unstructured to a structured methodology. At a high level, the discussion maps the DITA architecture to the structured environment and presents a methodology to examine information and create a focused model of information content. Both a bird’s eye view of an example and a topic implementation are part of the presentation and I will handle questions at the end.

This presentation will not go into a detailed description of DITA but will give a rationale as to why the standard makes sense in today’s market.

The Documentation Department of Epson America, Inc. was searching for a way to more efficiently produce its user documentation in four languages simultaneously to keep up with market demands. We needed to move to structured authoring and single-source publishing without interrupting our traditional documentation projects, without an enormous budget, and without a programmer on staff. Our content neatly fit the DITA information model, so we wanted to quickly author our topics, store them in a trouble-free, single-source repository, and use all the DITA “bells and whistles” to publish them and maximize their reuse over time.

To accomplish this, we are worked closely with DocZone.com as they developed DocZone DITA, a hosted XML-based, DITA-compliant content management system based on the Alfresco open-source CMS platform. The CMS stores our source files, publishes our manuals using the DITA Open Toolkit, and provides a seamless interface with our local authoring tool: XMetal Author Enterprise Edition 5.1.

In this presentation, we’ll tell you:

• What we needed to accomplish to move from document-based silos of information to discrete topics in a central repository, one product line at a time
• How we chose DocZone.com as our DITA solution
• How we worked with DocZone.com to develop our system
• How we use DocZone DITA

Have you thought about converting to XML, but were afraid it was too difficult? Have you talked to consultants who make the process seem long and expensive? Wondering if you should adopt a standard like DITA or go it alone?

We will first go through the steps involved in analyzing your unstructured content’s inherent structure. Look at different structure standards and create mapping diagrams to the structure of choice. Finally, we will actually convert an unstructured document(s) to XML based on the chosen structure.

Well, if you have a laptop, Adobe FrameMaker 8, and some sample unstructured documents (Word or FrameMaker), we’ll walk through the steps that it takes to convert Word, FrameMaker or any tagged format files to XML, using both a custom DTD and using DITA. We will also edit those documents with some of the industry’s leading XML editors and import the resulting XML content into a leading Content Management System.

If time permits, we will publish the XML content in the Content Management System to various output formats.

This session is all about getting you started without the hype. This session is a good starting place for those thinking of making the move to structured documentation.

Traditional performance metrics do not capture content’s impact on business performance. A balanced scorecard uses value-based metrics that include quality, customer satisfaction, timeliness, and costs. The balanced scorecard approach goes beyond schedule, budget and traditional productivity measurement to show how a broad value-based definition of success can be measured. A balanced scorecard is especially important when adopting content management, where productivity metrics do not capture content’s total organizational value. Using the balanced scorecard, then, helps make the case for content management, create plans for implementation, and measures the core value of the initiative.

The presentation shares a case study for how Lasselle-Ramsay and Cisco used the balanced scorecard to map business strategy into operational tactics and to measure the overall value of content and the content development organization.

The discussion will focus on the key success factors for implementing a balanced scorecard approach, including:

• Translating business strategy into operational tactics
• Making measurement a continual process
• Creating team buy-in
• Four key measures: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth
• Methodology: how to quantify your results

In the past, user assistance was typically a version of a printed deliverable that was repurposed for online use into WinHelp, HTML Help, and WebHelp formats, among others. Today’s web-enabled world has changed the expectations around user assistance.

Today’s intuitive applications require a help model that is unencumbered by complicated navigation, unnecessary information, and platform inflexibility. That help should be simple, flexible, and designed for the needs of the user. As a developer of online user assistance, the focus is how to move from being a content builder to a content architect.

Many technical communicators view online help as simply being a dump of a user manual (with a few tweaks) into a different format. We believe this is the wrong approach. Online help should:

• Contain only the information that users absolutely need (tastes great, less filling)
• Adopt a flexible format that meets a diverse set of needs
• Be easy to navigate and search
• Avoid distracting the user from the task at hand
• Not be aligned to specific tools

We spend so much time worrying about the usability of the application that we gloss over the usability of the user assistance that’s included with the application. It doesn’t have to be that way. By looking at what user assistance currently is and what it could be, Aaron Davis and Scott Nesbitt will:

• Outline the shortcomings of the universally accepted online help model
• Explain why simple doesn’t mean incomplete
• Explore how to give users the information they want, in the way they need it
• Discuss how to break down the walls surrounding user assistance
• Look at new technology—like RSS, wikis, and social networking—to enrich the overall user experience

There are many ways to consider taxonomy, metadata and IA in content and document management systems but these all boil down to two things: Navigation and Search. Creating an effective user experience is about helping the user meet their objectives and find the information they seek. However, developing and implementing taxonomies in an IA context is not as simple as it seems. Classification taxonomies feed metadata and navigational taxonomies are used to, well, navigate. But these are not necessarily the same. Search can be tuned with best bets and meta data weighting. Navigation can be influenced in multiple ways. Faceted search is really navigation or is guided navigation really search?

