We live in a highly visual world and thanks to popular sites like YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and FaceBook, the Internet has forever changed the expectations of consumers and how they digest information. The first wave of children to grow up with the web, sometimes called the “Connected Generation,” is now reaching adulthood and along the way have enjoyed the benefits of dynamic, interactive information and undoubtedly will never be satisfied with anything else.

This new revolution is disruptive for most industries, including Technical Communication and Instructional Design. With any change, though, comes opportunities to rethink about how to take advantage of rich media in documentation. When adding rich media, we can also incorporate new ways of delivering truly useful and interactive technical documentation in multiple languages and formats. In keeping pace with this new revolution, find out how Adobe and the new Adobe Technical Communication Suite is changing the industry landscape by providing new ways and new deliverables (e.g. Adobe AIR) for authoring and publishing the next generation of technical and instructional design documents.

The history of the Web has been, among other things, a history of unintended consequences. This was true of the original Web and it is true of Web 2.0. In both cases, the latent capabilities of standards that were adopted, or simply available, proved to be critically important to enabling breakout adoption and innovation. This is not altogether surprising as it is a feature that is common across the history of technology. What is surprising is how the success of the Social Web is bringing XML, the Extensible Markup Language, into focus once again as a language for designing content and the associated processing applications.

In many ways, the first ten years of XML have been dominated by activities dictated by the technology community to address technology problems. Many of the resulting innovations have not improved the usefulness, or accessibility, of XML as a tool for mastering content and content enabled processes. Some might even go so far as to say that many of the innovations have made XML less well suited to content applications than was its venerable predecessor, SGML. But the explosive growth of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has made it imperative that organizations can put their content assets to work in a dynamically connected world. The roots of XML are therefore finding renewed attention and some of the latent capabilities within XML are being mined to build new generations of content solutions. It is in this light that the notion of Content 2.0 takes on a measure of substance.

Maintaining a reasonable level of quality and consistency across all of the content that gets into your customers’ hands has always been difficult to manage. It used to be possible when the majority of the content was written by groups of professional writers, and edited by professional editors. And generally distributed in only one language - English.

Today, however, your customers get content from all manner of sources that used to be only for internal consumption, where quality and consistency was less important.  And in today’s Global Economy, chances are that much of the customer facing content is translated, and distributed in more than one language, or at least to a large population of non-native speakers. This is where quality and consistency really pay off.

Using meaning-based natural language processing software, we’ve analyzed Translation Memories, Software UI Strings from very large systems, and large corpora of assorted customer facing content. And, we’ve found that nearly every set of content that we look at contains 15% to 25% redundancy, or more. 

For example:

• UI strings with 22 different ways of advising the user that “the start date must come before the end date,” “the end date must be later than the start date,” “start date must precede end date,” “the end date must be greater than or equal to the start date,” ...
• 129 variants of a simple sentence advising the user to “turn the switch to the RUN position”
• 16 variants of a sentence introducing a package list

A minor irritant to a native speaker, a bigger irritant for a non-native speaker or poor reader, and a major irritant for your CFO. Every one of those variants was translated in some cases to 30+ target languages. On the average, this kind of linguistic redundancy adds 20% to the cost of translation. Put another way, if you currently translate to five languages, and could eliminate this redundancy in your source, your savings would be great enough to translate to an additional language, and open up a new market.

This presentation will discuss these and other relevant content quality issues in depth, suggest ways to deal effectively with them, and present real-world examples of companies that have ‘been there, done that.

There are a plethora of content management systems on the market; Enterprise Content Management, Document Management, Web Content Management, etc. But if you are creating reusable structured content, your focus is on managing components of content. While some of the other types of content management systems may meet your needs, a Component Content Management (CCM) system is ideally suited to your requirements.

CCM systems manage content at a granular (component) level of content, rather than at the page or document level. Each component represents a single topic, concept, or asset (such as an image or table). Components are assembled into multiple content assemblies (content types) and can be viewed as components or as traditional pages or documents. Each component has its own lifecycle (owner, version, approval, use) and can be tracked individually or as part of an assembly. CCM is typically used for multichannel customer-facing content (marketing, learning, support). CCM can be a separate system or be a functionality of another content management type (such as ECM).

