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.

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.

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.