You are invited to join the Documentation and Training West Conference as a writer in the Firefox BookSprint. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be physically at the conference to participate. You can work remotely, via internet, email and telephone. In return, you’ll learn about writing in a collaborative authoring environment (a wiki), discover the FLOSS Manuals toolkit, participate in a single sourcing/topic-based authoring project, and share your knowledge of Firefox and web browsing so that others may benefit from using free documentation to learn about free software.

Each on-site writer brings his or her own laptop to the sprint. Remote writers will utilize their own laptops or workstations. 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 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.

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. Anne Gentle will be participating from her home office in Austin.

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!

Get more information on using FLOSS Manuals.

This year’s Documentation and Training West conference is being held March 17-20, 2009 in majestic Palm Springs, California at the Westin Mission Hills Resort and Spa. Nestled in the heart of the Coachella Valley and set on 360 acres within the Rancho Mirage community, the Westin Mission Hills is surrounded by landscaped courtyards and extensive waterways. The Resort is a premier meeting place with extensive indoor and outdoor venues, two world class golf courses, spas, pools, and is located just moments away from a myriad of famous Palm Springs sights and attractions including shopping, dining and casinos, nature trails, art museums, live entertainment, dancing, and more. And of course, there’s the beautiful weather.

Register today!

When a lot of communication is compromised by being squeezed into 140-character Twitter posts or thumbed into text messages, creative spelling is considered, in some circles, de rigeur. Not in the know? If you need help reading “AMOF, Im OTW where its BAU. Feeling IOMY so IG2R”, relax, there is a dictionary.

These shortcuts do have their consequences, though. Talk to any lawyers, and they’ll tell you the implication of a misplaced comma. It can be expensive, as Roger’s Communications found out the hard way, when a lucrative contract was able to be ended several years early. Or it can be expensive and embarrassing, as well. Just ask tattoo artists Sam Hacker and Alfonse Wingfield, whose misspelled client tattoos netted them lawsuits.

Andrew Bredenkamp of acrolinx has made it his business to understand the many ways that the cost of quality can save a corporation money, and a lot of pain - and every second Thursday, acrolinx offers a seminar that demonstrates the various aspects of language consistency and other aspects of quality. In that same vein, Bredenkamp presents No Metrics, No Quality: Know Metrics, Know Quality! at DocTrain East 2008.

It’s been seven years since the publication of the pivotal book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, where the idea of marketing as pushing a message was replaced by the core hypothesis that markets are now conversations between people wanting to quickly share relevant knowledge. The idea that corporations need to engage in a conversation with their customers and potential customers with an authentic voice became an important concept for online communication, in general, and paved the way for much of the work done since then.

This idea has been developed by others since, notably in the book Naked Conversations, which demonstrates how communicating with an authentic voice is critical to success, whether yours is a micro-business or one of the largest technology corporations in the world. One of the big differences today is the new technology facilitating those conversations, and the variety of applications that are available.

David Esrati of The Next Wave understands the connection between blogging, blogging technology, and authentic voice. His own blog, Websiteology, is wealth of information on about the how to - and how not to - of blogging.  Billed as a seminar on Web 2.0 for those still struggling with Web 1.0, it has information for bloggers of all levels.

David presents Blogzilla: Why Blogs Are The Monster In The Business Closet: You Are No Longer In Control Of Your Brand at DocTrain East 2008.

Selling into new foreign markets is usually an exciting prospect for marketing departments, but when the realities of localizing the marketing or technical material hit home, the excitement can turn to panic.

A common misperception is that the vendor can translate what they choose, and by simply hiring someone to translate text into the target language, they’ll be ready to do business. The reality is that professional translation agencies understand the ins and outs of the customs and regulations in various languages and countries. These regulations can get quite complex, and when localization is being done in multiple languages, the permutations and combinations can get out of hand if not properly managed.

To see how a properly managed localization project brings value to an organization, read some of the case studies published by McElroy Translations.

McElroy’s Bob Donaldson presents Theory of Constraints and Project Management: Challenging the Dominant Paradigm at DocTrain East 2008.

Watching the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was, aside from a compelling series of sports events, is also an interesting exercise in the art of localization. As China hosted athletes from over 200 countries, the localization requirements boggle the mind. The Chinese translated signage into the second most common language in the world, English, to make certain that visitors to their country could navigate without the need for a translator. Recognizing that visitors would have trouble reading Chinese signage and understand Chinese instructions was, no doubt, a major factor in localizing material used by tourists and Olympic participants. Being welcoming hosts is an important aspect of Chinese culture.

Likewise, the important of localizing in a domestic market the size of the United States is becoming more important. Demographic trends are pointing to localization as a phenomenon not just for companies doing business in foreign markets, but also for companies doing business at home. Doing an internal audit can be illuminating. For example, an organization that translates only negative messages such as “Wet Floor” and “Shoplifters Prosecuted” sends a very different message than an organization that translates the value-added messages, as well.

To learn about the strategic, as well as technical, side of localizing content, visit the ENLASO Language Center Resource Center for a range of educational resources, from webinars to white papers to case studies.

John Watkins, president of ENLASO, understands the nature of product marketing in a changing domestic consumer market; he presents Reaching Untapped Markets in the US at DocTrain East 2008.

After 30 years in technical publications management, Kent Taylor decided he’d had quite enough stress, thank you very much, and that it was time to move on to something a little less stressful. So he retired from the rat race and took up competition aerobatics. He found that tumbling and hurtling toward the ground at high speeds was quite relaxing compared to the final few years of his career as a tech pubs manager in a ‘right-sizing’ environment.

What gives Kent the perhaps unique perspective that looping and rolling and flying upside down was less stressful than managing tech pubs? Kent recalls the gradual decline of the technical publications craft over the course of two decades as cost reduction became the primary focus, and executive decision-makers expected tools to compensate for skills – after all, tech pubs was “just typing …”

First came the tools frenzy, with desktop publishing, multimedia, hypertext, and other bells and whistles being thrown at writers who were given those tools with the expectation of making their content better - with a tacit understanding that “better” mainly meant “cheaper to produce.” This was followed by the cumulative starvation programs of “do more with less” and the emphasis on not producing good, but “(barely) good enough.”

Kent saw a downward spiral that helped writers produce more and more substandard content faster and faster, and distribute it in more media, and more languages than ever before. And about the time that content could be automatically marked-up and single-sourced and tagged—with more emphasis on the tags themselves than on the content between the them—Kent left the field and stayed away for nearly ten years.

