The world’s most respected medical device manufacturers are implementing PTC’s Product Development System (PDS) to bring innovative devices to the market faster while still complying with strict regulatory requirements and keeping in line with shrinking price premiums. For example, with the ever-increasing FDA demands for package inserts, leaflets and labels, PTC’s Arbortext Dynamic Publishing software helps organizations reach peak efficiency by quickly converting it to XML.

PTC provides a resource library with demos, tools and tutorials (http://www.ptc.com/products/tutorials/index.htm), and pre-recorded videos for Maintenance Customers. The resources allow users to stay up to date on PTC’s latest offerings. To learn about expert solutions and gain a better understanding of product trends in the life sciences industry, join a PTC webcast. The schedule of upcoming webcasts can be found on the PTC site. Also learn more about what PTC has to offer the medical devices and pharmaceutical industries. 

One of the pressing issues for life science professionals is the question of how to create, manage and store multilingual content for multi-channel delivery while keeping costs low and the quality high. Best practices in content management are fast becoming the norm and those organizations that hesitate find themselves falling behind.

When it’s the leap into structured authoring that makes a move to content management impractical, Vasont has found a way to help those organizations catch up. Vasont has integrated Xpress Author, from In.vision Research, into the Vasont CMS as a front-end XML authoring tool. This allows users to author in XML without being exposed to the nitty-gritty of XML code.
Vasont also offers a content management starter kit to help organizations learn more. The starter kit begins with the nuts and bolts of content management and systematically goes through preparing business plans, content and staff for the successful adoption and use of the management system.

Vasont Systems is a leading provider of content management software with more than 55 years of experience in the information management and publishing industry. To learn more about Vasont Systems services, visit their Services page.

Legacy data - we all have it, and in our desire to create content strategies that include single-sourcing and content re-use, we can’t overlook the need to deal with the vast quantities of documents in our organizations that exist only in paper form. In some industries, organizations may decide that storing older data may be a “good enough” solution, but in the life sciences field, that is not an option. Legacy data contains a gold mine of valuable information that is critical to current and future operations. Everything from patient records to medical forms need to be part of a forward-thinking content strategy.

With improvements in handwriting, character, and word recognition technologies, data entry costs are being dramatically reduced, and the ability to keep the conversion process in house ensures peace-of-mind for companies with sensitive-data processing requirements.

Download an industry report on Using Intelligent Word Recognition to Cut Labor Costs without Outsourcing from A2iA, named among The 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management for 2008 by KM World.

Pharmaceutical translation makes up a well-established business unit at McElroy Translation, who have cultivated and maintained excellent client relationships for over two decades in the area of life sciences.

Clinical and regulatory client work has been a cornerstone of McElroy Translation’s portfolio and their services to the life sciences community includes: Protocol and informed consent translation, patient information sheets, files and questionnaires and submissions to IRB ethics committees. One of McElroy Translation’s greatest challenges was a clinical trial that required 500,000 words to be translated into English in 27 days for an interim analysis, which McElroy published as a case study.

To celebrate their success, McElroy Translation is offering the first 40 referrals in 40 days a $40 gift certificate and an opportunity to win a catered lunch for 40 people May 5 through June 13, 2008.

The increasing need for software and website localization, Global Management System (GMS) software products as well as enterprise –wide translation services led the creation of Translations.com. - part of TransPerfect, the largest privately held language provider in the world. TransPerfect recently acquired http://www.translations.com/about/news/pr/pr_080520_overtaal.html” title="Overtaal">Overtaal, a language services provider based in the Netherlands. Overtaal is set to become a division of TransPerfect where they will add to TransPerfect’s already excellent service record. Translations.com provides life science professionals with a way to deliver localized products, services, applications and training in a culturally appropriate manner. All aspects of the life sciences field are covered from healthcare providers to in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) products.

Learn more about Translations.com services and particularly their services to the life sciences industry.

The Global and Localization Association (GALA), an international, non-profit organization focused on collaborative efforts in localization, has set up a webinar series to allow tool providers to give an in-depth introduction to their tools. The series will cover topics from a more general aspect, such as determining whether your software is global-ready, to XLIFF, the new official OASIS standard for internationalization tag sets, to term extraction algorithms.

The first WebSeminar is scheduled for June 12, 2008. To register, visit GALA’s technology blog, which is open to non-members.
The GALA blog is a space for professionals in the localization industry to gather and discuss the impact of tools within the industry. To participate in the exchange of ideas, simply register and join in. The technology blog also offers links to other industry blogs, newsletters, white papers, and reviews.

Learn more about GALA and explore the benefits of membership. 

WebWorks is a brand of the Quadralay Corporation which was formed in 1992 in Austin, Texas. Quadralay offers open and configurable solutions based on industry standard XSL and XML. WebWorks has been a trusted publishing partner in the industry since the early 1990s, with its e-Publisher Platform offering design flexibility and the ability to deliver information in multiple formats including print, web, mobile and electronic devices. WebWorks uses a unique concept in their product that promotes team efforts and lessens the dependencies on any one individual.

Streamlining the creation and assembly of information helps to reduce project costs and time. In an effort to focus on showing new and existing users of ePublisher how to implement streamlined processes, WebWorks redesigned their webinars to deliver this information to users who want to expand their knowledge about getting content out of their content management systems. For a webinar schedule, visit the WebWorks site. Register for a webinar or view the Technical Assistant page for more help with ePublisher.

Members of the IA Institute can receive a special discount to a subscription of the OptimalSort card sorting tool. When card sorting, a mainstay technique of information architecture in user-centered design, needs to be done by a geographically-dispersed group of participants, an online tool is an ideal way of gathering participant data in a single location and analyzing it.The added benefit is that the application also automates the administrative aspects, such as resorting the cards into their original state and sending the thank-you notes.
For more information about the OptimalSort offer, visit the IA Institute site.
Not a member of the IA Institute? Join the IAI before you sign up and qualify for your discount.
The Information Architecture Institute also offers access to their library, tools, job board and the opportunity to connect with others within the immediate community. Visit the library, disseminate new IA tools, peruse or post to the job board, or join a local IA group, all from the IA site.