In this session we will define these interrelated areas and discuss how they all work together in your content and document management systems to create an effective user experience.

As content management systems (CMS) spread into technical communication, they add a lot of uncertainty. Adopting a CMS isn’t as easy as changing help authoring tools, where the concepts are similar from one tool to another. CMSs bring new concepts and development processes, and demand more rigorous standards, all of which have to fit into your workflow and culture.  And CMSs cost far more than our traditional tools.  So buying a CMS can be risky.

One way to cut that risk is to create a test-bed CMS to test the effects on your workflow and culture.  Interestingly, help authoring tools like Flare and RoboHelp, among others, offer that capability.  How?

Content management systems let authors create content, store it, manage it, find it, process it for output, and control the workflow - help authoring tools offer most of those functions today.  Their ability to create and store topics, extract and customize them for single sourcing using features like conditionality and variables, store multiple versions in version control, and create reports, let us create ‘test-bed’ CMSs for evaluating changes on your culture and operations.  This session discusses how to do this.  It lists the core CMS features and equivalent features in MadCap Flare and Adobe RoboHelp, and explains how to use those features to create a test-bed CMS on which to discover operational kinks that might prevent you from making full use of your real CMS.

I will demonstrate many shareware tools that “let the computer do the working” (meaning, using the computer to automate repetitive tasks, compare data, find information quickly on your computer, etc.) to help you work more effectively and accurately so you can turn your computer off at night and sleep instead of pulling all-nighters redoing work. I also discuss tools to help keep your computer safe from the talented evildoers of the e-world. I will discuss inexpensive options for backing up your data. I will recommend tools to perform all of these functions.

• Demonstrate tools that process data efficiently and automate repetitive tasks including advanced text editors, powerful file / folder level comparison tools, and advanced search and replace tools
• Discuss tools that keep your computer safe from hackers, viruses, spam, etc. and recommend a set of tools to use
• Discuss the importance of backing up your computer on a regular basis and useful, inexpensive software for doing so
• Discuss how to determine what tools are available, which ones are best-in-class, and the long-term viability of specific tools

Supporting global markets has fundamentally shifted the way product information is distributed to your customers. Shorter development cycles have become the norm within organizations shrinking time-to-market for new and updated products. This agility provides your organization with new global revenue opportunities, market share increase and a competitive edge.

How do product documentation organizations match these fundamental shifts in product release cycles to meet the needs of a diverse, global customer base? How does an organization manage the localization process while concurrently authoring new content in the base language? How do you distribute and update specific information to your global customers in an on-line forum? How do you incorporate feedback and ideas from your customers back to your content creators?

This presentation provides insights into how Trisoft customers use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and component-based content management (CCM) to solve these challenges. Together DITA and CCM provide a solutions infrastructure to support the fundamental shift to Topic-based authoring matching agile release cycles. Topic-based authoring and CCM provide a core infrastructure to support:

• Advance reuse models to manage varying product conditions for different markets and languages
• Automate processes to manage single-sourcing for on-line help, content-sensitive help and traditional PDF deliveries from the same content
• Advance version and revision Topic and DITA Map management for all languages automating the processing of localized Topics
• Simplification of the management of last-minute product changes and the impact on product documentation to meet global release schedules

Intelligent content is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s structurally rich and semantically aware and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable.

Intelligent content let’s us deliver personalized content, enable dynamic multichannel delivery, content analytics, document exchanges, reuse, and data integration. With structured content we have the beginnings of intelligent content.

This session provides an understanding of the components of intelligent content including:

• Personas
• Semantic structure
• Metadata
• Xquery

To effectively create structured content you need effective tools. Structured content begins with the authoring tools, is managed by component content management and delivered through publishing engines.

This session provides an understanding of:

• Types of modular technology
• Understanding the options
• Key differentiators
• Identifying your needs
• How to employ use cases in addition to checklists to define your needs
• Developing an effective RFI/RFP

Structure defines how an information product is put together and defines how each element is written. Moving to structured topic-based writing can be a challenging task for writers. This session introduces the concepts, benefits, and methods for moving to structured content.

Structured content—as its name implies—is the way the content is put together to sup¬port the elements within the information product. It’s the process of authoring according to standards that dictate how content should be written to support its various uses and users. When implementing reusable content, it’s critical that authors structure and write their content consistently.