Then, completely by accident, Kent stumbled across acrolinx, makers of acrocheck, and was immediately hooked. What he discovered was a tool that can objectively measure the quality of “all the pesky stuff between the tags” that the consumers of the content actually see – a QA/QC tool for tech pubs!

Kent admits that the idea behind acrocheck is hard to explain to people used to worrying about quantity of output rather than quality of the customer experience. He describes his product as a “spell-checker on steroids.”  With a sophisticated natural language processor under the hood, it does check spelling and grammar, but it also checks conformance to your organization’s style guide and terminology guidelines. It also provides objective metrics and reporting that managers and executives crave, and an ROI that the CFO can’t ignore.

The idea that measuring and improving content quality can improve the lot of technical communicators is not a new idea, but this particular combination of product, methodology, and messenger is. At DocTrain EAST, where the theme of the conference is Advancing Your Career, technical documentation professionals can find out more about this tool.

If you’re in a smaller company, you’re used to taking a pass on many of the tools and technologies designed to create work efficiencies, no matter how cool, developed by companies that think of scalability in terms of “upward from large to huge”.  The good news is that now, smaller companies can take advantage of at least one of the tools that larger companies take advantage of on a routine basis. Across Systems, a developer of translation management software, has developed Across Personal Edition, a standalone application for smaller companies and freelancers.
The importance of extending the potential of streamlining the delivery of translated content has been important to Armin Wahl. He recognizes that the potential of the corporate asset called “content” needs to be available across the board, from multinational corporations to the independent translators hired to service them.

Information about Across Personal Edition, as well as white papers and webinars can be found on the Across Systems site. Wahl, with Across Systems, presents Global Sales in Local Languages: Streamlining Language Production at DocTrain East 2008.

We take a lot of technology for granted, even if we do work on the edges of the technology industry. The growth of ubiquitous computing adds a layer of complexity to consumer products; even the simplest of products has some sort of computing power incorporated into it. In the home, the idea of a home media network particularly requires lots of interoperability. It’s hard enough to program the digital cable remote control with the controls for the TV; getting the television to work with the DVD player and the audio components and the wireless speakers, and perhaps other components such as computers or digital audio players, seems an impossibly complicated task.

It turns out that the answer is not in complexity, but in simplicity. Vendors recognize that home media networks are becoming an important aspect of ubiquitous computing, which adds to the need for software to inter-operate. By standardizing on an open-source platform, ACCESS Linux and its NetFront Living Connect, the multitude of vendors in this market space have embedded a flexible solution in millions of home media devices. David Scheslinger clarifies the implications of this initiative in a webcast about Linux Mobile. Schlesinger will also present The Next Generation Home Digital Experience at DocTrain East 2008.

One of the techniques to ensuring job security is to specialize in a niche writing area. Creating SDK (Software Development Kit) documentation is one of those areas with seemingly limitless growth. As the drive for a social experience increases, the need for various software applications to inter-operate also increases. Companies are being asked to release their APIs (Application Programming Interface) so that developers of other applications can develop software for their platforms.

Writing in this area takes more than good writing skills. Before developers allow a writer to have access to their code, they want to be sure that the writer understands the importance of what this access means. Writers who can demonstrate an understanding of the landscape have a distinct advantage; the trust factor that the writer can think like a developer to describe the code, and who will not inadvertently create chaos in the code library ensures ongoing access.

Want to be part of the SDK club? Attend Ed Marshall’s session on Breaking into and Succeeding in the API and SDK Specialty Market at DocTrain East 2008.

If you’ve become proficient at single sourcing, learned about DITA, embraced content management, and thought you could relax into your profession, think again. Just when you thought you could take a breather, the ambitious developers at IBM introduced a new platform to be understood. Eclipse, an open development with extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes, allow projects to be created without being constrained to a single product or service, by ensuring the ability to build, deploy, and manage software across the product’s lifecycle.

Given that a project could span multiple products, the idea of creating content to support users, specifically online help or a knowledge base, could become a daunting proposition. To the credit of the Eclipse stakeholders, they devised an ingenous plan to include ways to develop effective user assistance for projects developed on the Eclipse platform. Dr. Lee Ann Kowalski, who helps teams use the Eclipse mechanisms effectively, discusses Getting Up to Speed on Eclipse User Assistance at DocTrain East 2008.

In 2008, the first STC chapter to officially “go virtual” was the Canada West Coast chapter. This move was in response to the need to service a province-wide membership – as technology centers open from Vancouver Island to northern Prince George to the Silicon Vineyard of Kelowna, their membership spans more of BC’s almost 375,000 square miles than ever before – by providing its programs on the Web, in a way that allows remote members to engage in real-time. This year was an appropriate time to launch the virtual chapter program, as incoming chapter president, Karen Rempel, with a newly-minted degree in ecopsychology, promoted the notion of combining professional development with social responsibility. In other words, a virtual chapter is a greener chapter.

We’re all encouraged to go green, and in a business world that has expectations of in-person presentations, keeping a balance is not always easy. The chapter decided to make its kick-off meeting to the 2008-2009 season even more green by encouraging the presenter, Adobe’s RJ Jacquez, to make his presentation from his home town rather than get on a plane to present in person. In addition to making a presentation about the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, Jacques made use of other Adobe software, notably Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Pro, to make sure his presentation went without a hitch. His write-up about the experience, and preparations for it, is on his Adobe blog.

This online, social experience of creating real-time collaborations, is familiar territory to Jacquez, who presents, in person, Leveraging Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing with Adobe Software at DocTrain 2008.

With all the attention paid to technology and techniques, sometimes the communication aspect of writing gets overlooked. Communication theories demonstrate how successful communication involves not only transmission but also receipt of the message, that communication is made up of content plus relationship, that sensemaking is an ongoing social process, and so forth. These need to exist in conjunction with the technology practices that are generally focused on improving production efficiency and increasing ROI.

Ostensibly, both goals can be met. The Minimalism described in the Nurnberg Funnel is part and parcel of the techniques for, say, using DITA. In creating a balance between the need to meet users’ needs for clear communication and management’s need to have good stewardship of documentation, a quality assurance component needs to be added to the mix.

The need for this balance is not lost on Roy Jacobsen, the man behind the Writing, Clear and Simple blog. His focus is on the quality aspects of communication, on the words rather than the techniques, and on successful transmission, and receipt, of messages. Before the area now known as user experience, or the subset of usability, became popular for user interfaces, field testing – essentially, usability testing of documents – was done as a way of ensuring that the documentation was effective for its intended audience. Documentation testing isn’t a new concept, but its use has fallen out of favor in recent years as corporate resources have focused on the sexier side of the product: the interface itself.