The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communication (ISTC) is a non-profit organization based in the UK. With over 50 years of established history the ISTC is the largest UK body representing professional communicators and information designers striving to improve communication standards.
The third annual ISTC Conference runs from September 23 – 25, 2008 at Eastwood Hall in Nottingham. This conference will focus on the changes within the industries technical communicators work in and how to best meet the challenges that lie ahead. By looking back, it is possible to learn and move confidently into the future of technical communication.
The ISTC focus is on improving communication of scientific and technical information that support products, services and businesses.

Women and Hi Tech is an established non-profit group created to address the specific needs of women in high tech industries in Central Indiana. Since their inception in 2000, the organization has branched out beyond Central Indiana to support and encourage women in high tech fields regardless of location.
Technology has been broadly defined by Women and High Tech to include everything from health care to the latest emerging technologies. This group looks beyond issues of the “glass ceiling” and concentrates instead on attracting and retaining women in the high tech sector.
Discussion groups are held once a month in Central Indiana. For those not local to the area, the discussions are posted on the organization’s blog. Users are welcome to post comments.
This blog is also a place to network with other Women and High Tech members. Join Women and Hi Tech.

CMS Watch, a firm of independent content management analysts, makes its mark by providing unbiased evaluations of CMS software applications that take into account the product development and vendor evolution aspects, as well as technical capabilities. The difference between CMS Watch and other analyst firms is that they represent no vendors, promote no clients, and take no sponsorships for their reports.

The reports, which cover the areas of Web CMS, Enterprise Portals, ECM Suits, Web Analytics, and Enterprise Search, are written by independent industry experts with no ties to a specific vendor. CMS Watch is the first analyst group to issue a comprehensive report in the area of Component Content Management. Written by Ann Rockley of The Rockley Group, the report covers the major vendors of authoring software and content management systems specifically meant for multi-channel publishing.

Samples of CMS Watch reports are available from the CMS Watch site. Subscribe to CMS Watch and get a full intranet licence for a year.

Visit the CMS Watch blog to read more about the products and vendors that CMS Watch covers.

O’Reilly, the publisher behind the extremely popular “animal cover” books for software and web developers, is widely considered the publisher of some of the most useful, truthful and interesting DIY technology project books available. What’s not generally known is that O’Reilly began as a technical writing company called O’Reilly & Associates. In 1984, they began retaining the rights to the manuals they created for UNIX vendors.
One of their latest publications is entitled Your Brain: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald. Advertised as an “essential guide for the modern brain owner”, this book comes with advice on how to, amongst other things, eat right, improve your memory and use your brain effectively. As “one part science guide and one part self help concierge”, this book is grounded in neuroscience, psychology and nutritional wisdom and promises to be an interesting and entertaining read.

Learn more about O’Reilly and its founder Tim O’Reilly.

Mobile marketing can sound terribly intrusive or wonderfully convenient, depending on the perspective of the consumer receiving the text messages. If you’ve ever used a “park by phone” option to pay for metered parking, and received a text message on a mobile phone to warn you that your parking will run out in 5 minutes, you know that feeling of relief of having dodged a parking ticket. On the other hand, if your teen has signed up for notifications of youth activities on your cell phone, which sets your mobile phone to beeping at your office every afternoon, you’re likely to get annoyed.

Love it or hate it, as SMS (short message service) - text messages you get on your cell phone - develops as a communication medium, it has also become another advertising channel. The possibilities, as a wider variety of people carry mobile phones, are still wide open for putting mobile messaging to good use, particularly in the medical industry. From appointment reminders to medication notifications to hospital notifications to call in - the possibilities are endless, as long as the strategy is well thought-out. For example, many cell phone users still don’t use text messaging; some don’t realize what the beeping means. To understand more about mobile messaging, read the Marketing Technology Blog and check out mobile messaging through TEXTBYREQUEST.

The FDA’s new requirement for XML formatted data is causing some pain for pharmaceutical Structured Product Labeling (SPL) submissions. The requirements fall into three main categories: service, hosted and enterprise, and the decision on whether to “build your own” or outsource your content for services analysis can be daunting.

Identifying an approach both meets the FDA’s regulatory requirements and pharmaceutical manufacturers’ business requirements in the short-term, while doing the analysis for future needs is a task that requires a parallel approach. While many of the issues have been discussed in journals and on the Web, the solutions are, by necessity generic.

As the deadline for XML submissions approaches, it has become clear that there is no one right approach. There are no cookie-cutter companies, however, and cookie-cutter solutions are not likely to work without some customization. SPL is only the first of many expected FDA-driven XML initiatives within the regulatory environment. For an intelligent discussion on the topic, see the white paper on the Data Conversion Labs site.

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 new 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.

The Across Personal Edition is a suite of tools, which includes the crossTank translation memory, the crossTerm terminology system, the crossDesk multi-format editor, the crossSearch research tool, and the crossCheck quality management system.  Information about Across Personal Edition and white papers can be found on the Across Systems site.

For the uninitiated, producing product labels might seem like not so big a deal. But if you’re in the pharmaceuticals business, the FDA’s requirement that companies must move to the implementation of structured product labeling (SPL) could cause a series of major headaches that no OTC analgesic can fix.

Richard Brandt, In.vision’s VP of Life Sciences and Strategic Initiatives knows all about the degrees of complexity, and is all too aware of the so-so history that pharma companies have with XML and DITA in the past. Introducing XML word processing in Microsoft Word to authors is a breeze, especially when compared to the struggles that occur when users are forced to deal with the technical complexities of an XML editor. As one happy customer expressed it: “Now I feel better because I did not need to learn XML.”

To receive a printed copy of the In.Vision Strategy Quarterly, featuring the Structured Product Labeling Strategy Report, developed in conjunction with Gartner, Inc., enter your contact info on the sign-up page.

