In this presentation, we will connect the dots between how content-centric authoring can be leveraged beyond producing technical documentation to other areas of the business to improve the customer experience, as well as increase your productivity and value to the business.

Customer-facing communications created by marketing—such as collateral and websites—are perfect examples of where your content components can be reused. Marketers are being squeezed between increasingly demanding requirements for timely, accurate, and relevant information on one side and the bottlenecks of costly, labor-intensive cut-and-paste and rewriting on the other.

Key industry pressures today that make it more difficult for marketers to communicate with customers:

• Rising above the noise: We are in a period of information explosion. More content is being created today than ever before making it easy for marketing messages to be lost in the abyss.
• Increasing media options: Customers have more options today on how they want to receive information such as the Web, E-mail, regular mail, and mobile devices.

Due to these pressures of increased content and media options, the old methods of authoring content simply do not work. Companies will need to adopt content-centric workflows and XML. This will provide them the required flexibility to reuse content components anywhere--whether it’s referenced in technical documentation, marketing collateral or on the Web.

These demands do not need to be translated as more work for you! Authors are in a key position to be the catalyst of change to drive improvements!

Quark will share with you how dynamic publishing can make your life easier by:

• Automating basic workflows to help you remove the tedious tasks of routing of jobs, working on assigned tasks that have been prioritized by your manager so you can keep and meet your deadlines, and remove the mundane task of updating your managers.
• Empowering you to write it once! Imagine if you could write a content component once and have it dynamically appear everywhere it’s referenced—the technical documentation, the data sheet, the Web, e-mail and so on.

Additional information

• Quark Dynamic Publishing demonstration
• Quark® Dynamic Publishing Solution
• Quark DPS
• QuarkXPress
• In.Vision Xpress Author
• Alfresco CMS

Information system designers with a “user experience” perspective strive to create applications and services that people find enjoyable, unique, and responsive to their needs and preferences.  These designers use techniques and tools from the disciplines of human-computer interaction, anthropology, and sociology such as ethnographic research and the user-centered design approach to specify the desired experience for the customer or consumer.  An emerging theme in this design philosophy is that the user experience is in part determined through “co-creation” when users add content, comments, or links to that contained in the application or service.  This emphasis discounts the contribution of the processes and activities that are not explicitly part of the user experience.

In contrast, designers with a systems and data or process analysis mindset follow different goals and methods.  They strive for efficiency, robustness, scalability, and standardization.  These design goals require identification and analysis of information requirements, information flows and dependencies, and feedback loops.  Concepts and techniques from information architecture, data and process modeling, industrial engineering, and software development define this approach. 

Given these vastly different design perspectives and goals, it isn’t surprising that there is often little collaboration and communication between the user experience designers and systems analysts.  Whether it is for organizational reasons, for ideological ones, or just because it is hard to work effectively with someone who thinks so differently even when you try - the outcome is the same --- tensions, conflicts, and sub-optimal design. 

I don’t believe that these tensions and conflicts between user experience and systems analysis are intrinsic or fundamental.  But to avoid them, we need a more comprehensive and robust approach to designing information-intensive applications and services that combines aspects of these “front end” and “back end” approaches.  I’ve called this emerging design discipline “Document Engineering,” and its essence is a set of analysis and design methods that treat the interactions, information requirements and preferences associated with the customer or consumer in an abstract way so they can be compared and integrated with those associated with automated or computational actors. This more abstract approach more naturally encourages an end-to-end systems design philosophy and makes it much easier to consider alternative service system designs. These might involve moving some functions or interactions from the user experience to the invisible back stage (or vice versa), replacing or augmenting a person-to-person interaction with self-service or eliminating it completely through automation, substituting one service provider for another (e.g, through outsourcing) to improve quality or reduce cost, and so on.

What is social media? Who makes it and what tools do they use? Who consumes it and why? Is there a content revolution happening on the web, or is it just a lot of marketing spin inflating Bubble 2.0? This session separates the social media facts from the fabrication and delivers lessons attendees can apply to their work today.

With all the collaborative tools available, how do you ensure your team members work effectively, and efficiently? What are the concerns about virtual team work, and how to you manage them? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this session!