Jacobsen discusses his ideas on this topic at DocTrain East 2008, presenting Document Testing: The Missing Step in Creating Effective Documents and The Shape of Information, about various content structures and their applications.

More often than note, content is not a single-use commodity. Content is resource-intensive to produce, and it makes good business sense to re-use content wherever possible. This means creating portable content that is able to be integrated with other content, to create a new message each time the content converges in a new constellation. Ask Donna Reynolds, whose articles on the How To Do Things site are not only re-used in multiple categories on the site, they are syndicated to other sites.

Reynolds understands content re-use in the technical arena, as well. She was instrumental in helping implement a single-source solution for technical documentation and training content for a medical device corporation. To learn about Reynold’s team used the Adobe Technical Communication Suite to re-use their corporate content assets to their utmost potential, attend her session, where she presents a case study, How Suite It Is, at DocTrain East 2008.

When a Web redesign or content management project gets announced, there is much excitement from all areas of the organization. The possibilities for a newer, better system holds out the promise of more functionality, better workflow, increased ease of use, and other great things. IT loves picking the tools; Marketing loves the chance for a make-over, and content contributors love the idea of automated management of the rote tasks that go with content management.

Where the plan breaks down is usually somewhere around the change management component of the project. Many times, change management means “change scheduling”, and there is little or no attention paid to the aspects of user behavior, process control, and setting up a governance model. Because operations strategy hasn’t been handled as an explicit part of the project, the long-term strategic vision doesn’t get carried through to the tactical level. As a result, once the implementation has been completed and staff engages as part of their day-to-day work, the operations of the site start to develop its unique set of problems.

Think this scenario is an exception rather than the rule? Think again. Kristina Podnar of WelchmanPierpoint Consulting knows how common the dynamic is; this consulting firm has made web operations management their specialty, and published a Web Operations Management Primer to educate organizations about the underlying reasons for their pain points. Podnar presents Principles of Web Operations Management at DocTrain East 2008.

Changing how your company works means changing how your company thinks, according to Fara Warner in Fast Company magazine. A new way of thinking involves a new way of learning, something that embodies the techniques that will be reflected in the content being taught. In other words, if you want your company to become more agile, you have to learn to think agile. To do that, your learning needs to be about hot to become agile, and your learning method needs to be as agile as the content itself.

Lean learning, as this is sometimes called, is often applied to learning about Lean methodology. However, lean learning can be a transformation in itself, as participants are challenged to use the Lean principles to focus the learning experience. The training method focuses on changing ways of thinking by guiding students some critical rules, and guided to figure out the answers themselves by solving real workplace situations.

Lean learning can be applied equally well to situations outside the workplace. Ask Ray Magnan, who uses these techniques to teach sailing to new crew members. To learn more about these new instructional design techniques, sit in on his session, Lean Instructional Design for Today’s Competitive Environment, at DocTrain East 2008.

The mobile phone has become way more than just a phone. Most devices we call a mobile phone have a basic feature set that includes a clock, calendar, text messaging capabilities, contact center, a game or two, and probably a music player. Add the word “smart” to a phone, and you’re talking additional computing power that includes Web access and mobile applications, and the ability to synchronize data with your computer. For purists, this is too much functionality, but the purists are in the minority.

The trend toward pervasive computing is fueled by more and better mobile services. We are becoming more used to just-in-time information. Need an address to mail a check? Look it up while standing in line at the post office. Need driving directions? Fire up your iPhone’s GPS and check your route. Want to stay connected to your far-flung friends? Have their Twitter posts sent to your phone. (Well, not if you live in Canada, which continues to have the highest mobile phone and data plan rates in the industrialized world.) Every day, new ways of receiving mobile content are created, making life easier for people on the go.

Tamara Knezic is on the other side of the pervasive computing fence. As a content creator for mobile platforms, she is keenly aware of the patience and skill required to ensure that the web pages served up, the content sent to small-screen devices, and the related documentation, is actually usable. Catch her presentation, Challenges of Creating Documentation for Mobile Devices, at DocTrain East.

The adoption of DITA by organizations has certainly hit the tipping point. Demand by organizations wanting to move to DITA has spurred activity amongst authoring tool and content management vendors to make a DITA version of their products or even, in some cases, completely switch to a DITA product. The seeming ubiquitousness of DITA encourages more organizations to consider this solution, and on the circle goes.

In the beginning, however, DITA was used by its creators – a group within IBM looking for a better way to create documentation – without a content management system. The framework for the new content model was rooted in the theories developed by user assistance professionals. Hypertext, which had practical applications in online help, grew to encompass other types of content that could be linked together in a non-linear way.

IBM’s use of DITA without a CMS was of necessity, as the DITA flavor of XML was not even a recognized OASIS standard at the time, and no commercial vendors supported it. Could it be done today? Is it practical to do so today? Chip Gettinger, a new addition to the SDL-Trisoft team, isn’t a keen proponent of that option, though he admits it is possible. A long-time practitioner in the content management field, Gettinger co-authored a white paper that provides a look at some of the reasons that DITA and a CMS are a match made in heaven.

Gettinger presents Are DITA and Component Content Management Right for My Organization? at DocTrain East 2008.

Knowing how to enumerate the benefits of training content and knowing how to go about implementing a training project are two very different kettle of fish. As with any project that involves a technology component, there are multiple ways to handle each aspect. Each organization has different needs, and so will want to derive different benefits from their training content. There are different methods of implementing instructional design, often which require different technologies. Understanding the technologies and their implications is critical, as the pitfalls of going down the wrong path may prevent an organization from deriving the very benefits they set out to achieve. Learn more about, and get the lowdown on, new technologies and how you can benefit from them, on Neil Perlin’s technology blog.

Perlin’s background and experience give him a deep knowledge of the implications of various types of training. If you’ve been thinking of moving towards visuals and away from text, catch Perlin’s presentation, Creating Visual Training Using MadCap Mimic at DocTrain East 2008.

Joe Gollner likes solving puzzles. In fact, he often draws on his passion for history and philosophy to help him with the paradigms for modern-day conundrums. “That’s probably why I work so much,” admits Joe, “though it doesn’t feel like work to me. I love to figure out things that initially baffle me.”