Like it or hate it, SharePoint is here to stay. As ubiquitous as that international chain of upscale coffee shops, it has the same convenience factor: it’s everywhere, it’s widely supported by IT departments everywhere, and it’s relatively simple to figure out the basics. Well, unless you like yours low-fat, soy milk, misto style chai, with half-a-pump of sugar-free vanilla syrup afficionados - that takes practice.

A company that has taken integration with SharePoint to a new level is TSG - The Technology Services Group. Founded in 1996 by David Giordano, after leaving a stellar career with Accenture (formerly Arthur Andersen), TSG has developed into one of the premier companies focusing on the implementation of SharePoint with web technologies. Download their white paper, Integrating Documentum with SharePoint, to understand the secret behind the TSG brew.

The industry has come to know acrolinx as a producer of content quality improvement tools, but few know its start as a spin-off of the Deutches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) research institute.  After launching their ground-breaking acrocheck product, acrolinx® has built on that, with their new IQ Suite.

The research aspect of their organization has demonstrated its worth, in that the product already has more than 3000 users worldwide, so to better serve the needs of content professionals, acrolinx® introduced two new modules to the IQ Suite: Intelligent Reuse and Terminology Lifecycle Management. These new modules allow the reuse of contextual content, easily deploy terminology, all while ensuring that the quality of the content is consistent.

acrolinx® hosts free webinars at 1600h every second Thursday to assist users in getting the most from the IQ Suite – including the new modules. Some of the topics covered in the webinar are:

• Increased efficiency in translation and documentation.
• Building and administering sensible and meaningful terminology.
• Increasing transparency in technical documentation.

For more information about the IQ Suite webinars, go to the acrolinx® contact page. You can also reach acrolinx® by phone or send them an email.

There is a lot of discussion about the localization needs for content in other languages, with a focus on translation quality and efficiency. A typical discussion covers the use of translation memory to re-use translated text, uses for the localization interchange file format (XLIFF), and how to single-source a language for multiple countries.

However, the missing element is discussion of the content associated with doing business in real-time settings. What doesn’t get discussed are the culturally-specific customs and conventions that can seal the deal in the first place, the deal that allows us to take advantage of all the technologies to make our localization processes more efficient. When putting together a presentation, should the content be factual and precise? Should it get to the point quickly? Or is it more appropriate in this business culture to create a presentation that begins with generalities before getting down to business?

Tina Cargile, a project management with McElroy Translation, knows the importance of considering both linguistic and cultural issues as part of a global localization strategy. In the McElroy Translation E-Buzz, both aspects are addressed, from language to technology to culturally-specific corporate culture. For a look at how to do business in Sweden or characteristics of Italian translation, the McElroy E-Buzz archives are a treasure trove of information about doing business in other countries and cultures.

Tina Cargile leads a workshop on Product Life Cycles in the Life Sciences Industry: FAQ for the Vendor Selection Process at DocTrain Life Sciences 2008.

Seasoned content management consultants will tell you that most of a content management project is not about choosing the right tool, but about adopting the right processes. Increasingly, seasoned technical communication managers will tell you the same thing. As a profession trained to focus on technology - technology is the backbone of our products, our toolkits, and often our processes, as well - we are equally discouraged from focusing on the “soft” side - called soft because the outcomes cannot be measured in precise digital outcomes of zeros and ones.

It’s the change management and the resultant processes that make or break the project in terms of ultimate success. From changing the concept of document ownership to changing the authoring method from individualist to collaborative, from changing the development and approval model to changing the delivery model, current state processes need to be thought through, examined, and, perhaps, changed. 

Jeanette Eichholz is one of those forward-thinking technical communication professionals who became the shepherd of the transformation from moving her department’s documentation at G.E. Medical, in a multi-step process, from an unstructured, uncontrolled process that had inherent inefficiencies, particularly downstream at the translation end, to a more efficient process. That process, which not surprisingly included content management, focused on good practices, and getting the best from a globally-dispersed team. Eichholz shares her experiences at DocTrain Life Sciences in her presentation Developing a Collaborative team: Lessons Learned from GE Healthcare.

CMS Watch, a firm of independent content management analysts, makes its mark by providing unbiased evaluations of CMS software applications that take into account the product development and vendor evolution aspects, as well as technical capabilities. The difference between CMS Watch and other analyst firms is that they represent no vendors, promote no clients, and take no sponsorships for their reports.
The reports, which cover the areas of Web CMS, Enterprise Portals, ECM Suits, Web Analytics, and Enterprise Search, are written by independent industry experts with no ties to a specific vendor. CMS Watch is the first analyst group to issue a comprehensive report in the area of Component Content Management. Written by Ann Rockley of The Rockley Group, the report covers the major vendors of authoring software and content management systems specifically meant for multi-channel publishing.
Samples of CMS Watch reports are available from the CMS Watch site.

Building a corporate documentation infrastructure is critical to content findability. The principles behind the development and maintenance of a document management system is mature at this point, but what health care settings bring unique challenges.
On any site or on any project, there are likely to be multiple stakeholders, both internal and external, who cannot come together to understand the context for decisions. As a result, decisions, policies, and procedures are summed up in documents which get disseminated throughout the organization. These documents are pushed out for consumption by staff working different shifts, at different locations, with different access levels. This asynchronous communication brings great potential for miscommunication. Potential problems - being left off a distribution list, overwriting an incorrect version in a shared drive, referring to an incorrect version are some of the more common miscommunications - can be offset with a strong document management system.

Jeff Potts, the Optaros Enterprise Content Management practice lead, has been providing document management strategies for their clients by showing them how to buy, build, rent, or assemble solutions that are moulded to the needs of an organization.  Potts shares his insights on the ECM Architect and Optaros blogs. Potts will present A Practical Guide to Capturing, Organizing, and Securing Your Documents at DocTrain Life Sciences.