This session provides insights into:

• Concepts of structured content
• Benefits of structured content
• How DITA supports structured content
• Matching your content to structure
• Writing to structure

The challenges faced by today’s documentation and learning professionals aren’t really new - they’re just growing exponentially. As technical communicators and learning content specialists we are asked to produce more content in less time, to translate content into more languages, and to output content into more presentation formats. We now customize the infoset by audience type, by product type, by media type, and oftentimes customer. The applications and systems we use have become highly specialized and tightly integrated. It’s a delicate balance - and then the unexpected happens. New requirements, new information sets, new applications and new systems are introduced. Existing infosets are incompatible. Costly conversions are required. Retraining is necessitated. And every project is now in jeopardy.

There’s a better way - one in which development costs are shared across hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals, where the collective knowledge of the group far exceeds that of any one organization, where partners and competitors alike come together to work on solutions to common problems. Where each voice is entitled to be heard, no matter how small. This is the mission of a Standards Organization.

In this presentation you’ll learn about OASIS - the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards - and the standards its members create that have a direct impact on your job, including structured authoring, translation, and content management. You’ll also learn how a Standard is brought to life, and most importantly, how you can become an active participant in the process and make sure your voice is heard - even if you’re not a member. It’s your future.

In the fifties, entertainment content was created by business to engage customers with their products: Soap Operas. They gave you “free programming” in exchange for you listening to their brand message.

Somewhere in the next three decades, business stopped thinking they had to pay for your attention and just threw things at you and hoped you wouldn’t duck.

You ducked.

You learned to avoid things that were uninvited, unfocused or unfunny. Soon, cutting through the clutter became very expensive. Finding “your people” got difficult.

Then came sponsored search. A “free service” that you couldn’t live without—without unfocused ads, and delivered in an unobtrusive way. All was well—except, you didn’t realize you were giving away your privacy in exchange for “free service”. The free service established a symbiotic relationship with everyone.

Now, the world belongs to Google. And, you have to pay to play again.

It’s not fair. But, the one small thing that’s missing from this paradigm shift is you—the content creators. Without you, they have nothing to search and stick their ads next to.

The next big thing is how much you can “pimp” your content to a specific audience by knowing that audience even better than Google does. You deliver a group, you get paid. It doesn’t matter if you are creating “The Sopranos” or- a community of users of a specific product—connecting customers to relevant sponsored content is going to be everyone’s job in the next decade.

Attend this lively session tol learn how to start preparing now, for the content creators revolution. After the revolution, you will be the new media of preference for delivering sponsored, relevant information that will connect your community to the things that are important to them ... all while getting paid to do it.

Learn the lessons that escaped newspapers, most magazines, and the TV Broadcast networks while Google ate their lunch. Listen up today, or prepare to go hungry tomorrow.

Whether it’s Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Information Mapping, or DocBook, at the keyboard the writer is still king. How do you motivate and inspire a legion of writers to work as one? This session, from a leading content agency that focuses on writing that gets results, shares the secrets of building a top-performing writing team in today’s more structured content environment.

Attend this session if you:

• Hire teams of writers and editors
• Are responsible for the results of a finished, large-scale communications project
• Are frustrated by having to dovetail the tone, style and voices of dozens of different writers
• Don’t want to settle for second rate work on large enterprise projects

This practical session will look at real work for major firms. (You’ll have to wait until the session because they won’t let us use their names in this promo copy.)

We’ll dig into a proven methodology for harmonizing diverse tones and styles through rapid training and rapid immersion in the unified mind-voice of the business and the brand. (Yes, it’s possible, and we’ll show you show.) We’ll share top-grading techniques for writing and editing talent that will help you hire better, or outsource more confidently.  And, we’ll share how-to guides to designed to take you from strategic to tactical, fast.

Web 2.0 is a lot like DITA in that content stays separate from presentation until you process it into the final form. The problem is, that process often takes a “long time”, which in the digital age is measured in minutes, not days. Your customers aren’t always willing to wait for your company to respond to their problems in a structured, systemic way. WordPress can be the tool that makes you agile, and most importantly, it can help you reach the first place on Google for every search about your company.

This one day seminar has been given to thousands of people who were looking to understand how their business could use this open source, free tool for a super-efficient, cost-effective way to manage their websites and their customer relationships. We’ll cover how Google works, how community can change your business, and the keys to making content that solves problems including how to make your brand loved.