And baffling situations seem to be thrown Joe’s way on a regular basis. The latest puzzle he’s trying to solve is how to support authors who work in complex authoring environments. For example, an author could be faced with a situation where they are merrily authoring a topic and need to choose some attributes. Technically, they could choose that attribute from a thousand valid attributes. Well, except that the editing “tool du jour” would probably crash, just trying to display all those attributes. And except that in any given situation, probably 997 of that thousand attributes wouldn’t make any sense to choose. So the puzzle becomes: how do you build in the logic to show only the applicable attributes to the author? How do you get the attributes to show only when they are applicable for that topic?

That became Joe’s latest conundrum. How does one describe very sophisticated, very exacting rules in a way that can be applied? And how does one share the rules with authors so that they can implement it correctly? Joe is pleased to report that he and his colleagues at Stilo have broken the code, so to speak, and have launched a product that serves up, on the fly, the portion of the prohibitive number of rules and regulations that govern the actions an author can - or cannot - take. Rather than thumb through hundreds of pages of authoring regulations, authors can have the appropriate regulations served up as just-in-time support material. Gollner captured some of this knowledge in a case study, Implementing Content Technologies on an Enterprise Scale.

His pleasure at solving this dilemma is apparent; he isn’t satisfied because of the technological solution, but because it solves a user experience problem and a business problem. “Content is so important that we can no longer afford to treat it like a cottage industry,” says Joe. “Corporations are starting to realize that we need to apply the same care and discipline to them as we do with the rest of our database assets.”

Gollner presents Content Oriented Architectures: Putting Content at the Center of CM Projects and Content Oriented Architectures: Putting Content at the Center of CM Projects at DocTrain East 2008.

Scott Nesbitt likes to write. In addition to writing the technical stuff that many of us do for a living, he also likes to turn his hand to other types of writing. He writes technology articles for publication—what better way to capitalize on all those high-tech toys—as well as marketing copy, journalistic writing, and travel articles. So it comes as no surprise when he describes himself as a bit of a digital bedouin.

The idea of traveling between coffee shops, setting up a laptop, and tapping into the free wifi is an acquired taste, but it suits his lifestyle. Balancing work and family, Scott finds his down time—if you can call extra writing time “down time”—where he can. He has even been known to crack open his laptop in a certain pub he likes to frequent, run by a bloke from New Zealand.

What are Nesbitt’s rules for the life of digital roaming? Only a few, it seems. First, there must be free wireless nearby—if not in the immediate coffee shop, then at the establishment next door. Second, stay within the three-beverage rule. Buying beverages is essentially your way of renting a space, so don’t monopolize the table. Give the coffee shop a chance to fill the table and make some money. And third, don’t succumb when you’re with family—even when your Blackberry pings. Living the digital bedouin lifestyle makes it harder to keep work separate from family life, so it’s important to make that effort.

It’s not a surprise, then, that Nesbitt is an aficionado of tools that support his minimalist work style, and he shares his findings freely on the DMN Communications blog. Nesbitt will share his knowledge of open source tools when he presents Creating Quality Content with Open Source Tools at DocTrain East 2008.

In the world of learning, there is a generally accepted principle that the retention of the material is directly related to how much the student participates in the training. The educationist Edgar Dale created a Cone of Experience that demonstrated that the most passive form of learning—reading text, listening to audio, or looking at pictures—leads to the lowest retention rate, while hands-on simulations and direct, purposeful experience helps participants retain the material the longest. Not to mention learn more of the material and have more fun in the process.

Thomas Aldous tackles this “forgetting curve” in his own presentations, with a unique blend of instruction, practice, and support materials that boost retention. Take advantage of some of the materials Aldous provides on the Integrated Technologies site, such as the free DITA plug-in. Aldous presents Case Study - Nuclear Power, DITA and FrameMaker: The How’s and Why’s at DocTrain East 2008.

Michael Boses loves the idea of structured authoring. He has a deep understanding of the business benefits of having content that is portable, interchangeable between systems, and highly adaptive to new business requirements. He also understands the motivation of users. He understand that they like to be productive, and to be productive is to think about what they’re producing and not about how to use their software - and certainly not about working around awkwardly-designed software.

Boses makes it his business to listens closely to both business executives and end users, and to bring together the two sets of needs into a single, elegant solution. In some circles, he would be called a marriage broker; at In.vision Research (now part of Quark, Inc.), he’s called a Chief Technology Officer. One of the most successful matches Boses made was in marrying structured authoring with the world’s most widely-used authoring tool, Microsoft Word. The chances of getting a myriad of Word uses to give up their familiar software and work routines to adopt a complex structured authoring tool was, frankly, highly unlikely. So Boses did the next best thing - he brought the structured authoring to Word.

The users were able to keep their familiar tools and the bulk of their processes, and the businesses were able to reap the benefits derived from the processing of structured content. The idea brought together the best of both worlds - a match, as the saying goes, made in heaven.

Read more about DITA for Enterprise Business Documents in this standards proposal by Michael Boses and Ann Rockley.

Boses presents DITA and XML Authoring the Natural Way: XML Authoring for Microsoft Word and SharePoint at DocTrain 2008.

A recent study indicated that one of the top features demanded of a content management system is workflow, yet most of the organizations that adopt content management don’t use the workflow they’ve set up. In fact, many of them don’t set up the workflow feature at all. Conforming to the workflow process can be important, particularly in regulated industries, but even in unregulated industries, formalizing the review process can be a time saver and a mechanism for ensuring the accuracy of content before it gets published.

Teresa Mulvihill,  a consultant specializing in XML publishing, know the ins and outs of implementing a sound review process, and brings her expertise to the DocTrain conference. Mulviill presents Quality Documentation Through Collaboration: Making the Review Process Efficient for All Involved at DocTrain East 2008.

It’s not unusual for an organization’s first foray into localizing their website under the assumption that the localization portion is as straightforward as settling loose a translation firm on the source-language content and getting it returned in multiple languages. Not only is that notion quickly dispelled once content starts being edited and updated – tracking multiple content updates in several languages can range anywhere from problematic to nightmarish – but other issues also arise.

One of the issues is brand management, which is often discovered when there’s a problem, perhaps a public one, and recovering from a damaged brand can be a difficult process. Perhaps the urban legend of the Chevy Nova comes to mind – and it is an urban legend – but the disasters go beyond bad translations of slogans. The quality of a translation for local regions affects brands when the translations result in inaccurate content, when it affects customer service, and when implementation costs increase.