Over the years, best practices have been developed for single-sourcing content to output documentation for multiple languages in multiple channels. Experienced content development specialists build in the contingencies for other-language translations, in the anticipation that whether a handful or a multitude of languages are needed, the process will stand up under scrutiny.
Unfortunately, creating “global-ready” medical devices to support languages and conventions does not seem to follow those same best practices. The focus is on developing hardware, and the software or systems that support the hardware. The content included - in the interface, on the platform - more often than not gets developed without a single-sourcing strategy in mind. The translation process is an afterthought, and turns out to be a painful and costly exercise.
Translation technologist Jon Ritzdorf has been teaching translators and other communicators techniques for computer-assisted translation through the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation at the Monterey Institute, covering the overlying concepts and jargon needed to master any translation technology, as well as covering the aspects of when and how to use the tools.
Jon Ritzdorf presents on Globalization Issues with Medical Device Embedded Systems at DocTrain Life Sciences.

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) exists to promote the discovery and exchange of knowledge about humans that 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 to the community.
DocTrain Life Science speaker Dr. Ronald G. Shapiro discusses how human factors and ergonomics are present in everyday life. Download the article from the National Ergonomics Month site.

The idea that measuring and improving content quality can improve the lot of technical communicators is not a new idea, but with the introduction of desktop publishing, the technical publications craft declined over the course of two decades as cost reduction became the primary focus. Executive decision-makers expected tools to compensate for skills, and technical writing became more about the fulfilling a requirement for formatted content than about providing quality content.
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 tags, Kent Taylor, a former technical communication manager, lost interest in the field. He had started consulting, but in over five years, only rarely found an executive who understood - or even wanted to understand - what happened in their technical publications group. They didn’t understand why their content had corporate asset potential, why it was important to raise it above marginal quality, or why they should take an interest in ensuring its corporate “health.” Convincing reluctant executives of their unmined veins gold had become tedious. The tacit understanding that “better” mainly meant “cheaper to produce” 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.
What brought Taylor back from retirement was discovering a product that allowed organizations to restore quality to their documents while retaining the productivity they’ve come to expect. He is in the right position, balancing the need for things like metrics and reporting that managers and executives want with features such as spelling and grammar, and conformance to your organization’s style guide and terminology guidelines - the stuff that really matters. Taylor is on a mission to restore a focus on quality, and raise the profile of technical communication to the status he’s always felt it deserved.
Kent Taylor is leading a workshop, Creating High Quality Content that Communicates Across Language Barriers: Reducing Localization Costs By Focusing on Information Quality and presenting a session on Creativity or Confusion Factor?: The Case for Sentence-level Reuse in Mission Critical Communication.

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. The goal, then, is to find the best mix for your specific content library.

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 will be sharing her expertise in this area at DocTrain Life Sciences, with her workshop on Analyzing Your Deliverables: Developing the Optimal Documentation Library. 

If you gave up on the idea of converting documents through OCR or ICR to machine-readable data when you recognized that even having ninety percent accuracy rates meant a whole lot of checking and repairing when it came to large-scale document scanning.

Courtney Rand, Director of Business for North America at A2aA, explains that the next-generation technology is Intelligent Word Recognition. The idea is that, unlike with previous technologies which tried to read type or handwriting at the character level, IWR breaks down lines of writing to the word or element level. This allows the conversion software to make smarter choices about how to convert text.

When the IWR technology is applied to specific industries, a controlled vocabulary can increase the chances of accurate translation. For example, a pharmaceutical company could apply its own Controlled English dictionary, which ensures that polysemous words are rendered in a life sciences context. To learn more about automated intelligent data extraction, visit the A2iA site.

Courtney Rand presents Unlocking Handwritten Information from Medical Records at DocTrain Life Sciences.

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.

He 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 Authoring Assistance: Friend or Foe? at DocTrain Life Sciences.

An easy assumption to make is that the content you produce in English will be read by an English-speaking audience, and the translations you produce will be read by native speakers of the translated language. Yet when we stop to think about the demographic of any major city, we realize that a great portion of its inhabitants come from “away.” Though they may be going about their daily business in English - reading signs, deciphering instructions, communicating with businesses and authorities - they may be struggling to some degree to comprehend the Anglicisms and idiom that the native English speakers use in their spoken and written communications. The same thing occurs in the metropolitan areas of most European cities, as well, and is growing in other areas where economic growth brings migrant workers and the import of consultants and their families.

Organizations with communication savvy have a measured response, by using written techniques such as Controlled English, and other techniques such as visual communication. With any of these techniques, the potential for alienating an audience is as great as reaching them. Ann Zdunczyk, a long-time technical communicator, will discuss some of the finer points of cross-audience communication, with both cultural and linguistic aspects in mind.

Ann Zdunczyk presents How to Maximize Content for a Global Audience: Best Practices for Translating, Localizing and Globalizing Content in Life Sciences and Your Global Audience is Already Here: How to Create Content that Communicates with non-English Speakers at Home and Abroad at DocTrain Life Sciences.

Discover how the Documentum infrastructure can make your deployment of SharePoint 2007 a success—and reduce your TCO. Join Lance Shaw, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, as he outlines how EMC Documentum extends SharePoint 2007 with the critical enterprise-ready archive and content services that today’s leading companies demand. Learn more.

The US Food and Drug Administration issued a new guidance on indexing structured product labeling (SPL). The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) will begin indexing SPL in the product labeling for human drug and biologic products. (Source: PharmaTech.com)

SPL became a requirement in October 2005 when FDA stated that SPL in Extensible Markup Language (XML) was the only electronic format for content of labeling that CDER could process, review, and archive, according to the guidance. The agency is now recommending that content be submitted in SPL. The labeling standard enables the electronic exchange of the content of labeling and other regulated product information. It also enables the inclusion of indexing elements with product labeling. Indexing is made possible by machine-readable tags that are inserted into the label, but that do not appear on the actual printed label (consumers cannot see them). With these tags, individuals using clinical-decision support tools and electronic prescribing systems can more easily and rapidly search and sort product information in product labeling… The change also will help to decrease prescribing errors and enhance the safe use of medical products.

