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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.