We’ll study webstats, usability issues and how these two factors can make your site and your content the first place that Google will turn to for answers on your area of expertise—be it your product, service, or industry. Examples of best practices (and what works and what will work in the future) will be discussed. Then, we’ll move into a hands-on, step-by-step familiarization with WordPress and it’s awesome tools to make content generation easy. Even if WordPress isn’t the platform you will want to use- these same principles can be applied to Joomla! or Drupal- two more advanced options that can be considered if WordPress isn’t quite what you think you want.

Video is not only for YouTube: it is a powerful means of connecting with your end-users, especially if it is coupled with text-based content. The potential of MPEG-7 as it applies to multimedia and technical documentation is truly remarkable and relatively untapped. The MPEG-7 standard allows for the description of video via XML metadata, and the separation of the metadata from the source video makes it possible to develop powerful XML-based applications that integrate video with your current documentation set.

In DITA, tasks are the main building blocks of its user assistance architecture. Tasks provide step-by-step instructions by describing to users exactly what to do and the order in which to do them. It may be far more effective to show your users exactly what to do and the correct sequence through video as well as by written descriptions and still graphics. Video segments can be managed, remixed, searched, and reused across as many documents as you like. This is possible because of the convergence of greater bandwidth speeds, improvements and cost-cuts in video production workflows, and the emergence of MPEG-7, a multimedia content description standard.

Attendees will learn:

• How to take advantage of MPEG-7 to connect with your target audience
• How to integrate video with your current DITA documentation set
• How DITA information architects collaborate with videographers
• How easy it is for content creators to insert video segment references into DITA source using standard DITA authoring methods
• How to use XSL and XQuery as the basis for video segment retrieval

In our current economy, your enterprise may become more dependent on World Trade than ever before. How do you get the world to come to your doorstep to do business? That was the challenge facing the Montana World Trade Center (MWTC). They needed a web site that non-technical staff could update via CMS and also have content translated and globalized for international customers. Target languages included Chinese, Arabic and Spanish.

In such a project, there are locale and cultural issues to consider, as well as content translation. What colors and images are considered lucky or unlucky in China or many Arabic speaking nations? What are some of the seemingly innocent images that could alienate the specific international partners or customers you are seeking?

The primary requirements for MWTC’s site included:

• Multilingual
• Better lead generation
• Better SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Ability for non-technical staff to easily add and edit content
• Automated approval processes for content contributors
• Automated translation workflow for language versions
• Subscriptions, Web alerts & memberships
• Schedule content to go live and expire
• Internal search of content and library assets

Although there are many ways to organize a multilingual website project, there are some specific fundamental Phases, Steps and Tasks which should be integrated into every Web Design, Development and Deployment (W3D) plan.

Services in creation of this website included:

• Website Design and Development
• Glossary Development
• Translation and Copy Writing
• Localization of Graphics and Multimedia
• CMS deployment, training and support
• Global Search Engine Marketing (country-specific SEO)
• Website training

This presentation shares lessons learned from a colorful case history and covers the proven ten-phase W3D process to ensure project success on a global basis. Processes will be explained in detail, including which process can occur concurrently:

• Phase I: Discovery, analysis and Project Proposal
• Phase II: Project Planning and Kick Off
• Phase III: Information Architecture (IA): Content, Creative, Technologies aligned with Business Processes
• Phase IV: Production: Content, Creative, Technologies
• Phase V: QA and Testing
• Phase VI: Globalization
• Phase VII: QA and Testing
• Phase VIII: Launch
• Phase IX: Search Engine Optimization
• Phase X: Updates and Content Management

“Information architecture is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint before you dive in and put the thing together. Information architecture (also known as IA) is the foundation for great Web design. It is the blueprint of the site upon which all other aspects are built—form, function, metaphor, navigation and interface, interaction and visual design. Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do when designing a site.”

You’ve read all the papers on ROI for XML and you get it. You’ve already concluded that moving to DITA will save you tons of time and money. But management says prove it. This presentation helps you determine the cost portion of the ROI calculation. What are my costs now? What will my new costs be with DITA? And what is the difference—my savings? This presentation discusses the cost metrics, reuse metrics, in a case study of one company’s journey to DITA. In the end, you should be able to speak the financial language of managers and prove to them in dollar signs the value of moving to DITA.

This hands-on workshop provides an overview of topic-based writing concepts and principles, and then lets you try your hand at using a topic-based approach. We will define key concepts (such as topic, information type, and element), look at examples of different types of topics, and discuss pros and cons of a topic-based writing approach.