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is rapidly becoming well established in Technical Documentation with many groups adopting it or considering the adoption of DITA. However, many other areas in the organization are looking at the use of structured content to improve consistency, publish to multiple channels, and make it possible to manage content in the same way as they manage data. For the most part these organizations have created custom DTDs or schemas, but now they are beginning to focus on DITA as a possibility. Organizations that want to share content between such areas as Tech Doc, Marketing, Sales and Customer Support are looking for guidance on how to share DITA content with new DITA-adopters outside of Tech Doc. Recognizing this need and the exciting prospect of enterprise reusable content, OASIS has formed the DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee.

This session will focus on:

• Identifying the “nuts-and-bolts” of narrative business documents
• The developing DITA standard
• The role of technical communicators as information architects in the organization

Sometimes our customers think they know what they need and want.

Sadly, they don’t usually know. Too often, training and documentation requirements come from business line managers discussing projects in conference rooms. Instead, actual training consumers have different requirements.

The film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan begins with a seemingly impossible training challenge involving a rescue of the Kobayashi Maru (a spaceship in the fictional Starfleet Academy). The trainee fails the test and claims that the challenge is an impossible one—a no win situation for all involved. Later in the movie, Captain James T. Kirk reveals the secret to his unique solution as a cadet: He changed the rules.

The best way to change the rules is to focus the solution on the users receiving the training or doing their jobs. Instead of simply filling out checklists of project requirements, we can add key value by centering training and documentation plans on actual users.

This case study looks at an training development engagement where what the customer asked for was not what the users needed...or wanted. We’ll look at the initial requirements and how I changed the game to the benefit of the users and the delight of the customer. Initially, the customer asked for training...which, to them, consisted just of a PowerPoint deck and some stand-up lecturing.

Rather than simply provide that, I took a user-centered approach. I interviewed 12 people in their offices, labs, and cubicles. I also noted their environment and their habits of working. Then I created personas and scenarios along with analysis of existing documents and training materials.

Rather than delivering some Power Point files and boring lectures, I created an online, on-demand system focusing on key tasks that actual users would perform with the new software. Users appreciated the approach immensely, and the customer was ecstatic.

As we all know, creating training materials and documentation is an expensive and time-consuming process. If your editorial content, training materials, online courses, or user generated content reside in disparate sources such as Web sites, intranets or portals, you are losing significant potential value of this information. The RedDot’ Web Content Management solution will allow you to access all your valuable content, regardless of where it is stored, in a single easy-to-use interface.

Integrating a WCM solution with Web 2.0 functionality allows your organization to optimize your documentation and training efforts through collaboration, content re-use, interactive web-based training, user-generated content, forums, and many other tools.

In this informative session you will learn how to:

• Offer social environments such as Blogs and Forums to enhance collaboration on your site
• Centralize access to enterprise applications using single sign-on, with customized interfaces based on user profiles
• Access content across multiple existing repositories with comprehensive, central access to various asset and document management systems
• Target your training to the right audience – deliver personalized experiences to ensure that information is received to those that need it most

Global markets are rapidly erroding “English only” markets. It is only a matter of time before something you write or create will reach a non-English speaking audience. Find out how to prepare your content so that your ultimate audience will grasp your intentions, even if they don’t speak a word of English.

This session is appropriate for anyone who creates technical content, be it distributed via paper, PDF, the web or mobile devices. Many North Americans have become complacent due to a monolingual environment that has lulled some of us into using “worst practices” in writing and document structure. In addition, 8.5 x 11 paper is often the unconscious lens we view our content through. (How many times have you caught yourself writing just one more paragraph to reach the bottom of the page?)

Learn how to overcome these barriers and use a few simple principles and common sense to “frame” your content in the most effective way for translation, localization and globalization. This session is not another sales pitch on how much you need your translation vendor; it is a nuts and bolts “how to” session on getting your content act together for the broadest audience imaginable, the entire world.

In 2007, author and Wiki Evangelist Stewart Mader and his editors at Wiley Publishing used a wiki to write Wikipatterns: A practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization.