Mark Ambrose knows all too well the implications of good and poor translations. As a solutions manager at SDL, he understands the importance of following best practices, right from the start, to ensure that a website is ready to go global the first time. Outlined in an SDL briefing paper, the best practices cover the analysis of business goals through to site design and technical considerations – all factors that affect the translation outcome. You can also learn more about the topic when Ambrose presents How to Leverage More When Writing for a Global Audience at DocTrain East 2008.

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) exists to promote the discovery and exchange of knowledge about humans as it applies to the design of systems and devices. With this knowledge, the society advocates for ease-of-use, and effective, safe systems and environments with which people can interact. The discipline of human factors has brought us better computer interfaces, easier-to-use equipment, safer workplaces, and accident prevention programs.

HFES has designated each October to be National Ergonomics Month (NEM). The purpose of NEM is to focus on promoting human factors and ergonomics to corporate executives, students, and the general public by providing information and services. In this article from National Ergonomics Month , user experience guru Dr. Ronald G. Shapiro discusses how human factors and ergonomics impact everyday life.

Shapiro leads a workshop, Games to Explain Human Factors, at DocTrain East 2008.

When changing to structured authoring, many considerations go into the mix. Topic-based writing? Check. Content re-use? Check. Semantic structure? Here is where the questions start. Organizations considering the adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) may wonder how their complex content types can be squeezed into the standard DITA schema. That’s where DITA specializations come in. DITA specialization is the process of creating new schemas to meet the needs of individual content types.

The debate over whether or not to use specializations may never bet settled, mostly because the situations calling for one or more DITA specializations is highly situational and has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are definitely related to business, as it allows for the processing of various types of content, no matter how “non-DITA”-like it is. The disadvantages are more technology-related, with some additional production overhead and more attention being paid to detail.

To learn more about the ins and outs of adopting DITA, attend the Tim Bombosch session, Success Factors for DITA Adoption with XMetaL: Best Practices and Fundamentals, at DocTrain East 2008.

Creating content in a multi-authoring environment needs some control, if the finished product isn’t going to end up reading like a patchwork quilt of writing styles. Yet the time and effort it takes for humans to get that consistency is rarely built into a department’s workflow - or headcount, for that matter. The requirement for consistency, accuracy,  and overall quality is put in the hands of assistive technology, and whether it’s called authoring assistance, translation-oriented authoring, or controlled authoring, the advantages can be demonstrated and measured.

With many years of expertise in the localization arena, and involvement in the Localization Institute, Richard Sikes understands the benefits of assisted authoring. He is particularly aware that the decisions made upstream at the content authoring stage affect localization decisions downstream, in both translation and localization costs and processes.  For every author who wonders why it is important, at the cost of stifled creativity, to re-use an existing phrase from the translation memory, Sikes can provides multiples reasons - often hundreds of thousands of them. These reasons translate not only into direct added translation costs, but sometimes into items such as lost business opportunities or lost productivity.

Sikes points to another productivity tool, an Web-based translation suite that provides translators with translation assistance and translation memory alignment. A free trial of the NoBabel Enhancer is available online.

Sikes presents Localization makes Strange Bedfellows: Three Companies that Eat Their Own Dog Food at DocTrain East 2008.

The profession of technical communication continues to morph as the needs of business and the demands of technology push writers to push their envelopes, learn new communication theories, and apply new technologies. With each paradigm shift, a certain number of writers drop off, and writers with the skills to cope with the new reality come aboard.

Yet skills and abilities are not the only aspects that make a good communicator. In an industry filled with introverts, the interaction with one’s peers and colleagues is as much a critical success factor as is being software-savvy. So how does this seeming dichotomy get reconciled? Linda Urban‘s observations have led her to make some analyses and draw some conclusions about some of the tangibles and intangibles that create the winning formula for success.

Urban shares her insights and strategies at DocTrain East 2008 with her presentation, Paths to Success: Networking and Contributing, at DocTrain East 2008.

Knowledge management is (finally) hitting its stride. When done well, it can be an incredibly valuable source of information for various stakeholder groups. When done badly, it can have serious negative consequences.

Poorly implemented knowledge bases cause the users to lose confidence in them, which discourages their use and sends users to alternate, more costly sources of information such as tying up the call center lines with calls that could have been easily handled by a call center. Worse yet is if, because of a poor user experience in a very public interface, customers lose confidence not just in the knowledge center but in the company itself.

Well-implemented knowledge bases don’t just happen. To ensure that the information available to consumers is relevant, and continues to be relevant over time, a significant amount of implementation strategies must be worked out - not only once but on a continuous basis.

This Outlook Journal article provides information about creating a strategic framework for knowledge management that creates value. The balance to strategic measures is action at the tactical level, getting user feedback about the content, which is then incorporated back into the knowledge base. To see this principle in action, attend the presentation, Content Feedback Methods, by Jennifer Shankle and Mirhonda Studevant of Ceridian at DocTrain East 2008.

The world has gotten quite small in some ways, particularly as the concept of doing business implies doing business globally. The potential for miscommunication increases exponentially as your audiences go from one comfortable with American English and all of its complexities, to a diverse audience when it comes to language, culture, and literacy levels.

In industries where the impetus to ensure that there is absolutely clear communication with users, controlled natural languages have been developed. A controlled language restricts the grammar and vocabulary in a way that reduces ambiguity. From word choice to sentence structure, these attempts improve readability for both native readers and those who are second-language readers.

The aerospace industry has the ASD Simplified Technical English, Caterpillar has its own Technical English (PDF) and IBM has Easy English. What’s not well-known is that other industries have adopted controlled language to encourage better user comprehension. One long-time vendor of Controlled English dictionaries cites industries such as banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and software development as industries that have created their own restricted vocabularies.
The move to controlled language - realistically, Controlled English - is strong enough that the University of Zurich is involved in a research project to create Attempto Controlled English (ACE) as a specification and knowledge representation language.

If the idea of controlled English resonates and you want to know more, attend Brenda and Alison Huettner’s presentation, Choosing the English That’s Right for You: Simplified Technical English and Other Controlled Languages, at DocTrain East 2008.

Until recently, the idea of having to manage user-generated documentation was met with stony silence. The idea that users would go out of their way to create documentation, particularly documentation that would be taken seriously by users, seemed ludicrous to many practitioners. However, a little bit of research turns up all sorts of examples of user-generated content.

In some cases, users are looking for relief to frustrations caused by missing information in manuals. In a Google search on Trikke instructions - a self-propelling cambering vehicle, the top results are not from the vendor, but from a UK seed nursery whose passionate Trikke owner created his own instructions and tips, and put them on his site. Others created YouTube video documentation to demonstrate repairs, rather than create written material.