This session will focus on:

• What is a Component Content Management System (CCM)
• The benefits of CCM
• The three types of CCM
• A survey of the industry

Wikis seem to be the poster child of Web2.0 content delivery. But how practical are they for creating and delivering content that people can really use? Relive our experience of setting up not just one—but three different wikis—each designed to meet a different need and have a defined role in delivering information for different audiences. Find how we populated them, how they were received by our customers, and how we published traditional online help from wiki content.

Over the last 18 months WebWorks has deployed two external wikis, one technical and one event driven, as well as one internal wiki used for a variety of business process and knowledge capture activities. It’’s been a steep learning curve, and we did some things wrong, but we also did a lot right. The impact on both our internal business processes and our ability to provide our customers with “just-in-time” information has been immediate and beneficial.

If you are thinking about deploying, or have recently deployed, a wiki, then this session is for you. The session will share some of those lessons learned, how we approached wiki design, how we encouraged people to contribute, and perhaps more importantly, how we controlled those contributions.

The session will also include a practical demonstration of how we automated the initial population of the wiki with existing content from legacy Adobe FrameMaker and Microsoft Word documents, as well as DITA-XML, and how the wiki content was used to publish user documentation in a variety of formats.

The session will conclude with a look at how we intend to continue our adoption of wiki technologies and how we are investigating the role of wiki-based content as part of our overall publishing workflow.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, or are transitioning from another platform, such as Blogger, this session will help you move from WordPress novice to quasi-geek in about an hour. You’ll learn how to get up and running, not only writing posts, but categorizing and tagging them, customizing their display on your site, and styling your theme in prime Web 2.0 fashion.

WordPress gives you the most flexibility, control, and style for publishing your blog content. With a passionate developer community, WordPress has enthusiasts worldwide writing WordPress plugins and themes and helping each other in forums. The open architecture of WordPress allows you to completely dissect the code, and rearrange and manipulate (and often break) your blog’s content in dozens of ways.

This session focuses on the technical aspects of using WordPress. You’ll learn how to install WordPress on a web host, add plugins (and what plugins to add), apply themes, write posts and pages, style your sidebar, create categories and tags, integrate multimedia (such as videos, podcasts, and screencasts), and syndicate your feed.

Additionally, you’ll learn best practices for setting up your WordPress site, such as how to choose a theme, grow your reader base, make your blog more usable, create search-engine-optimized content, and write appealing posts.

Finally, you’ll be exposed to more advanced techniques, such as adjusting your theme’s style through CSS, how the theme files interact, and how to alter PHP tags to control the display of your database content. 

All participants will receive access to their own, individual test site they can explore and play around in, as well as some step-by-step help materials and videos.

While new technologies have always been of interest to those within the content management industry, it is perhaps Web 2.0 and the possibilities it brings for communication and collaboration that has caused the most excitement and innovation in terms of new products.

As more and more teams now seek to work together collaboratively across multiple locations, states and even oceans, tools have become critical to that success. 

But as the flow of information increases, so too does the requirement to ensure that it is the right information, accessible at the right time, delivered to the right person.

Content Management vendors must therefore ensure their applications provide the capability and flexibility that allow virtual teams to work together efficiently and effectively, while taking full advantage of Web 2.0 functionality.

Join Steve Davis, Author-it President, and Mark Patla, Sales Director North America, who will demonstrate:

• Component Content Management – what it means and why it is different
• Author-it key features including content reuse
• Collaborative authoring functionality including authoring via the web
• Creating multiple outputs from the same content
• Knowledge discovery – organizational knowledge accurate and accessible to all
• What if? Author-it’s vision and future in the Web 2.0 environment

There is no ‘right’ way to use a wiki. The fantastic thing about wikis, and the reason they have been so successful, is that they are built from the ground up by the people who use them. That way, the structure of a wiki, and how it is used, comes to mirror how the people using the wiki want to structure it, how they want to use it.

On Wikipatterns.com, a growing community is using the wiki to document the patterns of wiki use present in their own wikis. The site contains a toolbox of patterns and anti-patterns, and a guide to major stages of wiki adoption that explores patterns to apply at each stage. Applying these patterns can help coordinate peoples’ efforts and guide the growth of content on a wiki, and recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder growth - can give a wiki the greatest chance of success.

This workshop/presentation will give an overview of Wikipatterns.com, explore some patterns from the site, give practical guidelines on how to apply patterns to a new or existing wiki. Attendees will also learn strategies for wiki adoption from a range of organizations, like Sun Microsystems, Johns Hopkins University, LeapFrog, and more.