In this session, you will learn:

• How the book was organized on the wiki


• How authoring and editing took place on the wiki
• The evolution of a typical chapter from start to finish
• The system we developed for comments and suggested changes from the development editor
• How the wiki kept track of revision history as chapters were written and editor feedback was incorporated
• How the manuscript was kept secure by restricting access to only the author and development editor via login

Using a wiki can improve the existing publishing process by reducing reliance on email and documents, making the process more fluid and collaborative, and better tracking progress as the chapters are written. We’ll also discuss future directions for this process, including how to directly link the wiki to the production process so that the wiki can output structured data in standard XML-based architectures such as DITA.

Audience: Anyone interested in how the wiki can fit into an existing information management, collaboration, and knowledge production process will benefit from this session.

With regard to the publishing industry, we’ll talk about how the wiki can fit into the standard authoring process, so this will be of particular interest to authors, acquisition editors, development editors, production editors and managers, and publishing executives interested in streamlining and improving this process.

Kyocera Technology Development produces software for printer drivers and networked device management. The technical communicators are responsible for creating user assistance and system administration manuals. We also edit UI strings and hardware messages and manage translation for 23 languages. Our information assets contain many common elements, but they were difficult to manage without a single-sourcing strategy. Consequently, we created and translated similar or even identical phrases and sentences over the years.

We recognized that if we could manage these assets efficiently that this would dramatically reduce translation costs and free us to create new and richer content that would better support our customers. The foundational strategies that we agreed upon up-front were writing in DITA topics, manging those topics in a content management system, tight integration with a translation tool set and implementing a hosted solution (Software-as-a-Service). To accomplish this, we have implemented an automated end-to-end authoring, reviewing, publishing and translating solution. We looked at every aspect of our group’s output. The result was a radical overhaul of our processes that affected not only the tech comm group, but everyone with whom we interact. Software developers and QA, translation vendors and in-country reviewers and company personnel at our manufacturing facility in Japan can now all connect to our system and work with our data in real-time. The variety of users and the many possibilities the system has opened up is leading us into new territories, as we train and support this varied constituency. This presentation describes how authoring in DITA topics and managing those topics in a content management system has contained translation costs while improving overall information quality.

Since we enjoyed benefit from others’ experience and stories, a recounting of what worked well (and not so well) as we implemented our system can help those who are contemplating a similar move.

Ah, the wonders of reuse and repurposing of information! How enticing it seems. How orderly and straightforward the vision can sound--a clearly defined content structure, writers trained to write in a modular fashion, and a content management solution in place.

In fact, implementing reuse across information deliverables—--both training and documentation--is a rather messy process. It tends to have starts and stops. And it almost never exists in a vacuum; new deliverables continue to be needed along the way.

This case study provides a glimpse into the early stages of a reuse project in a training department. The immediate need is to modularize the curriculum and materials for a key, instructor-led training course. This modularization is needed fairly quickly, to address customer requests for more personalized versions of the class. But looking down the road, there are potential areas for reuse across other trainings, and eventually with the product documentation. With an eye to the future, it is essential to consider what “modular” means at a number of different levels.

Every reuse project poses challenges--—that’’s where they get messy. This case study will show you some of the challenges faced on this project, and how we addressed them.

For example: 

• Existing training materials are in different formats--some in FrameMaker and PowerPoint, others in XML and a content management system
• We will need to publish multiple course variations before all content is moved to one platform
• Design decisions need to be resolved across multiple training departments
• Limited resources (a very small team)

In this session, Linda Urban will focus on the strategies used, trade-offs made, and lessons learned to date as the team moves toward making training content modular with both short and long-term goals in mind.

Quark will demonstrate how Quark® Dynamic Publishing Solution (DPS) leverages existing authoring tools and content management systems to automatically publish content across multiple types of media.