In other cases, users band together to create entire documentation systems that vendors could never have predicted that users wanted.  For example, the first two results in a Google search for World of Warcraft documentation yields a forum and a wiki, followed by an unofficial documentation forum site.

In the case of open source software, there is no documentation team. Until recently, the reputation of poor documentation was legendary. Documentation was usually incomplete, outdated, or poorly written. With the advent of collaborative content environments, usually wikis, the ability to contribute content, and to edit it, has changed the playing field. In what is the tip of the iceberg,  the FLOSS manual site has become a central repository for free documentation about free software. There are even instructions on how to produce documentation for the site, should you choose to get involved with the project.

To hear more about user-generated content and understand what drives these content creators, attend the presentation by Adam Hyde, Read Write, Remix: The FLOSS Manuals Story, at Documentation and Training East 2008.

Quick, how many help authoring tools (HATs) can you name? Ask a technical communicator, and they likely start with Adobe RoboHelp, which has been around enough years to be into double-digit revision numbers, and MadCap Flare. If challenged to include an application such as Author-it to the mix of HATs, a writer might well reply that Author-it is, instead, a component content management system. So what is the difference between a HAT and a CCMS?

Indeed, the differences between the two types of systems are getting fewer and fewer with each passing year. First, the commonalities. Both a HAT and a CCMS support topic-based writing. Both systems have a similar way of ordering the topics to prepare them for output. The names may be different - a HAT uses a TOC, while a CCMS will likely use a DITAmap to arrange the topics for output - but the concept is the same; and both allow for multiple TOCs. Both types of systems support topic re-use, and do so in relatively similar ways. Both have some sort of mechanism to allow for more granular re-use of content, which may be called variables, snippets, or by other colorful names. Both systems allow for multiple outputs, such as HTML and PDF.

Yet there are a few pretty significant differences, as well. One is the usability of the interfaces. Help systems, by virtue of their longevity, have developed attractive, intuitive interfaces that something like an XML or DITA authoring tool just doesn’t have. More importantly, a CCMS generally uses XSL transformations to style and output content. This difference can make a huge difference in work processes, in either negative or positive ways, depending on the individual situations within a workplace. The third difference is that a CCMS is more likely to conform to standards, notably XML, and quite possibly DITA, which gives these systems a huge advantage when interoperating with other systems, or doing processing that uses semantic content.

The differences between HATs is less distinctive, and figuring out which one is for you can be daunting, if you had to do all the research yourself. Luckily, there is a shortcut on the HelpStuff site, which includes articles, a HAT comparison matrix, and links to external resources. Char James-Tanny, who runs the site, is an acknowledged expert in her own right, in the HAT arena, including the cross-over Author-it. She will present Four Features that Matter when Choosing a HAT and Customizing HTML in Author-it at DocTrain East 2008.

The second annual Society for Technical Communication (STC) salary database report has been published, and is available on the STC website to members, free of charge. This report provides a look at the state of technical writing salaries in the United States. (Not a member? Consider joining today!)

This report is a departure from the traditional survey issued by STC in years gone by. The data used for the report is drawn from over 1.25 million businesses in over 170 American cities and counties, in 90 industries that employ people whose duties and job functions qualify them as technical writers. This new reporting method brings a new level of reporting accuracy.

The report, which provides data for 2006 and 2007, doesn’t stop with the reporting of annual wages and hourly rates for writers. It also breaks down employment numbers by state and industry, providing valuable information for professionals looking for information before an industry or geographic move.

Championed by STC’s new Executive Director, Susan Burton, this is only one of the changes that reflects the new level of professionalism to which the STC is committed. Susan Burton is presenting a keynote session entitled The Changing Face of TechComm and the Society for Technical Communication at DocTrain East 2008.

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) technical communication competitions offer unique opportunities for professional communicators. Submitting a winning entry is a noteworthy accomplishment that provides tangible recognition of your work. Perhaps equally important is the feedback that entrants receive from judges who are qualified technical communicators.

Unique to the STC competitions, this feedback can be of great value in helping you improve your processes and products. Participating in the STC competition process has its own rewards, and is a great learning experience. Competition managers, committee leads, and judges hone valuable skills in areas such as project management, time management, consensus building, and teamwork. Networking, making industry contacts, and being recognized for a job well done are valuable by-products of the competition experience. An article in the July/August Tieline (“Advice for Competition Managers”) details important information and tips for community leaders involved in managing competitions; please see http://www.stc-cdx.org/tieline.

Whether you’re interested in entering, organizing, or judging a competition, please consider getting involved!

In the world of personality profiling, the technical writing field is dominated by the Meyers Briggs type of Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving (INTP). It’s not surprising that INTPs are drawn to the profession of writing. After all, writing tends to be an inward-focused activity, carried out independently, and involves the organization of conceptual material into logical topics.

Though social media uses the medium preferred by introverts - communication that can be prepared and posted, rather than real-time communication such as phone or meetings - it is, after all, an activity that doesn’t fit the profile of the average introvert. As a personal pursuit, it can be seen as a time sink. When asked to learn about this as a professional endeavour, it can be perceived as a world of hurt.

So what happens when social media meets technical communication? In what may be described as the next big shift for the technical communication workplace, where technical content converges with marketing communications,  e-learning content, knowledge management, and user-generated content, the shift to a social media model in the coming decade may be as profound a shift as that to content management during this decade.

Rich Maggiani understands the insertion of social media into the workplace in ways it was not originally intended, He realizes that social media can be used to create efficiencies that ultimately benefit the effectiveness and quality of our work. He shares his knowledge in his presentation, Social Media in Organizational Communication: How It Affects Technical Communicators, at DocTrain East 2008.

You’ve heard about Agile development, or perhaps are being called to wrangler your well-developed process into an Agile environment. Whether the environment is Extreme Programming, Lean, or Scrum, the effect is the same. Change is often met with a less-than-enthusiastic response. However, what may seem daunting at first can turn out to be a work method that has distinct advantages in the long run.

To distill the lessons of integrating an Agile development environment into a single maxim, it would be to learn the techniques the way you would with any other tool in your toolbox. Become familiar with the strategies, shift your focus to what’s important in the process, and learn the ropes.

Christine Sigman, principal technical writer and documentation team leader at Endeca Technologies, has written an article in STC’s Intercom magazine about the challenges and strategies of adapting to Scrum. You can also attend Sigman’s presentation,
Producing Quality Documentation In An Agile Development Environment, at DocTrain East 2008.

