A lot of attention has been devoted to the subject of Web 2.0. Companies are exploring how to incorporate Web 2.0 concepts into their externally-facing systems. Some take an IT-centric approach, focusing on the underlying technology and its implementation. Others examine the potential business benefits through improved communication and collaboration. However, both perspectives frequently struggle to demonstrate ROI in the face of uncertain user adoption and control/security issues.

This presentation will examine Web 2.0 from a very specific angle: user experience in a business context, where “can do” meets “will do”, and how that applies in life sciences, where customer needs are unique compared to traditional e-commerce or brochure-ware sites.

The Web 2.0 paradigm is here to stay, giving users far more control to become content contributors and choose the types of interactions they want. Successful companies will have to design a useful, relevant, compelling user experience for customers.

This presentation will cover:

1. The evolution from Web-enabled self-service user control with Web 2.0
   
   • Implications for design: navigation, search, content creation & publishing, page design, and brand experience
2. How businesses can profit from Web 2.0
   
   • From customers (externally-facing sites)
   • Defining the trust factor in health care sites, and the Web 2.0 impact
   • Openness & collaboration
   • Knowledge management
3. The future: Pulling it all together

The ECM marketplace is changing rapidly with no slowdown in sight. As major infrastructure vendors (IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) threaten to take over the sector, what will happen to incumbents like EMC, OpenText and Interwoven? How will Open Source options play out - and what about Software as a Service? One thing is for sure the ECM market is growing substantially - yet making sense of it becomes harder by the day. In this session we will look at current trends in the vendor marketplace, and how they will play out in 2008 and beyond. We will also subdivide the sector both by technology orientation and geographic dominance, and give our honest and independent opinion on the vendors in this space.

Structured Product Labeling (SPL) and Product Information Management (PIM) has been mandated for pharmaceutical labeling materials and XML standards are available for Clinical Study Reports. Medical device companies have begun to use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), though often with specializations, to manage labeling content. However, there are a number of opportunities to structure content like submissions documents, and on the customer facing side, sales and marketing materials. Structured content beyond the label brings many benefits including faster time-to-market, greater compliance, increased consistency, reuse, and reduced cost of translation.

This session:

• Identifies structured content opportunities beyond the label
• Outlines the benefits and savings
• Outlines the steps for achieving structured content

In “Phase 2 - What’s next for Life Sciences and Enterprise Content Management”, Dave Giordano of Technology Services Group, shares his experiences from multiple large and small pharmaceutical clients that have implemented ECM. The presentation will focus on common themes, both functional and technical, as to what clients that have implemented ECM “do next” to get incremental benefits out of ECM. Dave will provide key lessons learned and warn how to avoid the big mistakes whether you are planning you first or next ECM effort.

Creating content for a global audience can seem daunting at first, but most best practices come down to practical guidelines and simple common sense. Document assets must be packaged in a consistent and specific way. Graphic assets must be tracked more specifically than with an English-only project. Effectively converting your content into target languages and locales involves a host of decisions:

• Are graphic images in your marketing materials potentially misunderstood or offensive?
• How can instructive graphics of device and equipment operation be created to minimize translations costs?
• How can source-file document templates be designed to allow “breathing room” for target languages that will increase word count and paragraph depth?
• What computer settings are required to enable you to view content published for Asian markets?
• When generating multiple outputs from single source publishing, how can content best be organized for optimal results?
• How can you select and qualify in-country review staff within your company to ensure that target languages are optimized for your audience?
• How can you reduce the turn-around time for in-country review?
• What can you do while authoring new content to maximize the leveraging of content from legacy files?
• How can you monitor your project’s progress as it advances through various milestones on the translation vendor’s end?

Attend this session to find out answers to these and even more critical questions that will help get the most out of your translation budget. The world is waiting for your product and accessible information to use it. Don’t be left behind as your competitors reach even further into expanding global markets.

Collaboration cuts across teams, geographies, groups, and organizations, and is becoming an increasingly important in today’s global business environment. Fortunately, the number and quality of tools for supporting collaboration continues to improve. This session will tour conventional, Web, and future tools for supporting collaboration. We will discuss and demonstrate the most popular types of collaboration tools: communication and meeting support, document collaboration, and project/schedule/task support. If you are challenged by your interactions with a distributed team or just need to improve your team’s effectiveness, you will find something of value in this session.