You will get a chance to work with actual content, as you

• Identify and define information types
• Chunk linear information into topics
• Assess what kinds of changes are required to make individual topics work effectively for users
• Consider how to connect and cluster topics, to provide a cohesive collection of information for users, even when content is complex

Along the way, we will touch on related questions such as:

• How long should a topic be?
• Can a topic-based approach work for complex, highly-technical information?
• What’s the difference between topic-based writing and structured writing?
• Do you need to use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) to benefit from topic-based authoring? Do you need a content management system?
• What benefits can you realize by following topic-based writing principles, and what require assistance from tools and technologies?
• Just how hard is the shift to a topic-based approach?

You are encouraged to bring a sample of your own content (10 to 15 pages or topics, printed single-sided).

A laptop computer is NOT required.

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.

If you’ve bought MadCap Flare but haven’t taken a course, or even if you have taken a course, you may be boggled by the number of control options that Flare offers.  Which ones should you use in your project? What about options that the course touched on but didn’t cover in detail? How do you set up a project for efficient development and maintenance? Where do you start?
 
This half-day hands-on workshop answers these questions. It starts by reviewing the project control features in Flare and the files that control their settings. The workshop then walks you through the creation of a set of basic control files that are likely to apply to typical projects—topic templates, style sheets, table style sheets, and skins.  (Depending on attendee interests and available time, the workshop may look at additional control files such as variable sets, snippets, and conditional build tags.)  Finally, the workshop discusses how to distribute the control files to multiple developers manually and programmatically using a new approach introduced in Flare 4—the ability to create a centralized master set of control files and re-use them in other projects semi-automatically.

If you’re using Flare but haven’t taken any training, even the basic, “standard” features can be overwhelming. The Flare-ish features can be even more so. Flare offers style sheets, for example, like any other such authoring tool, but implements them a bit differently than you may be accustomed to. The result can be confusing at first, until you understand what’s going on.

This half-day hands-on workshop explores the basic tasks involved in creating a project, creating topics, adding navigation and links, controlling styles, and generating outputs by defining “targets.”  The focus of the workshop isn’t so much the mechanics of these tasks, although you’ll spend time on them of course, but rather on the design options available for those tasks. And, depending on the available time, Neil will try to answer as many as possible of those questions that you’ve been building up.

Although not quite as exciting as risking life and limb to explore lost civilizations, knowledge archaeology is an inevitable part of each content management project. Knowledge archaeology is the effort of searching for and discovering lost content assets and then undertaking the painstaking process of recovering these assets into a form that can become useful once again.

It is often staggering how much content that the typical organization creates and while much of it can be safely returned to the crypt, there are inevitably treasures that are uncovered that must be converted into a new format so that the embedded knowledge can be put back into service. Sometimes it is a matter of establishing a documentation baseline for an initial version of a product so that the team of technical communicators can commence the process of updating the materials. In other cases, the content that is recovered is critical to the survival of the organization.

A bit like a snake-infested cave, the conversion of content from lost formats into XML, and increasingly into DITA, is a task that frightens many project managers. It is assumed to be difficult and expensive and a task that will depend on the engagement of numerous specialists who write strange programs and talk about stange characters. The real stakeholders in the content would normally wait outside the cave of conversion listening to the struggles occurring under the surface. If all goes well, the hero emerges with the lost treasure. If things don’t go well…

Fortunately, content conversion techniques and tools have evolved substantially over the last 20 years. Today, powerful migration solutions perform the excavation, uncovering the secrets of the legacy formats, and complete the conversion of the content into XML and DITA. With these tools, the main task of archaeology becomes the work of the real stakeholders in the content - the subject matter experts and the technical communicators who understand what the content is good for.

The lost art that is in fact recovered when the state-of-the-art in content migration technologies are leveraged is that of communication. With the right tools at hand, the communicator focuses on making past knowledge relevant to today’s needs and this is not an entirely mechanical process. It is instead a creative process that can save organizations the cost, time and pain of recreating content that already exists.

Some organizations may treat the departments that create content like cost centers. Others treat their content like the valuable asset that it can be. It’s content - text, music, and videos - that brings potential customers to their sites, content that persuades them to make their purchases, content that instructs them in how to make their purchases, and content that makes up the product being sold.

In the music industry, the quality of the user experience - in other words, the quality of the content and how it comes together - is paramount to keeping ahead of the competition. Take a peek behind the curtain at the techniques that allow disparate types of content to converge and be served up in a way that forms a unique combination of magic that each vendor hopes will be the winning formula.

In this session, we will look at the different experiences offered by several leading music services, and at the various ways that they combine their content. We will also look at the related roles that various content structures play, from microformats to XML, and the role of content management systems, in the delivery of that content. As well, we will look at how to take the lessons from this high-profile industry and apply them to create high-value content and a good user experience in our own organizations.