Jeff Deck of the Typo Eradication Advancement League was scheduled to speak at Documentation and Training East 2008, but due to legal action documented in this article, he will be unable to attend this year’s event. Instead, we’ll be featuring Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals, whose keynote presentation, Read, Write, Remix: The FLOSS Manuals Story, takes place October 31.

Deck has agreed to speak at next year’s event. More information coming soon.

It’s no secret that topic-based authoring is the hottest trend in technical communication today.  Even die-hard communicators who produce book-format publications are realizing the value of creating the source content in a topic-based format, then aggregating it into a linear, contextual output for consumption by the end user. More likely, the content will be aggregated into several linear, contextual outputs for consumption by different types of end users - and therein lies the beauty of topic-based authoring.

The ability to re-use the content source, without having to copy (and ultimately maintain those copies) is a distinct advantage for many communicators who want to get the most efficiency out of their core processes, in order to spend more time on the actual creation of content. However, making the switch to topic-based writing isn’t as simple as chopping up a document into chunks.  Topic-based writing is as much an art as a science, and a discipline for topic-based writing has emerged from the work started with help authoring tools.

Mike Hamilton is one of the professionals in the field who has been around since the early days of topic-based authoring, and has watched the development of this field into a discipline complete with industry leaders and best practices. Long before it was in vogue, he used topic-based authoring to create training materials, and then turned to working on the products themselves, as a product manager, to improve their functionality. Now, as VP of Madcap Software, Hamilton evangelizes not only his product, but the art and science of topic-based authoring. On Hamilton’s blog, he discusses the finer logistics of creating topic-based projects, such as using CSS stylesheets to control formats or the implications of using XML, as well as answering product questions.

Hamilton presents MadCap Flare - An Introduction to Topic Based Authoring: (Part 1), MadCap Flare - Content Control and Publishing Techniques: (Part 2), and MadCap Flare - Controlling Document Look and Feel with CSS at DocTrain East 2008.

Wiki evangelist Stewart Mader may love the technology, but what he really loves is the productivity that the technology can bring about when properly implemented. The idea that wikis help organizations share information may be the primary reason that they want to adopt a wiki, but the side benefits - reduction in email and meetings, development of planned and spontaneous communities, and idea hatcheries - can be teased out when the implementation is done with due thought and care.

In addition to Mader’s wiki consulting blog, where he provides a wealth of information on the topic of enterprise wikis, check out these resources:

• http://www.ikiw.org/21days
• http://stewartmader.blogs.wikiconsulting.com/
• 25 Tips for a better Wiki Deployment

Stewart Made presents Should You Call It A Wiki, Or A Collaborative Work Space? at Doctrain East 2008.

Alan Houser doesn’t believe in magic—at least not when it comes to XML. He thinks the fact that airplanes can stay up in the air is magic, but what makes XML an effective technology for structuring content has more to do with foresight, planning, and execution than sleight-of-hand. However, Alan does make his living helping organizations to improve their publishing processes, and much of his work involves XML. He cautions companies to not get caught up in the XML hoopla—XML is only a tool, and just as you shouldn’t hammer a nail with a screwdriver, you shouldn’t try to implement an XML solution unless it actually meets a company’s publishing requirements.

The enticing image of XML as a magical solution to every company’s publishing needs is a bubble Alan frequently has to burst as an electronic publishing consultant. He notes that while most companies are trying to achieve similar goals, such as improving publishing flexibility, and efficiency, the tools and processes with which companies can achieve these goals varies widely.

Alan enjoys the challenge of the range of business problems that customers present to him. Equally challenging is implementing solutions in different corporate cultures with different resources, constraints, and business requirements. Alan eschews “magical” solutions to real-world publishing challenges, nonetheless, his customers have come to rely upon his technical wizardry. His wizardry is actually just plain hard work, but there is no need to burst that bubble.
Alan contributes to the Group Wellesley blog, where he writes on various XML-related topics.

Alan Houser presents The Right Tool for the Right Job for the Right Output for the Right Audience: Expanding Options for Technical Communicators, and runs two day-long workshops, Using Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe Technical Communication Suite - Integration at Doctrain East 2008.

The temptation to communicate with pictures goes far beyond IKEA furniture assembly instructions. Although the allure of saving translation dollars cannot be denied, as budget-watching managers will tell you, the move to visual communication is a much bigger strategic shift. Users love visuals; the amount of information that a well-drawn illustration or a short video can convey is much richer than what can be conveyed in a similar block of text.

Using a visual form to communicate isn’t as simple as it seems. Effective visual communication has its own localization issues. Whereas localization of text has translation issues between languages, graphics also have specific cultural contexts that have to be taken into consideration. From culture-appropriate colors to culture-specific contexts, graphics and videos are imbued with meta-messages. For example, viewing the instructional videos on YouTube can transmit information about the country, culture, and generation. When the graphics are captioned, the labelling process adds its own complications.

To learn more about communicating using visuals, visit the Eserver TC Library. The Content Wrangler community also has a localization and globalization group, moderated by Maxwell Hoffman of Welocalize, for documentation and help.

Maxwell Hoffman presents Do You See What I See?: Optimizing Visual and Textual Content for Global Audience Acceptance at DocTrain East 2008.

If you’ve wanted to experience DITA but didn’t know where to start, then the DITA Users is a good place to start. DITA Users is an online community who connect with other users, share information, and provide provide peer support.  Set up by Bob Doyle, who also maintains multiple blogs and websites, his index lists the DITA blog and a DITA blog on the XML.org site amongst his many resources.

The community recognizes that users may need help ramping up to use DITA, and the benefits of membership certainly help users start off right, whether you choose between JoAnn Hackos’  Introduction to DITA or a license for an XML editor.

Members of DITA Users are automatically provided with a workspace folder where they can create and manage DITA projects - which include input files, build files, each with an action link to rebuild them, and output files - in a easy-to-use AJAX environment.  The XML editor is DITA Storm, which is a Web-based DITA editor embedded into the site. 

To join the DITA Users community, visit the website. You can also use DITA Storm free of charge, directly from the Immedius site.

Bob Doyle, founder of the CMS Review site, presents Leveraging the DITA Community: Advice, Tools and Resources To Get Your Tech Pubs Team Up-To-Speed at DocTrain East 2008.