We will take you through a common scenario in which a product tagline (representing any content component) that appears everywhere needs to be changed. Quark DPS will automatically publish the new tagline to print and the Web using the following tools along the way:

• QuarkXPress® to create a design-driven template for the printed piece
• Xpress Author™ to intuitively author XML content using Microsoft® Word
• Alfresco™ Content Management System to manage the content

Over a decade ago DocBook became the standard for those forging ahead in XML publications. DocBook offered a cheaper and more efficient way to publish to multiple formats. Single-sourcing became a reality for hardware and software companies. However, in recent years, many in technical documentation publications have proclaimed the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) as standard for XML documentation. DITA offered an architecture in which to create and publish structured content. Makers of XML editors advertise seamless integration with DITA. Does this leave DocBook on the shelf? Are these two seemingly rival standards really that different? This presentation answers these questions with comparative examples, allowing the audience to decide for themselves.

It’s not enough to create a manual or job aid in today’s “instant media” environment. Today’s employees have grown up with and expect a rich media experience wherever they are. Your audience expects to be engaged and stimulated by the media they consume.

This session will explore how to keep the attention of the digital generation using video and audio. Topics covered will include:

• Today’s media landscape
• Effective production methods
• Tools to create
• Distribution technology
• Peek at the future

After the session you will have the information you need to plan how you’ll use rich media for documentation and training purposes.

Migrating content to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an interesting proposition. For the last 20 years, the prospect of migrating content into a non-proprietary markup standard (SGML or XML) proved difficult enough. With DITA, the migration target becomes more exacting. For one, there is an impetus towards changing content away from a fundamental orientation towards single-purpose monolithic publishing artefacts and towards a topic-based modularity that is optimized for reuse. There are other challenges away, many arising from the need, or desire, to align with some of the best practices distilled within DITA.

A successful migration of content to DITA can be a harrowing experience. It should be stated up front that there is no magic solution that will eliminate all the pain of migration. It should also be stated, as a counterpoint, that there are tools and techniques that have been developed that can minimize the pain of migration substantially. This presentation reviews the lessons learned from over 20 years of experience migrating content to open markup standards and to modular structures geared to optimized content reuse. Among the key lessons learned is how automation can be intelligently leveraged to achieve very high levels of quality in the resulting content while keeping the cost of the migration under control and within acceptable limits.

Following a cost-effective strategy for content migration to DITA will be one of the most important determining factors of the success of a DITA implementation. A migration strategy that proves too expensive, or too painful, or that fails to deliver the level of quality necessary, will undermine any DITA initiative, sometimes fatally. But past experiences have shown that success is fully achievable and that what originally appeared to be an insurmountable mountain of legacy content can become the most durable part of a successful renovation project.

What is the current state of social media and Web 2.0? Where is it at, where is it going, and why should marketers and technical content creators care? This session discusses major social media trends of the past year, and looks ahead to what we can expect from 2008 and beyond. Attendees will leave this session chock full of fresh ideas to apply when they return to work.

Assembling a full DITA suite from various components can be a daunting task. It is not uncommon for an organization to spend a year or more just reviewing the options and trying to understand how one product might work with another.

While this can be an good approach to assembling a high-end system, it is not for everyone. Many organizations want to simply use the Microsoft tools they already own as the basis for their DITA solution. The In.vision DITA Enterprise Suite allows organizations to do just that, and to quickly go live with a complete DITA system based on Microsoft Word and SharePoint. 

In.vision will demonstrate:

• The popular collaborative and content management features of SharePoint being used with DITA topics, conrefs, etc.
• Simple authoring of single or aggregated DITA topics in Microsoft Word—designed especially for subject matter experts and other users who are not XML or DITA aware.
• In.vision’s DITA Studio, a complete design, authoring, and publishing environment built from the ground up for DITA and technical documents.

The word apocryphal comes from the Greek word ἀπόκρυφα, meaning “those having been hidden away”. In this presentation, David will talk about the stories that companies like yours don’t want to tell.  Learn about the 24 different ways one company used to “shut down your application” or how another company localizes devices and the accompanying documents to different languages. Then learn a little on how to manage this.

Within any complex organization, the content “conveyor belts” driven by specific business units deliver similar information through different routes—the authoring practices, rules and processes particular to that business unit. These conveyer belts all converge at the point when the content is distributed to the end customer—which is where the inconsistencies take their toll. When this information is also delivered in multiple languages the problem is exacerbated.