This half-day workshop introduces technical writers to the area of documenting APIs (application programming interfaces) and SDKs (software development kits). Writers should consider this area as the demand is often greater than the supply of writers; hence you can get higher pay than for other types of writing. Also, you often get greater flexibility in telecommuting / working remotely when doing this type of writing.

Tools used to generate the documentation from the source code, “a single source of truth”, such as Doxygen and Javadoc will be demonstrated.

Attendees will actually use these tools in hands-on exercises to generate documentation from sample source code. They will be able to use these completed examples as part of their portfolio when applying for technical writing jobs in these areas. The completed exercises will be reviewed and discussed. Common errors in coding for both tools will be discussed.

A new and growing area of opportunity, Web Services, will also be discussed and demonstrated.

Creating usable structured content depends much less on the tool, and much more on the ability of the author to apply sound communication theory to content as it’s being written. The principles behind the Nurnberg Funnel, along with minimalist writing, Plain Language, and translation-ready writing, allow authors to create crisp content that satisfies not only the “4Cs” of good writing, but also lays the groundwork for creating structured XML content.

In today’s business, products and processes are becoming more complex, while companies increasingly have to translate their information into different languages as their products enter a global market.

However, information that is difficult to understand due to the use of ambiguous words and complex sentence structures can lead to:

• Damage, injury and costly legal liabilities
• High translation / localization costs
• Unsatisfactory translation quality
• Higher technical support costs
• Unnecessary costs resulting from miscommunication (such as recall costs)

Therefore, in order to better communicate technical information to a global audience, it is essential to standardize on terminology and style. Controlled authoring makes documents clearer and more readable for a global audience, which applies to both non-native English as well as native English speakers. Furthermore, controlled authoring enables writers and editors to increase the clarity and consistency of technical documents, resulting in faster, clearer and more accurate translations.

Steps of implementation

In order to successfully implement the use of controlled authoring, the following steps are necessary:

1. Standardize on company terminology—In order to eliminate ambiguity in company terminology, it is necessary to create a dictionary that distinguishes approved words vs. non-approved words.
2. Training—Tedopres offers classes to train writers, editors and engineers how to write in a clear and understandable way, and how to optimize documents for translation. The training comprises lots of hands-on exercises, focusing on workarounds for common problems.
3. Controlled authoring software—Tedopres’ HyperSTE controlled authoring software helps writers and editors to ensure compliance with corporate terminology and style guide rules; as an interactive checker tool for the writer and as a quality measurement tool for the editor.

Results

The use of controlled authoring will result in the following benefits:

• Quality assurance, quality control and quality measurement for content
• Cost savings for translation and localization (up to 40% per language)
• More accurate translations and improved translation quality
• Compliance with corporate style guides and writing standards
• Reduced safety risks and liability claims
• Improved technical support
• Reduced time to market
• Efficient authoring
• Increased benefits for DITA, S1000D, SCORM, XML and Content Management due to optimum reusability

Strategy is an ambiguous term.  The strategy for developing content, messaging and branding?  Is it the technical strategy for implementing the CMS? The strategy for selecting a tool? Strategy for migrating and tagging content? Change management/educational/adoption strategy? Globalization strategy? And so on.  In this session we will review the core components of a content management strategy and ways to execute and “operationalize” strategy.

Attendees will learn:

• Various approaches to developing a content management strategy
• How to most effectively gather requirements
• How to correctly drive technology selection with business requirements
• What to do when you cannot drive technology selection with business requirements
• How to keep your strategy from becoming “shelf ware”

Developing a search strategy cannot be an afterthought. Search needs to be considered in the context of information architecture, taxonomy, and content management. Organizations are struggling with unifying their content management tools, enterprise information and search systems so that information can evolve with changing markets and business processes yet remain in context to user needs. How can you create a search strategy that will address diverse business and technical requirements without creating redundant integration points as new repositories and applications are developed? This session provides practical approaches to developing an actionable search strategy including checklists and example questionnaires as well as illustrative findings and approaches.

Why don’t people respect the documentation we create as much as we do? Maybe part of the problem is that the vast majority of us are writers. We love the written word. Perhaps, we love it a little too much? We need to ask ourselves is the written word the best thing for documentation? Is it the best thing for us as an industry, and is it the best thing for you as a content developer.

This presentation will take a look at why we are so focused on the written word, and present a few ideas about better ways for us to deliver our message to the end user in a way that increases customer satisfaction, and might even gain docs a little more respect.

The presentation will discuss what we as documentation professionals can learn from just observing the world around us, and how people communicate. It will also look at the impact of new Web2.0 technology and social networks, and how they will change the way we need to view documentation design, distribution and usage.

If you are involved in any aspect of documentation design or content development, then this is the presentation for you.