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

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

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

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

The Solution: Natural Language Processing and Linguistic Analysis research and development has been in vogue practically since the introduction of the first computer.  The concept of having a machine analyze text like a human being has been appealing, but very difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to apply in a practical, real-world environment. But things started to change at the turn of the century in the NLP Lab at the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI – Saarbrucken). A powerful Natural Language Processor was integrated with sophisticated Linguistic Analysis algorithms, and presented in a common word processing environment using a spellcheck-like User Interface. The system was spun off and productized in 2002, and further refined and enhanced over the past six years.

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

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

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

Life Sciences companies are trying to cope with an information explosion. The amount of content and data within and outside of the average organization is growing exponentially, but the majority of it – more than 90% - is unstructured and residing in disparate repositories. This overload of disparate information makes it nearly impossible for employees, customers and business partners to find the content they need, let alone the correct version or representation of it.

The inability to access and reuse existing content leads to the proliferation of redundant information across the enterprise, resulting in increased costs of information management, increased compliance risks, lower productivity, and slower time to market.

This session will describe how new and innovative solutions are being developed leveraging the power of XML and using products such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, and emerging Web 2.0 tools, to deliver significant operational improvements across the enterprise such as:

• Lower costs through the use of a single source of content
• Lower risk of non-compliance by ensuring only the use of the latest approved content
• Increased productivity by reducing manual and error-prone processes, and automating the publishing of information to various output formats
• Increased customer satisfaction through quicker and easier access to information when, how and where it is needed

As drug development expands globally, pharmaceutical project managers need to master management techniques, tools, and measures that transcend language, cultural, and geopolitical barriers. Industry leaders need to employ new technologies allow their global team members to collaborate better and to manage critical information on local, international, and global levels.

Pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies selling their products internationally typically adapt the offer, the product itself, the language, the website, the marketing collateral, its way of selling, how it delivers the product, and who supports it to the needs of doctors and other consumers in their target markets.

This presentation will outline the need, best practices, and enabling technologies for managing this critical function.

Global collaborative writing team. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But why would anyone want to develop and maintain a collaborative team, especially over international time zones? Doesn’t everyone want their own autonomy anyway? to control their own destiny? their own budget? be happy within their own writing silow? Why develop a collaborative writing team?

For consistent standards, to share content and processes, reduce costs, to share a one for all and all for one attitude, and to gain the best of all possible worlds, of course. Because the reality of maintaining separate but equal writing silos is costly, redundant, and ‘managed’.

In reality, we’re all working for one company, sharing the same budget, using the same vendors, developing the same templates, following the same style guide… With the business imperatives we all have today to deliver more documentation faster, consistently, and cheaper, can we really afford to work in a silo? And wouldn’t we really have more to gain by sharing costs to develop content, agreeing on standards and templates, and determine how to meet tight schedules by sharing responsibilities by empowering all members of the team? 

Managers/Teams will Learn about: How to build, develop, and maintain a global collaborative team and the benefits/challenges of working with a global collaborative team. Here are some of the differences and benefits she’ll discuss about working with a collaborative team vs working in your own separate writing ‘silo’.

• Team Leader vs Separate managers for each writing group
• Developing a Style Guides collaboratively vs Maintaining consistent styles across all the writing groups
• Getting everyone to do the same thing willingly vs Enforcing standardized templates and processes
• Srategizing translation cost trade-offs with everyone’s input vs Being told to reduce translation costs by 20%
• Meeting ‘creative’ schedules by splitting up the tasks vs Missing tight schedules
• Controlling quality and consistency collaboratively vs Getting the go-ahead to hire for a department editor
• Agreeing to write and reuse one set of content vs ‘Enforcing’ no changes in order to minimize translation costs
• Implementing a content management system with 4 months to write a 1000-page manual for two products with development in two different countries by working together vs doubling the resources, doubling the time, and doubling the cost
• Validating Chinese, Korean, Japanese translations with team members overnight vs Using costly external experts that takes one week to turnaround
• Gaining the best from 8 global teams vs Utilizing the best of one team
• Having an on-site writer working alongside the subject matter expert in another country vs Developing content for software written in another country
• Empowering everyone, sharing best practices, and gaining from the global interchange of information and technology vs Keeping expertise with the chosen few and enforcing their guidelines
• Developing a shared repository of content vs. Developing unique documentation sets and translations
• Collaborating on schedules, standards, and costs vs Managing schedules, standards, and costs

Reusing content is critical in helping to ensure that content is consistent regardless of where it appears, but many technical communicators hesitate to reuse content because they write for several different audiences, with different needs. For example, you may need to accommodate physicians, patients, and the FDA, and you may also need to accommodate the marketing requirements for your product. However, you can accommodate differences and still reuse content effectively. It’s all in the planning. This presentation shows you how to plan for effective reuse by creating content models that support different information products and different audiences, and how to create reusable content to support those models.