This presentation will follow along the hilly path as Siemens Building Technologies’ Integration Department took Single Sourcing documentation from concept to pilot project. I will use the “building a house” theme to explore the steps with a mixture of tasks, lessons learned, wins, and losses along the way. I will also discuss ways in which expanding and maintaining the single sourcing system, as well as using it every day as a department standard, is just as challenging as maintaining or expanding a home.

A new home means a new routine, a new route to work, and a new grocery store. Our daily use of XML as our main writing tool also means new processes, procedures, and resources. A new home may also mean new neighbors, roommates, maybe even out-of-town guests. A writing team made up of six members, all with varying backgrounds and areas of expertise requires the same negotiations and discussions as living with people with different needs and schedules. And training another department - a new project scope altogether - can be a bit like accommodating guests who may not have the same appetites, sleep schedules, and interests.

Find out how the Integration writing team faces these challenges every day, with every documentation set.

The use of visual help authoring tools like Adobe Captivate has exploded in recent years because they’re a quick, inexpensive way to create training movies, tutorials, simulations, even e-Learning materials. All of these tools, and there are almost 30 ranging from mainstream tools to shareware and freeware, do basically the same thing, but they often do it using different development models and feature sets. In this presentation, we’ll look at three commercial tools, the market-leading Camtasia and Captivate and a new one, Mimic to see how they compare as far as their development models, features, and appropriateness for your needs.

In today’’s global business environment companies must continuously improve their ability to quickly and cost-efficiently develop new products, tailor them for an increasingly segmented customer base, and support them globally over the entire product lifecycle. Advances in ERP, CRM, and PLM systems have added pressure on technical publications departments to deliver information that is tailored for individual customers or specific products and configurations. Additionally, this information has to be delivered faster, in multiple formats and media, and at a lower cost. XML provides an excellent path to automating the publishing process and achieving a leap forward in an organization’s ability to produce and maintain volumes of high quality, tailored information at a fraction or the typical costs. Until recently, however, XML came with high start up costs which limited adoption.

New standards such as DITA enforce best practices and enable reuse of information and interoperability of publishing systems. Today, many organizations are adopting DITA because they are simply looking for faster implementation; they deploy the DITA open source toolkit with little to no specialization. These organizations are simply looking for an out-of-the-box solution that automates their publishing process with minimal implementation effort. As the technology matures, we will see an increasing number of new solutions, built on DITA, that take this idea one step further and leverage this excellent infrastructure technology to develop production-quality turn key applications for various publishing processes. You can expect out-of-the-box applications that automate the process of creating high-quality, interactive service manuals, illustrated parts catalogs, operator’s manuals, and many other commonly used technical publications. Your ability to embrace and adopt these new applications will enable you to significantly improve the capacity and efficiency of your organization and allow your company to capitalize on the quality of its product support through lasting business differentiation.

PTC has already delivered the first of these integrated, out-of-the box applications. Built on Arbortext dynamic publishing software, this DITA-based solution enables customers to publish high-quality service manuals with embedded interactive illustrations quickly with minimal configuration. The PTC service manual application offers a comprehensive set of capabilities including text and illustration authoring, automatic publishing, and advanced content management. It incorporates industry best practices and enables you to both repurpose product design information and link your service manuals to actual product configurations, thus eliminating costs and allowing you to standardize your service procedures. And all this is packaged in one simple, integrated application that allows you to get started at a fraction of the typical costs and time.

Attend this session to learn more about the PTC service manual application and how you can broaden your skills to fully leverage the power of other similar new solutions.

In 2006, Business Objects faced a major challenge. How to migrate over 50,000 pages of unstructured non-topic based documentation it had acquired through rapid growth and acquisitions. The answer was to use DITA to standardize content creation, management, translation and publishing processes company-wide. In this session, you will learn how they went from planning to publishing using an iterative approach, and how you can use this method to see the results of a content migration sooner in your project cycle.

Content models show how documents, web sites, manuals, or any other information products are put together. Content models define structure. They tell authors what components to include, in what order, and whether components are mandatory or optional. Content models help authors to create consistent materials, whether they are working in a content management environment or not. But, defining the structure of information products is only the first step in working towards consistency. You also need to figure out how to write the content that goes into that structure, regardless of who is writing.

Writing content consistently ensures that it is reusable, that its reuse is transparent, and that all content appears unified whether it is reused or not. Writing content consistently makes content reusable and more usable.