Feedback from previous attendees at this presentation has included comments such as “inspiring,” “totally changed the way I look at how I deliver information,” and “made me take a close look at how I write documentation”.

Be one of the first to hear MadCap Software’s plans for DITA support. This will be the first public session ever where MadCap Software will explain their roadmap plans for the next year, including the new DITA support. The remaining time will be spent in live demo of key MadCap Software tools including Flare. If you have been wondering what all of the MadCap Software buzz was about, this would be the perfect overview session to get the big picture.

Today organizations are facing the multiple challenges of global change. Not only do they have to manage their geographical dispersion, with employees, distributors and clients spread throughout many continents, but they also need to adapt constantly to evolving communication technologies. In these challenging conditions, it is becoming harder to ensure that content is produced to the highest level of quality and is consistent with the organization’s vision.

Join us to find out how the Author-it Content Management suite allows you to:

• Increase content quality by creating, managing and auditing content at the sub document level
• Collaborate across geographically dispersed teams in a controlled authoring environment
• Manage your documentation for export, including translation workflow and automatic multi-language delivery (print, web, training)
• Customize your documentation for multiple audiences by publishing multi-layered documentation based on various criteria

Few companies understand that they are in possession of a valuable hidden asset. Senior management rarely realizes that the past investment in documentation and translation can have lasting value in terms of reuse and leverage. Enter a new term: “linguistic assets”. Coined in recent years, this term refers to the value locked in original documentation pieces and their corresponding translations. Modern technology can unlock this value by streamlining the writing process and optimizing use of both source and translated material. The Across LanguageServer is an ideal platform upon which knowledgeable language professionals can generate efficiencies, cost-savings, and faster turnaround times. Armin Wahl will demystify the process of storage and reuse of both original and translated linguistic assets using the LanguageServer for terminology management, source authoring assistance, and translation memory.  Find out how to maintain, improve, and extract the hidden value your company doesn’t know it possesses. Come home with new perspectives to share with your team and your management.

Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) information model and Component Content Management (CCM) are hot topics for many organizations. Using a combination of customer case studies and product demonstration, Chip Gettinger will discuss the business and applications benefits of DITA and CCM adoption.

It’s no secret that the thought of XML and its technical complexities stops many writers from even considering structured authoring. But what happens when people find out that they can create XML documents right in Microsoft Word?  Once the fear is gone, authors see how much “smarter” XML documents are, and how smarter documents can make their workday far more interesting and productive.
This session will demonstrate how the Microsoft Office System is enhanced with Quark’s products for enterprise authoring of XML:

• XML Author for Microsoft Word (formerly In.vision Xpress Author): The leading narrative XML authoring environment
• DITA Studio:  designed from the ground-up for DITA content modeling and publishing
• The DITA Suite for Microsoft SharePoint: An off-the-shelf solution that provides DITA authoring, component management, and publishing in a single product suite

Come join us as we create a DITA publication from start-to-finish, showing how all types of users can collaboratively create XML content in their favorite Microsoft tools.

In today’s Web 2.0 world, the Internet has connected all of us and consumer experiences have become richer than ever with access to dynamic and interactive information and its unlikely people will ever be satisfied with anything else and that includes technical information. Working is no longer a solo experience, but rather, a social one, which means that peer collaboration and real-time screen sharing, for example, are now essential. This session will provide an Adobe technology update and demonstrate how the Adobe Technical Communication Suite leverages various innovative Adobe technologies, such as Adobe AIR, Acrobat Collaboration tools and our new Cloud Computing story to enable Technical Communicators to redefine the way they communicate.  Don’t miss it!

Do you have Standards for Information Quality?  Do you monitor, measure, and track conformance to your Information Quality Standards?  Are your Information Quality metrics collected consistently and objectively?  Are your Information Quality metrics collected automatically on every information product that you deliver?  Are your Information Quality metrics presented in a meaningful, actionable manner?  Can you conclusively demonstrate Information Quality improvements?  Can you tie cost and time-to-market reductions directly to Information Quality improvements?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, you are applying well-known Quality Management principles to your Information development, localization, and production processes.  And you know that in addition to quality improvements, you have generated substantial cost and time savings.  You also know that your company is among the elite minority that knows their own IQ, and continually improves it.

The rest of you likely answered no to most of the questions, either because you thought it was too hard, or too expensive, or too time consuming.  Or not possible at all…

This presentation will let you know what the yes people know, and how you can apply that knowledge to help improve your company’s IQ. 

