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.

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

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

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.