The situation is all too familiar. An organization has a number of writers, distributed across multiple geographic locations, who are creating a pool of content, some of which needs to be shared and re-used. The content ranges from installation guides to user guides to service guides, and gets translated into multiple languages. With this much content to manage, there are bound to be inefficiencies. However, the larger the organization, the more havoc the inefficiencies can wreak, and the more expensive it can get.

It’s no surprise, then, that a company the size of Hewlett-Packard wanted to make their documentation processes more efficient and effective. Read how their Industry Standard Servers division reduced their word count by over 50%, raised their re-usable content to over 75%, and reduced their review cycle by 40% by implementing the Author-it component content management solution.

Author-it’s Kendra Carter presents two full days of workshops (Understanding Author-it Concepts, Building your Author-it Project, and Reuse and Conditionality in Author-it) at DocTrain East 2008.

In the progression from delivering documents on paper to delivering them electronically and on the Web, then as Help, then as a combination of various media, the concept of the “document” has changed from a contextual, linear chain of content to a modular, topic-based content bank that users can tap into, on demand, and pull out the answers they need.

The advantages of topic-based documentation have been extolled for a decade now, but in a Web 2.0 world, a new trend has emerged, that of including content from various sources. The idea is to direct users to up-to-date product information as well as provide ad hoc technical support, consulting, training, sales info, and other content, all in a single place.
The overall effect is to make users more successful, more quickly than by simply providing the standard documentation set. Nicky Bleiel, an information developer with Component One, has done just that, and documented the proposal process for an “Answer Station” that acts as an information portal, working with an existing corporate website, to provide a winning user experience.

Nicky shares her expertise in this area at DocTrain East 2008, with her session on All-Around User Assistance: Delivering Layers of Information Efficiently. 

One of the downfalls of implementing structured authoring is the perception that the process of creating structured content is onerous. Writers unaccustomed to structured authoring sometimes try to write off the process as cumbersome and slow. Without metrics, however, it’s hard to show the ultimate benefits of a structured authoring project.

Thanks to Scriptorium, there is a well-documented case study that shows some solid metrics for the benefit of automating documentation. Their challenge was to automate the documentation process for a client, to make the requirements documentation process as efficient as their technical documentation process. An additional challenge was to create these efficiencies by building on existing processes and using existing software. They rose to the challenge, creating a solution that built on a DITA implementation already in place.

To see how Scriptorium reduced a week-long process of rote formatting and clean-up tasks to a 15-minute, automated process, read the Solutions Brief on the Scriptorium site.

Scriptorium’s Simon Bate presents Comparing DITA Support in XMetaL and FrameMaker and Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL and DITA at DocTrain East 2008.

Component Content Management (CCM) technology allows enterprises to manage text content as “componentized” chunks of information rather than whole documents or web pages. It has become increasingly important to modern enterprises, especially given the rapid emergence of the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. However, CCM technology remains largely the domain of a wide collection of smaller software vendors targeting narrower use cases, according to research from CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

These findings come from The XML & Component Content Management Report 2008, a groundbreaking evaluation of fourteen major CCM suppliers and five prominent XML Editor tools, based on extensive technology research and customer interviews. The 365-page report also documents industry best practices and common pitfalls to avoid when selecting and implementing a CCM system. Developed by CMS Watch and The Rockley Group, this report provides business critical background on the tools needed to effectively and efficiently deliver the right information to the right people at the right time in the right language and format.

Request a sample chapter. And, if you are interested in learning more about CCM, consider joining the Component Content Management group, moderated by Ann Rockley.

If you were to see her home office in the early evening, with rows of blinking green, yellow and blue lights and the multitude of screens casting an eerie glow (two laptops, a flat screen, a TV; all turned on), and the productivity gadgets connected to all of it, there would be no doubt in your mind. Here lives and works someone who doesn’t like wasting time. A “multi-tasker”, who can actually pull it off. Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with her knows that its not easy to keep up with this self-professed geek. On occasion, and only half in jest, she has attributed her high level of productivity to ADD high-functioning ADD, that is.

But there’s another explanation: passion. Rahel Anne Bailie is absolutely passionate about what she does which is why shes so good at it. As one of the leading content management strategists and usability experts in the Pacific Northwest, Rahel has developed a solid reputation as an innovative thinker, with a keen sense of business, and with the expertise and the network to get exceptional things done. Most recently, she chaired the very successful and critically acclaimed first annual Content Convergence and Integration conference, bringing together speakers and topics that are seldom connected. If your reputation is also shaped by the company you keep, well, lets just say Rahel keeps some excellent company. Don’t miss her presentation at DocTrain East, Content Convergence: Trends in the Creation, Production, and Maintenance of Technical Content. She’ll inform and inspire you, guaranteed.

Read Rahel’s blog. You can reach Rahel via email or via telephone at +1-604-837-0034.

across Systems, a leading manufacturer of corporate translation management software, is offering its Personal Edition available for free download for freelance translation professionals. Personal Edition v3.5 was developed by across to offer full translation functionality particularly for freelance translators.

The across Personal Edition can be used either as a standalone application or as a remote client for direct access to across servers (crossWAN). For example, freelance translators always work with one single installation, irrespective of the current task and workflow.

When you register for your free Personal Edition, across takes you through a short, easy registration process that also adds your name and a brief resume of your qualifications to a pool of freelance translators. In this unique database, companies who already use across, but need translators, can easily find one.

across believes this allows for seamless processes, maximum transparency, and shared use of all resources.They also offer full support to freelancers through free on-line training (limit 2 in the course of six months) or their free (unlimited) interactive tutorials on “Project Management and Translating with across.” Tutorials are about 10 to 15 minutes long, so you can learn where and when it’s convenient for you.

While you are at it, you might want to check out the across library of white papers on Consistent Terminology, Translation-Oriented Authoring, or any number of other topics that could make the translation process easier for you and your clients.

across Systems is a Silver sponsor of DocTrain EAST 2007. The event takes place October 16-20, 2007.  Advancing your Career is the theme of the conference and is designed to help you improve the skills and expertise you’ll need to future-proof your career and improve your value as a professional technical communicator.

About across
across Systems is the manufacturer of the across Corporate Translation Management (CTM) software solution. Headquartered in Germany, across Systems is a spin-off of Nero AG, the provider of the world’s leading CD/DVD application.

The software includes a translation memory, a terminology system, and powerful project management and translation workflow monitoring tools. From project managers to translators and proofreaders, all involved parties work within a single system, either in-house or over a seamless connection to external language service providers. Open interfaces allow the smooth integration of third-party systems.