Specifically, you will learn about:

• Proven, well-known Quality Management principles that have been successfully applied across most manufacturing, engineering, software development, and other service processes (6-Sigma, ISO 9000, Kaisen)
• The application of these principles to the content supply chain
• Information Quality Standards and Metrics
• Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and how it is being applied to analyze content for
• Correct spelling and grammar
• Consistent use of terminology
• Conformance to Corporate and/or Industry Style Guides
• Translatability
• Reuse opportunities at the phrase- and sentence-level
• Tools that enable
• QA – real-time feedback in native authoring, editing, and localization environments
• QC – automatic, independent generation and tracking of meaningful, objective Information Quality metrics and reports

The session will also include real-world applications of these tools and processes, and the resulting impact on quality, translatability, and overall cost and time-to-market.

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.

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.

Many organizations have a style guide, but how many are actively referenced by all your authors?  How can you leverage terminology, style guide rules and previously written and translated content to improve the quality of content and prepare it for global audiences? 

This session will examine how organizations that have implemented global authoring strategies can dramatically improve authoring productivity. By providing real-time advice and automating many stylistic checks for their authors, editors and reviewers, the time and cost of global authoring can be greatly reduced.  SDL’s Global Authoring Management System (Global AMS) will be highlighted and demonstrated.

So you’ve decided that adopting DITA and authoring with XMetaL is the path you want to take. But there are still so many questions to answer!  A successful migration to structured authoring and content management requires careful planning and decisions that match the needs of your organization. This workshop with start with an overview of best practices that include:

• What is the value of structured authoring and why adopt DITA?
• How does the nature of authoring content change in this environment?
• How do you plan for the impact that structured authoring and content reuse will have on your organization’s workflows, content governance, and staffing requirements?
• What are best practices for adoption, including templates, specialization, and customizing XMetaL?

The majority of the workshop will focus on DITA fundamentals and authoring with XMetaL. In work sessions that are 50 percent hands on, participants will learn:

• Content Creation
• Organizing Content
• Creating a Publication, Bookmaps, and DITA maps

Participants will complete with workshop with a deeper understanding of what it means to migrate to a structured authoring environment, how to plan for a successful adoption, and foundational skills for authoring with XMetaL. Participants will also receive a trial copy of Just Systems XMetaL.

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.

With Author-it, you can publish directly to a number of sources, easily creating HTML pages from standard content within the Author-it database. However, sometimes you may have specific requirements for your organization, or client, that require customizations. Almost any aspect of the HTML output can be changed. The only limitations are your own knowledge of HTML. Join Char James-Tanny for some great tips and tricks on customizing HTML in this workshop which include: 

• Modifying styles in the underlying CSS
• Customizing the frameset
• Creating and using your own HTML templates
• Using Publishing Profiles to modify theme (for example, for different clients)

Students should bring a laptop preloaded with Author-it. Download a trial version.

The first hour of this session will be a high level overview of just what CSS means to the modern author and its importance and role in the evolving world of XML- based content. Following this overview, specific techniques for controlling the look and feel of Flare published content will be presented. The demonstration will include techniques for using CSS for online and for print publishing with maximum control.

While primarily targeted at using CSS within the MadCap Flare authoring environment this session will also provide a good grounding on general CSS information for authors using any tool chain.

While topic based authoring provides for maximum content reuse, this session will explore the specific techniques for controlling and manipulating content down to the element, paragraph, and even character level. The use of conditional markers, variables, publishing control files and more will all be demonstrated.

This session will be beneficial for both the existing Flare user and to those who are not currently using Flare but want to find out more about this state of the art authoring suite.

Find out why so many authoring teams are switching to topic based authoring for maximum content reuse. This session will explore the concepts of topic based authoring and will showcase the MadCap Flare authoring environment in doing so. The import and conversion of existing content, creation of new content, and the use of XML metadata to control content while publishing will all be demonstrated.

This session will be beneficial for both the existing Flare user and to those who are not currently using Flare but want to find out more about this state of the art authoring suite.

Students should bring a laptop preloaded with Author-it. A trial version can be downloaded at http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=freetrial

One of the foundations of single sourcing is the ability to reuse the content that you or other authors produce in multiple information products. This approach requires changes in the way that content is produced. Large blocks of content such as chapters are rarely reusable in their entirety between different outputs, however the smaller components that make it up - paragraphs, sections, graphics - may be used in many information products.

Author-it allows you to maximize reuse by creating content in small, independent chunks, then combining and arranging them as needed for the intended output.

This workshop introduces you to the features of Author-it that allow your content to be created once and reused in many different places, and to the Conditional strategies you can use to achieve the results you want.

• Strategies for reuse
• Strategies for conditionality
• Embedded topics
• Variables
• Publishing Profiles
• Author-it Xtend