For example, says the guidance, a full-text search of the content of labeling for hepatoxicity will miss labelings that use the term liver toxicity. New indexing elements based on standards adopted for use in the healthcare setting will address this problem. The new guidance comes upon the completion of a six-month FDA pilot project that evaluted how best to add indexing elements to products. It also comes approximately two months after FDA issued a draft guidance on structured product labeling. The new guidance addresses some of the suggestions received from industry based on the draft, including more concrete advice on how applicants can recommend indexing terms to the agency and how indexed terms will be identified and shared.

See also Structured Product Labeling (SPL) Guidance (Source: XML Cover Pages)

A common problem facing medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers conducting international or global clinical trials is the daunting task of knowing all the regulatory requirements in each target market. The regulations to market to the European Union, for example, means navigating not only the 26 countries with their 23 official languages, but also the translation and labeling requirements that may vary from country to country.

It may take multiple years and millions of dollars to bring a new product to market, and having the process derailed because of the lack of knowledge of a regulation is the stuff that life sciences management nightmares are made of. Now, Global Language Solutions offers a new consulting service to organizations whose need to “get it right the first time,” ensuring that documentation meets regulatory requirements, speeding the labelling and translation process, and shortening time to market.

In addition to their translation and localization services, GLS also offers a range of services, such as multimedia services and voice-overs. GLS will provide subtitles and voice-overs as well as the option of transcription services for foreign language audio and video. This is an especially valuable service to offer as podcasts and video become more popular and accessible.

For a complete list of services, visit the Global Language Solutions website.

The American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) holds its 68th annual conference this year in Louisville, KY from October 23-25, 2008. The focus of this year’s conference, which draws attendees from across the country, is Setting the Pace.

The keynote speaker is Nanette K. Wenger, MD, Professor of Medicine, Emory University. Dr Wenger will be discussing women’s heart health. Coronary heart disease in women is one of Dr Wenger’s major clinical and research interests.  In 2003, over 45 million American women were over the age of 50. As the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) increases with age, raising awareness of coronary heart disease for women is increasingly vital, and physicians can play an important role.

This year’s AMWA conference is hosting a record 72 roundtable breakfast sessions, where delegates can, over breakfast, exchange ideas and experiences on topics ranging from medical translation to Word macros, freelance writing for the medical device industry to plain language writing for patients, writing effective case studies to amending clinical trial protocols.
The Indiana chapter of the AMWA is a sponsor of DocTrain Life Sciences 2008. Their site provides information for AMWA members in the Hoosier state.

What makes Bosnian and Kazakh languages worth sitting up to note? Ivan Lukavsky of Moravia Worldwide has written about these languages in the March issue of Multilingual magazine, noting that while there are “different drivers for the growth of these languages, and each exists in a different context, ... they certainly share some issues associated with their rapid development.”

In the case of Bosnia, the country is populated mainly by Bosniaks, ethnic Croats, and ethnic Serbs, each with their own linguistic differences. While the languages have a lot of overlap - similar to the way the languages spoken in Australian, Britain, Jamaica, the US, and India are all English but with sufficient variances to create humor and sometimes havoc - the languages within Bosnia are also dissimilar enough to create practical and political translation realities. Also, with the separation of Montenegro, the possibility that Montenegrin will become another recognized language is a distinct possibility.

In Khazakstan, a movement is afoot to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script, following in the footsteps of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, whose languages are in the same language group as Kazakh, and who used Cyrillic script when they were part of the Soviet Union.  Despite the fact that Russian is the official language, there is a push to popularize Kazakh, making localization into Latin-character Kazakh a near-future option.

Jon Ritzdorf of Moravia Worldwide will present Globalization Issues with Medical Device Embedded Systems at Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008. Ritzdorf will examine how medical devices that run on embedded systems can be developed in ways that make them ready for global users, so that they support the language scripts, formats, and conventions of international locales.

Peachpit TV has begun offers several podcasts to which users can subscribe via RSS feed, or use iTunes to find episodes. Peachpit TV offers seven different podcasts to choose from with subjects ranging from Author Tips (which consist of live demos on everything from video blogging to using CSS) to Voices That Matter, which brings users closer to the authors whose books help shape their careers. Documentation and Training Life Sciences keynote speaker, Ann Rockley, is one such voice. Her book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy explores how companies can deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in the right language and format.

Peachpit is also the publishing partner for Adobe Press, Apple Certified and AIGA Design Press among others. Peachpit provides a Commons Blog, where you can find a wealth of tips and tricks on the Adobe product suite.

MultiLingual, originally a buyer’s guide for translation companies, now boasts over 15,000 readers in 60 countries, and is considered the top industry magazine for globalization, international software development and language technology.
MultiLingual’s Blogos weblog, written by Ultan Ó Broin and Andrew Joscelyne, offers interesting and relevant insights into language through multilinguality, translation While Blogos is primarily a means of tracking and sharing news and views about the global language industry, it is also a space devoted to exploring new practices and the world of ideas.

Leading industry analysts and major organizations such as GE Medical Systems, Philips Medical Systems and IBM subscribe to MultiLingual.
Subscribe to MultiLingual to keep abreast of trends in this fast-paced world of localization and global communication.

Every industry needs a community, and PharmaVOICE is the community for life sciences industry executives and health care service professionals. The magazine, produced by PharmaLinx, provides access to all the articles published in the print version of PharmaVOICE and the VIEWs as well as an online calendar of industry events, a discussion forum, a monthly interactive opinion poll and other content.

One of PharmaVOICE’s best offerings on the website is their free and interactive web seminars. Registering for a seminar allows the user to speak with guest speakers, submit questions and learn about current issues affecting life science professionals. Their current offerings include Maximizing Efficiency and Impact through Sales and Marketing Integration on June 12, 2008. Sponsored by inventive Health this seminar explains re-evaluating how to bring products to market while saving money and time.