You’ll learn:

• How to analyze content to determine valid differences
• How to create content models to determine the different places content will be used
• How to accommodate differences through structure
• How to create writing guidelines that everyone can follow, ensuring your content is both usable and reusable

Gambro BCT, a medical device manufacturer, is diving in to the next generation of technical communications. This new environment consists of topic-based XML/DITA-structured authoring, automatic publishing, and the need increase the number of language offerings to support growth in additional and merging markets. All of this is to be done while continuing to follow regulatory guidelines.

In this discussion, Jennifer Perkins, the Technical Communications Manager, and Jennifer Linton, the XML/CMS Project Manager, provide helpful tips about each phase of the document lifecycle and what to consider when moving to an XML/DITA-based environment in a regulated industry. Do you have questions about how to support an XML/DITA-based and content and translation management system environment in your industry? This talk will provide you with some helpful tools and answers for you to move forward.

After about two and a half years of attempting to move to DITA and trying different content management system approaches, Gambro BCT is finally using the open source authoring standard, a content management system, and a translation management system. This new environment, called GEM (Globalization and English Management), is the basis for many new opportunities at Gambro BCT. They will share a brief overview of the organizational structure, tools infrastructure, and the regulatory standards needed to maintain this new environment. Then they will dive into some of the details about the discussions they had to solidify this working environment. These discussions include the information model, user guide for the content management system, persona descriptions, and process and procedure guides. For example, in their discussions, they determined that the document lifecycle needed to change to encourage regulatory signoff at a more granular level to promote a translations cost savings.

The presenters will also share the benefits that they foresee with this new environment as well as some lessons learned and next steps, including implementation of this system to develop training materials.

The technology purchasing lifecycle is an essential part of putting together a solid content management plan. This lifecycle typically starts with identifying a business need/scenario and understanding the technologies that will meet that need, then moves on through the selection, implementation, and use phases. Just as there are a myriad of needs and scenarios, so too do technology suppliers differ greatly in their offerings. In this session we will provide you with some best practices for selecting content and document management technologies and define a framework for bringing it live into your organization.

Many life science organizations are looking at XML technology to foster collaboration by using reusable ‘chunks’ of information across the organization. XML offers an efficient foundation to enable collaboration by reusable content. But while their is technology to facilitate this; your content, your architecture, your organiazation and your management probably aren’t. Bridging silos of information and developing a clear content strategy are a key aspects of making sure that the right information is always presented. This session will look at micro (human-based) and macro (computer-based) approaches to understanding content reuse to get your system and you boss on-board. Best practices for designing for effective reuse and helping the organization to move towards true collaboration will be provided.

This session will provide the attendee with an overview of micro and macro content analysis and address:

• What is reuse and what are the benefits?
• How to analyze your content for reuse
• Architecting your content for an effective content strategy
• Best Practices for bridging information silos and gaining support

The last few years have seen the rise of visual authoring tools like Adobe Captivate that let us create tutorials, simulations, web-based product demos, even eLearning, for marketing, training, and tech support. These tools are easy to learn and use, and cheap (well under $1000). All these tools do the same thing –-- create “movies”—–but they offer different feature sets and design philosophies that may determine which one you choose.

This presentation looks at three tools—market leaders Camtasia and Captivate, and a new entrant named Mimic—to examine how they work and how to choose the best one for you.

Today, life science industries are experiencing tremendous pressure from regulatory commissions to conform to mounting numbers of industry standards. At the same time, they must always look to improve cost and time efficiencies and maintain the highest levels of quality and safety.

All of these pressures present a daunting challenge for companies who then need to publish critical information into multiple languages around the world. They can no longer rely on paper-based, manual business processes that are time consuming and error prone.

Fortunately, new technologies can improve your ability to manage and translate information into multiple languages through a set of seamless business processes and best practices. 

Businesses can now:

• Simplify sharing and reuse of content and translations
• Reduce translation and localization costs
• Produce more accurate content in all languages
• Roll out new products faster
• Consolidate content to a single source for multi-channel delivery

Structured authoring can provide many of the benefits of XML-based authoring and publishing, with lower start-up and maintenance costs. For many organizations, structured authoring provides an achievable migration target in a longer-term migration to XML. For other organizations, structured authoring alone may be the optimum target for maximizing publishing efficiency.