In this session, you will learn:

• The role of an content model in defining structure
• How to create consistent structures for similar information types
• How to create reusable content to support different structures
• How to create writing guidelines that everyone can follow, ensuring your content is usable and reusable!

Yo’u will also see examples of different structures along with their writing guidelines to help you get started in creating your own.

There are many careful steps that must be taken when migrating content into a modular form suited to long term maintenance and reuse. In performing these steps, one of the considerations to be kept in mind is how the units of content, once modularized, will be re-assembled to form both legacy and new information products. This is something that those embarking on implementations of such standards as DITA and S1000D are well acquainted with, or will be.

As one of the key motivators for moving towards a modular content posture is the ability to deliver more precisely tailored information products, the expectations set for the quality and utility of delivered products are in fact being raised over those that applied to legacy offerings. And to make the scenario even more daunting, one of the criteria getting particular attention at present is timeliness – which typically amounts to the mandate to provide just-in-time content. So the assembly of the applicable content modules and their transmutation into a context-specific information product must be performed with blistering speed and flawless quality. The delivery of information products therefore introduces a set of demands that must be systematically addressed if this goal is to be achieved. With reference to a number of case studies, this presentation will review the demands that must be met if modularized content is to be assembled, resolved, compiled and rendered into the types of information products that people rightfully expect.

Get a glimpse of the many facets of wikis. “What is the wiki, the source or the deliverable?” You may ask yourself and your teammates this question as you begin to explore wiki implementation ideas. Wikis have many content management-style aspects, so wiki as source repository has definite advantages, until you try to figure out how to slice the wiki into deliverables that resemble a book, a training session, or a user assistance file that is shipped with a software product. If you already have an admirable structured authoring environment, is a wiki then another deliverable? What about round-tripping?

DITA provides an end-to-end architecture for authoring, managing, and publishing topic-oriented technical information. DITA may appear to be an ideal solution for authoring and maintaining online help systems. However, the DITA specification does not directly accommodate many of the customary and expected features provided by conventional help authoring tools. Learn how you can use DITA today to deliver online help, and learn what the DITA Technical Committee is doing to make DITA more directly usable for online help in the future.

Attendees will learn the following:

• How features of the DITA architecture map to the structure of conventional online help systems
• Why DITA can provide an ideal solution for authoring, maintaining, and delivering online help
• Current issues and limitations when using DITA for online help
• Common features of help authoring tools and how they map to (or don’t map to) DITA
• Approaches for maintaining and delivering DITA-based context-sensitive help

Content reuse, single-sourcing, multi-channel publishing; these terms have typically brought to mind expensive enterprise publishing solutions, but that doesn’t have to be the case! Come and see how MadCap Software is solving the problems of content authoring for maximum effective reuse, single-sourcing, and multi-channel publishing on a shrink-wrap software budget.

Start with a single authoring seat and then only grow when needed. Additional modules supporting multimedia development, localization/translation work flows, document/content analysis, even Web 2.0 functionality are available and can be added at any time.

Anyone responsible for creating or authoring content, publishing or re-publishing content, performing translation or localization, or architecting content systems for maximum re-use and leverage should attend this session. The tools and work flows covered will include:

• Flare - Content reuse, authoring, and publishing
• Mimic/Capture/Echo - Multimedia tools for creating animated or static visuals or audio
• Analyzer - The ultimate in automated content analysis finding technical and consistency problems in tens of thousands of content pages
• Lingo - Dedicated and integrated translation memory supporting the MadCap Software tools and industry standards
• Feedback Server - Don’’t guess, know how your content is being used by your customers

MadCap Software is leading the industry forward, come and see how.

Documentation deliverables have evolved beyond manuals and online help in recent years, and with the emergence of Web 2.0, things are changing faster than ever. Technical communicators have many more options to enhance the user experience, and developing many of them provide the opportunity to work with other departments to find a more holistic approach to content development and delivery. But there is no one-size-fits-all set of solutions. This session will review the types of analysis you need to do to determine which deliverables are right for your project, your customer, and your company.