On June 26, 2008, PharmaVOICE hosts another web seminar – Creating the Most Effective Sales Calls: The Impact of Messaging on Prescribing, sponsored by TNS Healthcare, which covers how to deliver critical messages that drive prescribing in the face of soaring sales costs.

Learn more about PharmaVOICE online and print memberships. 

The translation and localization world is not a regulated industry, where standards are often as good as the organizations that implement them. Each business has its own procedures, their client and suppliers may have completely opposite procedures, but all the procedures ultimately have the same purpose: to create the best possible translation or localization.
In the Globalization Insider newsletter, the flagship publication of LISA, Juan José Arevalillo Doval, Managing Director of Hermes Linguistics Services and the Spanish Committee on EN-13058 discusses the future European Quality Standard for Translation Services (CEN/BTTF 138), backed by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). The standards bodies will promote activities related to standardization and quality that contribute to their awareness, use and development in society.

LISA also offers a free globalization industry primer as a PDF download. The primer covers topics such as planning for globalization and best practices and standards. Learn more about LISA.

Professionals feel pressured to design and create and content as quickly possible with as little extra time or cost as possible. Sometimes this content, by nature or by regulation, must be complex and highly structured. Yet the professionals creating the content are not in a position to learn complicated XML authoring tools – and nowhere is this truer than in the life sciences industry. In.vision Research has taken this issue to heart; their Xpress Author reflects a commitment to making content easier to produce and publish.

Xpress Author combines with the familiar interface of Microsoft Word to allow users to create XML content without actually learning XML. Xpress Author works quietly in the background with no change of environment for the user in Microsoft Word – yet Xpress Author is powerful enough to create valid XML and content as it is being created. This allows clients that have large knowledge management or e-business applications to create and leverage the advantages of XML content.

Learn more about In.vision and their products.

SDL hosts its first Global Information Management (GIM) Thought Leadership Conference this summer, on July 16, 2008 in Boston, MA. The first of its kind, this conference series is intended not as the usual user conference or marketing seminar but as a knowledge-sharing series where content management professionals can come to share best practices and other knowledge between themselves.

The conference provides the opportunity for participants to speak with leading practitioners of global information management and some of the decision makers of behind the world’s best known brands. These experts will present case studies, share best practice techniques, and demonstrate how they made their products stand out above the rest.

For conference dates and registration information, visit the SDL conference page. To see how over two dozen companies have used SDL effectively deliver information to their customers, comply with regulatory standards and improve service provider and patient interactions, download the case studies from the SDL site (registration required).

The untold tales of woe in the life sciences industry caused by the corporate pain associated with drug and biologic submissions could fill a book. Worse, the amount of potential revenue lost because of associated delays going to market could easily fill a vault. And calculating the ultimate health benefits lost to users, if that could even be quantified, would be astronomical.

As is often the case, the problem may be large, while the root of the problem is often relatively small. But because content management challenges are an area that is not well understood, it gets undervalued. The undervaluation results in the company not making the small, yet critical, investment that would make the submissions process go more smoothly. Every rejection by the FDA for reasons such as a lack of navigability of the electronically-submitted content, or problems reading PDF files, becomes incredibly frustrating. A rejection related to quality of clinical trials would be understandable, but rejection for, ultimately, lack of knowledge of publication tools and processes is simply an unacceptably wasteful way of doing business.

Antoinette Azevedo makes it her business to get to the root of the submissions problem. When it comes to eCTD submissions, she has become an astute diagnostician, recognizing the right combination of tools and processes critical to massaging content into shape in a way that will be accepted by the FDA, without delays for reasons that make pharmaceutical companies cringe. In fact, she has become a go-to person for life sciences publishing, and provides a wealth of information about topics such as product labeling and study data tabulation on the e-Submissions Solutions site.

Azevedo shares her knowledge in this area with her presentation Preparing Compliant eCTD Submissions at Documentation and Training Life Sciences in Indianapolis June 23-26.

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, Houser 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 Houser 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.

Houser 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.

Houser 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.

Houser has begun sharing his insights on the Group Wellesley Wire blog and will lead a workshop and two presentations at DocTrain Life Sciences: Do you Know Adobe Acrobat?, What’s New in Collaboration Tools, and Migrating to Structured Authoring on Your Way To XML.

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 Gollner, “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 Gollner’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. How do you raise their success rates when they have to implement complex publication standards? How do you ensure that non-technology-focused writer implement those standards in a way that does not jeopardize a submission to the FDA?

That became Gollner’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 have broken the code, so to speak, and are launching 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’s pleasure at solving this dilemma is apparent, even over the telephone. His interest, though, isn’t satisfying because of the technological solution; it’s 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 Gollner. “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.”

Other successful puzzles that Gollner has solved involve the careful dismantling of entrenched systems in order to replace them with newer, nimbler ones. In organizations that had sound authoring and editing practices in place, their inertia actually helped them leapfrog over an entire era of desktop publishing and land squarely in the content management space, allowing them to capitalize on their existing practices.

In one memorable case, a client was taken from stone age to space age in a single shot, as mountains of old data was converted into sophisticated XML content and poured into a content management system. Ironically, the old Wang word processors - used until last year for word processing - were so heavy that the organization could not justify the cost of moving them out of the building, so they were converted, as well, into rather unattractive but solid plant stands.

Gollner demonstrates his problem-solving skills at DocTrain Life Sciences, with two presentations: Ensuring Information Quality: Leveraging Intelligent Automation and Health Information Portals: Case Studies.

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, featured speaker at DocTrain Life Sciences.

Interested in life sciences and healthcare-related standards? There’s a lot of them to keep track of. To make your job easier, the folks at XML Cover Pages have created XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare Industries, an online directory of clinical research and healthcare industry standards. While not complete, it’s a great place to start your research.