Authoring inconsistencies combined with localization to many markets can create havoc within an organization trying to create a single face for the customers. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls and achieve consistency in global authoring to optimize, cost, time and consistency.

Mark E. Wallis of IBM Internet Security Systems will demonstrate the primary development tools that IBM uses for DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. The tools include Task Modeler (a free tool), Arbortext Editor (which requires licensing), and compiler (an open source tool).

If you expect to be working with DITA, this is a great opportunity to get a feel for the process and learn how to streamline your work effort.

Task Modeler is a powerful tool for prototyping and development. Come see a demonstration of how you can use Task Modeler to:

• Develop and manage ditamaps
• Develop what we call Task Support Clusters (a group of topics that provides critical conceptual, task, and reference info about a particular application page)
• Build relationship tables that determine what related links appear in a DITA topic
• Generate stubbed (skeleton) DITA topics

You’ll also learn how to use a DITA-compliant editor such as Arbortext Editor to develop your content and you’ll see the compile process in action.

Flash-based content lets you add with animation to your text and graphics. In this session, participants will see examples of Flash-developed content and a live demonstration of basic Flash development. Topics include:

• Timeline
• Keyframes
• Tweening
• And much more

If you’re curious about Flash and want to find out what it’s all about, this is the session for you.

A marketing campaign and readiness materials needs to be distributed into 105 countries and 14 different languages simultaneously or nearly simultaneously with the US release. The average campaign includes over 40 items that range from simple email templates to complex advertorial print pieces, to web applications. It is vital to the company that the message is released globally. Executing a project of this nature will include over 100 stakeholders and over 2000 planned process steps. The content is creative and volatile, the deliverables are apt to change, and the supply chain is peripheral at best.

This case study provides an overview of an innovative and comprehensive platform, developed to optimize the production and release of global and translated content. The approach is to engage all stakeholders across the globe through a software framework that manages the content translation and marketization lifecycle.

To determine the best framework for accomplishing this recurring tasks, the Pilot team:

• Defined globalization for the content and the supply chain
• Designed processes that could objectively facilitate the needs of all constituencies
• Developed an on-demand workflow
• Institutionalized performance management and a 360 feedback loop for the entire supply chain
• Leveraging and showcasing new technology - Microsoft Workflow foundation on top of Sharepoint 2007

Find out how a simple portal was created to manage this complex process with minimum pain and maximum results.

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:

• Better wikis: Even though wikis are tremendously popular, many people are realizing that wiki content would be even more useful if it was properly structured and tagged. But wait-creating wiki content is fast and creating XML is slow and painful-how can these two things go together? The answer is simple editing of XML wiki content right in Microsoft Word, and you will be surprised how much better wiki content can be.
• Better 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 as DITA content from wikis, blogs, or where-ever.

With the rise in internet use and the growth of commerce in emerging markets around the world, not only is the volume of content to be written for global markets increasing exponentially, but most content can also be accessed by audiences anywhere in the world. SDL helps organizations write content with a view to international audiences and to maintain consistency and quality across corporate communications.

The need to write with international audiences in mind has never been more important. Left unchecked, the cost and time involved in publishing information for global markets is constantly escalating.

SDL empowers authors with technology that assists the authoring process. By providing access to terminology and translation memory from within the authoring environment, content can be automatically checked against these assets at the time it is being written. Authors can assess recommendations made by the technology on how to modify content to improve the use of terminology and where previously written content can be reused.

This presentation is for team leaders, information managers, tech communicators and product managers who care about maximizing efficiency and return on investment in the information-heavy parts of their product cycle. 

We will discuss current developments in the field of Technical Communications and how the role of the Technical Communicator has been rapidly and fundamentally evolving. The world is becoming more and more tech-savvy by the picosecond. More savvy means more demanding, and an organization’s ability to balance internal and external management of supporting technical information while delivering quality technical communication products has gone from being a burdensome nuisance, to a central and strategic must for market competitiveness. 

This presentation takes a low-tech, cross-industry look at why strategies are changing and how organizations are adapting to these challenges.  Best practices for approach, organizing teams, planning for change, DITA/XML, and departmental integration will all be addressed.