Structured authoring can provide similar benefits to XML-based authoring, with potentially lower costs, less migration pain, and lower maintenance costs. Also, structured authoring allows organizations to use conventional tools and retain authoring flexibility (the ability to apply manual formatting when necessary, for example) that many organizations still require.

Structured authoring may be a goal or a milestone on the way to XML. In either case, structured authoring can provide improved consistency, quality, and control, while “future-proofing” your technical publishing.

This session will introduce structured authoring and will look at how structured authoring can be implemented using several popular authoring and publishing tools.

It’s no secret that the thought of XML and its technical complexities stops many writers from even considering structured authoring. But what happens when people find out that they can create XML documents right in Microsoft Word with the In.vision Xpress Author add-in? Once the fear is gone, users see how much “smarter” XML documents are, and how smarter documents can make their workday far more interesting and productive.

This session will demonstrate how XML enhances collaboration and really delivers what users want:

• Web 2.0: Collaboration today is defined by wikis, blogs, and other aspects of Web 2.0. Does XML authoring fit with the spontaneous nature of Web 2.0, and can it actually bring a new level of functionality to Web 2.0 processes?
• New Levels of Document Review: Track Changes and Commenting in Word are already the basis for many organizations’ review processes. Come see how adding the intelligence of XML to these features takes document review to the next level and supports productivity gains for everyone.
• Real-time Content Pipeline: Interviewing SMEs is a time consuming and often non-collaborative activity. We will demonstrate what happens when the results of collaborative processes flow directly to technical writers from wikis, blogs, or review processes.

Quick turnaround within the context of regulated documentation environments may be considered an oxymoron.  Although stringent approval sequences are necessary and important to the life sciences, technology can help mitigate process drag caused by creation and review cycles by enabling storage and reuse of quality linguistic assets.

Reuse of linguistic assets, generally categorized under the moniker of translation memory, has been widely used in the translation and localization industry for 20 years.  However, this reuse has been largely targeted to reuse of translations, not the reuse of source materials.

Recent product offerings, conceptually derived from translation memory and known as authoring assistance now bring the benefits of reuse to creators of source material, but this has been greeted with some reticence by the authoring community. Questions arise such as, “Why should I use a phrase just because it has been already translated into 20 languages?”

With documentation often following the development process like the caboose at the end of a train, and translation stumbling along the tracks trying to catch up with the caboose, authoring assistance provides technical writers new opportunity to improve overall corporate performance and to ease pain felt by downstream stakeholders.  By leveraging previously created linguistic assets, they can cut turnaround times, improve consistency, and become instrumental in reducing costs.  Moreover, they can adapt more quickly to product changes thrust upon them at the last minute by their upstream colleagues.  In short, authoring assistance technology can help authoring resources become stars in their organization.

This session will detail the benefits of an authoring assistance product and will demonstrate actual usage of this technology.

English is one of the most expressive languages on Earth; with a vocabulary of over 900,000 words, no wonder there are so many ways to say the same thing! Mission critical, life saving messages must be communicated clearly in English as in target languages. Even if your content is still in “English only”, this presentation will give you insights to more effectively communicate your intent, in words and images, to a diverse audience. Find out what global forces are eroding market boundaries and helping “make the world flat,” broadening your future audience to include languages you may not have considered before.

This presentation will cover many considerations, including:

• Is your content written as clearly and as to the point as possible?
• Does your content use consistent terminology?
• Has your company acquired other subsidiary divisions that have different standards for writing and managing content and language translation? If so, how do your coordinate your efforts in this arena?
• How do you optimize source, English content to leverage as much previously translated text from legacy material as possible?
• How can a professional linguist be certain of your intent during translation?
• How can you validate content translated for overseas markets?
• When does “fancy” formatting and page layout become an impediment to language translation?

No doubt you’ve already heard about Controlled English, and the many challenges to effectively translating rich, technical content from English to other languages. At first glance, the task can seem overwhelming. Believe it or not, you are already “shifting gears” and writing at different levels of English for different audiences. The same skills you use every day in editing you own email can be transposed to effectively create focused, technical content for a broad global audience.

Domestically, a significant proportion of medical staff are non-native English speakers. In an emergency, all staff must instantly grasp the intent of written instructions on complex equipment. The “life-saving” ramifications of your content become even more pronounced when your words are translated from English to another language. Attend this session to learn even more ways to avoid errors and save lives. (And you thought you were just creating content!)