Here you’ll find information about:

• ASTM Committee E31 on Healthcare Informatics
• CDC Public Health Information Network (PHIN)
• CEN/TC 251 Health Informatics
• CEN ISSS eHealth Standardization Focus Group
• Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC)
• Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)
• Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) Initiative
• Continuity of Care Record (CCR)
• Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM)
• Electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) for Pharmaceuticals
• Guideline Elements Model (GEM)
• Healthcare Informatics Standards Board (HISB)
• Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Health Level Seven (HL7)
• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)
• ITU-T Study Group 16
• Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC)
• OASIS International Health Continuum (IHC) Technical Committee
• Open Electronic Health Record Foundation (openEHR)
• Structured Product Labeling (SPL)
• Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED)
• Web3D Consortium Medical Working Group (MedX3D)

Check out XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare Industries.

Wal-Mart has begun rolling out personal electronic health records to a handful of employees as part of a plan to eventually provide more than a million of the retailer’s workers and their dependents with digitized health records, says Information Week. 

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with the overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. According to the company, “users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online”. See some early beta test screen shots and read what http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-14-n43.html">Google Blogoscoped has to say about Google Health.

Knowing how to enumerate the benefits of modular content and knowing how to go about implementing a single-sourcing 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 single-sourcing their content. There are different methods of single-sourcing content, which will 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 single sourcing implementations, and get the skinny on how-to tips and cautions in this podcast interview with trainer and consultant Neil Perlin.

A new book titled “Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design” is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com. (Shipping is estimated to begin at the beginning of March 2008.) Published by O’Reilly, the book demonstrates how successful businesses should be using customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

This book was a collaboration by practitioners from the leading experience strategy and design company, Adaptive Path. The professionals at Adaptive Path are considered thought leaders in the user experience field. They share their knowledge freely, and their contributions can be found on various community of practice sites such as Boxes and Arrows and the Adaptive Path website and blog.

The weak US dollar will create opportunities for American companies to sell their products abroad, according to John Yunker, who predicts that because of this, globalization of web content will be strong in 2008. Whereas in past years, a Web strategy may have been a full English site with a few localized pages in other languages, this year the balance will tip. Companies will have to rethink where they want to expand their markets, and invest some marketing dollars into boosting their globalization efforts.

Yunker, who since 2002 has been benchmarking websites for their localization efforts, issues an annual Web Globalization Report Card. In it, he reviews some 225 sites, which on average, each supports some twenty languages. Yunker evaluates them for their effectiveness on a number of criteria of interest to global users. He gave his globalization predictions for 2008 in a December post of his Global by Design blog.

Finding a way to turn direct mailing campaigns from irrelevant throw-aways into highly relevant keepers has been, until recently, a marketer’s dream. JFM Concepts has found a way to improve campaign performance by giving marketers the tools needed to create and manage their campaigns, and to segment and deliver personalized marketing messages. By reducing marketing fatigue with irrelevant information, it increases receptiveness to messages that matter.

Personalization is, in effect, optimizing the marketing message for an audience of one. The technology behind the process, variable data printing, has been combined with opt-in marketing and the web to create a powerful user experience. At the same time, the process yields far better results for marketing organizations than traditional campaigns. Learn more about variable data printing and its role in personalized marketing campaigns in this white paper by DocTrain Life Sciences presenter James Michelson and John Fager from JFM Concepts.

The competitive advantage of good user experience is well-established: easier-to-use sites are more used, better used, and repeatedly used. Users are happier, and as a result, more loyal. And as a result, the companies that create the sites are happier - knowing they’ve found the sweet spot: a user experience that keeps their customers engaged.

Persuasive design has moved from being a mystic art to a cognitive science, and Human Factors International (HFI) has been at the forefront of the movement to codify the principles behind what seemed to be the magic elixir. HFI Chief Experience Officer, Jerome Nadel and Jay More, President, discuss the strategy of persuasive design in this HFI webinar.

Adobe Systems publishes a product support and information blog that covers topics of interest to both users of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite and users of the individual products that make up the Suite: RoboHelp, FrameMaker, Acrobat 3D and Captivate.

Visit the Technical Communication blog on the web or subscribe to the Technical Communication blog RSS feed using your favorite news reader.

Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL)offers a quick and inexpensive test to help you understand the value of a content reuse strategy for your specific document collection. It’s called the Content Reuse Assessment. It 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. The Assessment includes a Summary Report with reuse potential metrics for your document set, as well as a detailed analysis report displaying location and content of exact and close matches.

DCL has found most document collections to contain more than 50% redundancy, meaning you’re maintaining twice as much content as you need to… at twice the expense. It also means that you’re likely updating the same content multiple times, you’re risking excess errors creeping in, and you’re reinventing text that you’ve already written.

Learn more about the DCL Content Reuse Assessment.

There are distinct business advantages to using modular writing techniques, particularly in a team environment where the opportunity exists for content to be shared between writers for re-use among information products such as product descriptions, procedures, error messages, interface instructions, and boilerplate text. Writers who have made the switch to this type of writing, willingly or because of corporate adoption of modular design, generally profess they could never return to what they perceive as a chaotic, uncontrolled method of assembling content. The ability to efficiently and effectively construct a document with a building block approach using content chunks, with the confidence that the content inside those building blocks will all be compatible, is certainly seductive.

Pamela Kostur of Parallax Communications is keenly aware of the benefits. In her work with companies who want to move to structured writing for content re-use, she has found that making the case is important for those writers whose resistance is rooted in a fear of loss of creativity or autonomy. Download the white paper Whose content is it anyway? to understand the argument for modular writing.

Usability is a critical factor in keeping consumers engaged during a transaction. Without a clear understanding of a consumer’s motivation, combined with an easy navigational pathway through the task at hand, converting a browser into a buyer. Mona Patel, Executive Director of Human Factors International, a leading North American user experience firm, has introduced a methodology that provides a way of understanding elements of consumer experience. From user motivation to site elements to building brand loyalty, the methodology covers best practices.