Other factors that cant be ignored, such as translation needs, staff/time constraints, file size limitations, corporate image and control, and proprietary concerns will also be discussed, including: 

• Analyzing the Product - Intended audience; delivery method (desktop, web application, etc.); competitor offerings; software development methodology. The UI as part of the Help system. Product Management expectations.
• Identifying User Wants and Needs—Preferences and expectations for information; work environment; knowledge and experience levels.
• Ascertaining Internal Needs and Opportunities—Working with Training, Support, and Marketing to reduce duplication and provide the user with consistent, useful information. Finding ways to incorporate information from other departments to improve documentation.
• Accessing Deliverable Options what is the optimum mix for the product?—The traditional: online help, manuals, embedded help, job aids, forums, web sites, technical support knowledgebases. Emerging trends: wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, software demonstrations, podcasts, and other collaborative tools. They can supplement and/or enhance the traditional. Or, they may be a better fit for internal knowledge management or marketing use.
• Optimizing the Library—Single-sourcing; best practices for structuring information; continuous publishing.

XML and DITA for documentation and publishing boast extreme productivity and cost-savings, as well as revenue opportunities. But how can you build your case to executives to get the green light and show them that DITA is the path for future content?

Come to this session to discover your potential financial returns. Learn how to calculate the cost of your current processes, and calculate the potential savings with new technology for authoring, re-use automation, localization, review, and publishing. You can then use these ROI calculations for budget requests and business cases to senior executives, to set expectations with the team and stakeholders for future XML adoption, and track project success.

You’ll learn how to:

• Quantify and calculate savings in authoring, localization, reviewing, and publishing
• Build your business case for DITA including sample scenarios and calculations
• Communicate your proposed savings to senior executives
• Save 20 - 40% on authoring, 25-50% on localization costs, and over 50% on your existing publishing costs
• Explain how DITA adoption supports enterprise initiatives

Learn about intersections of blogging, information development and architecture, and just plain technical writing from writers who are producing blogs with technical communications in mind. In this panel discussion, several bloggers talk about web logs, subscription feeds, and RSS, describe blogging from their perspective, and discuss the organic growth of user communities and documentation. Each blogger has a different view point and all come from varied backgrounds and job titles. Hear stories about blogging and connect with the people whose posts you read. Ask questions about writing, content wrangling, being barefoot, or wikis.

This session will be facilitated by Anne Gentle, a tech writer and blog specialist who regularly blogs about technical communication at JustRightClick. Joining her are Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing, Darren Barefoot with the ever popular self-named blog, Darren Barefoot, The Content Wrangler himself, Scott Abel, and Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis who write a group blog at DMN Communications Blog.

Panelists will address these and other questions:

• I find that I have to remember that not every one has read every single post I ever wrote. So when I get a question that I’’ve already answered, I’m guilty of thinking, “Didn’t you read that in my blog?” What types of things do you think everyone should know about you that are related to your blog?
• How risky is blogging? How do you mitigate the risks?
• How has blogging helped you explain technical information to customers?
• How has blogging helped you have conversations with customers?
• What’’s the most sticky technical issue you’’ve had to resolve for your blog?
• Do you believe in the “build an online brand” concept of blogging? How have you done an online brand? What has your online brand done for you?
• How important is Search Engine Optimization when blogging?
• What is the relationship between blogging and journalism?
• Do you make any money as a direct result of your blog?
• What are some of the indirect results of your blogging?
• What was your biggest mistake with your blog and what did you do to correct it?
• And finally, what’s after blogging?

There are many ways to skin a content management project, and the skeletons of CM projects gone awry, or even abandoned before conception, line the ditches to prove it. Of all the critical factors on a content management project, why is all the talk about technology? Separate fact from fantasy, marketing from mayhem, and figure out where to focus your energies to make your content management process a success.

Managers and project leads contemplating content management implementations will explore critical success factors for successful content management projects. They will learn the right questions to ask and determine how to refocus the attention on the areas that will lay a strong project foundation. Participants will also be given a framework in which to think about project challenges that often arise, and examples that help provide context. Participants are encouraged to bring their questions to the session.

In this demonstration, you will get a chance to see live what companies like eBay, AOL and NASDAQ are doing with Adobe AIR and how this new and exciting platform from Adobe can also be leveraged in Technical Communication and eLearning using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite.  During this session, RJ Jacquez will show you how to create AIR applications using Flex, Dreamweaver, Flash and the new RoboHelp Packager for AIR via the Technical Communication Suite.  Other topics that will be covered include embedding live and interactive 3D models into your Technical Documents; and supplementing text-based documents with engaging software demonstrations, simulations and video.