To learn more about the methodology, watch The Difference Between Evaluating ‘Can Do’ and ‘Will Do’ – How Persuasion, Emotion and Trust Relate to Conversion, a free archived webinar featuring Mona Patel and Susan Weinschenk. You might also want to download the accompanying white paper.

Global Language Services may provide professional translation services in over a hundred languages, but they realize that translation is not a simple matter. Aside from the linguistic issues, the cultural aspects make the translation of any text a complicated matter. Add to that the legal complexities within the life sciences space, and the need for a translation agency with a strong awareness of industry issues quickly becomes apparent.

There are precise requirements in the translation of, for example, Informed Consent forms, to protect the rights of non-English speakers during clinical trials. To be sure that consent is truly informed consent, the language in an Informed Consent must be considered sufficiently clear to the trial subject. It must stay consistent between the original language and translated form, and adhere to precise translation equivalents. The wording of the consent form is monitored carefully by multiple institutions. In addition, the consent must be demonstrated to be understood. In other words, the document must be shown to be readable - a subjective, yet monitored, condition.

Global Language Services provides industry white papers to helps companies with their translations and make informed decisions related to the translation and localization space:

• Tip sheets - includes pharmaceutical and medical topics
• White papers - culture, linguistics, localization, and technology topics

The DITA Maturity Model has just been released, and is available as a free download. Jointly authored by Amber Swope (JustSystems) and Michael Priestley (IBM), the DITA Maturity Model provides the industry with a graduated methodology for successfully implementing DITA within an organization.

The publication of this paper dispels the myth that implementing DITA is an all-or-nothing proposition. The DITA Maturity Model divides a DITA adoption into six levels, with each level requiring a greater investment, and also reaping a greater ROI. Organizations with more resources, and more to gain, can invest considerably more time and effort into an implementation, but that doesn’t mean that smaller organizations need to be excluded from gaining any benefits that might accrue to them from a simple implementation.

• Download the DITA Maturity Model white paper
• Keep informed about DITA developments at DITA News
• Be part of a DITA community

An important phase of a content management implementation is a proof-of-concept, which generally takes place after you’ve made your final choice but before you’ve purchased the software. While some vendors may encourage potential buyers to bypass the proof-of-concept stage and head directly for the dotted line, Vasont Systems’ Suzanne Mescan published an article that provides guidelines for organizations wanting to follow a practice that will ensure project success.

The Top Ten Tips for a Successful Content Management Proof of Concept is not specific to Vasont Systems and, truth be told, could be applied to all types of technology projects. The steps may seem mostly common sense to the experienced integrator, but a good reminder, and an extremely valuable guideline to the first-time content management project manager.

The power of content management goes beyond a single publication channel. The ability to exchange content between various departments within an organization has long gone beyond being a luxury. It has become a necessity, with substantial business benefit. This has particular significance in the life science industry, where the volume of information exponentially increases the potential for re-use.

The ability to repurpose content for multiple outputs - for documentation, for training material, and as content chunks integrated into a knowledge center takes both knowledge of content management from the Web side as well as the component side, and a content management system that can handle both component content management and web content management. To read how one healthcare information technology supplier structured their content to single-source it for documentation, training, and customer support, download the case study from the Vasont Systems website.

While American companies are rushing to enter the Chinese market, Don DePalma is very much the voice of reason. His advice may run contrary to popular opinion, but his arguments are extremely compelling. He points out that rather than playing a numbers game, you should be looking at quality over quantity of online populations: which groups are more likely to open their wallets? Whether you consider DePalma an inspiration or a wet blanket, his article in Chief Marketer is a highly compelling read for any company ready to extend their reach into the global marketplace.

Indiana’s $69 billion health industry, defined as biopharmaceuticals, medical devices and instruments, healthcare delivery, laboratories and payors – accounts for over 20 percent of Indiana’s total state taxes and almost 10 percent of the state’s employment. Across Indiana, researchers are working on the cutting edge of life science discovery and translating those advancements into new business opportunities and the latest in therapeutic treatments. Universities, private industry, and government unite collaboratively here to further develop Indiana’s life science base and network of supporting businesses. Recognized repeatedly as a premier cluster for pharmaceuticals, medical devices and ag biotechnology, the impact of Indiana’s research and development strength reaches around the world.

Documentation and Training Life Sciences association sponsor, Indiana Health Industry Forum has created a useful online resource, the “Indiana Health Industry Map”. We provide an iPaper version of the map below.

ITtoolbox has introduced its new Vendor Research Directory. This interactive online directory for the information technology industry is the first resource of its kind to marry user-generated content with information from technology vendors to create a comprehensive and objective tool for evaluating IT purchasing decisions.

Test drive it today!

By Mark Gross, President, Data Conversion Laboratory

In an age when we download movies at will, store piles of personal records on our BlackBerry devices, beam software to each other’s Palms, and store truckloads of digital photos on some website “out there”—accessible from anywhere—it’s frustrating that we aren’t yet applying the same technology to medical records to make them easily accessible to those who need them. I know there are obstacles—confidentiality, liability, resistance to change, and of course paying for it—and I’m not an expert in most of these, but it does seem that these issues are already addressed in other, less-technologically-advanced industries. It’s ironic that it’s in medicine, with all its technological advances, and day-to-day impact on life, that adaption of electronic record keeping would be so slow.

While I spend most days on mission-critical electronic data for a number of industries, how best to obtain, store and transmit it, none seem as personal as health care.

Not long ago, when my father-in-law was quite ill, I spent much time in the intensive care unit of a major hospital. The care was great, the nurses terrific, and the equipment state of the art. Yet, I was struck by the irony of nurses and doctors writing out, in long hand, the readouts from quarter-million dollar automated diagnostic equipment into a bedside notebook. And when someone misplaced “the notebook” the scurrying to find it would have been entertaining, if it weren’t so serious. Recently my mother saw three doctors, a day apart, all within a block of each other, yet each took blood and ordered his own blood tests, all on the same matter.