Have you thought about converting to XML, but were afraid it was to difficult? Have you talked to consultants who make the process seem long and expensive? Wondering if you should adopt a standard like DITA or go it alone?

Well, if you have a laptop, Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 or Adobe FrameMaker 8, and some sample unstructured documents (Word or FrameMaker), we’ll walk through the steps that it takes to convert Word and FrameMaker files to XML, using both a custom DTD and using DITA. We will also edit those documents with some of the industry’s leading XML editors.

This session is all about getting you started without the hype. Whether you own FrameMaker or not, this session is a good starting place for those thinking of making the move to structured documentation.

You’ve got fantastic deliverables but you still run into problems with building buy-in and consensus? Maybe you can’’t even get traction to create great deliverables? You’’re not alone!

Even excellent practitioners will struggle if they ignore the business side of experience. To have the greatest success we need to understand business, find the right opportunities to make a difference, and draw on a solid toolkit of methods for working with business stakeholders.

Succeeding in the business of experience takes the right skill set and the right mindset. This session tackles both, leaving attendees with big picture thinking and practical tools they can start using right away.

Walk away with the foundations to increase your business fluency, paired with hands-on instruction in a set of simple, effective methods to help you make a greater impact.

This workshop will provide the opportunity for participants to spend time in-depth with core principles, concepts, and methods. These will be shared using a combination of presentation, case studies, conversation, and hands-on exercises.

Specific concepts covered include:

• Business Fluency 101
• The Four Constraints of Business
• Value Centered Design
• Design Maturity
• The Experience Cycle
• Basic Business Building Blocks

Tools discussed will include:

• The Experience Impact Framework
• Strategy Patterns
• Guerrilla Field Research
• Design the Box and other co-design bridges
• Sticky Note Diplomacy
• Backcasting

We will provide an overview of these methods, and then based on participant feedback, we will conduct exercises to provide deeper hands-on experience in several of these tools.

After this session, practitioners will have a foundation in the business of experience. More importantly, this session will help practitioners at all levels be more effective at arriving at a shared vision, reaching solutions, and producing useful and usable activities and deliverables that meld business goals and user needs.

Instead of looking at Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transformation from a programmer’s perspective, this class addresses transformation challenges faced by those in the publishing field. See how to convert XML content into HTML output.

You should have a solid understanding of Extensible Markup Language (XML). Programming knowledge is not required but will be helpful.

Each participant should bring a laptop and will need to install specific open-source software ahead of time. An email will be sent to each registrant in advance of this session.

Topics include:

• Creating basic transformation files
• Processing paragraph and inline elements
• Generating tables
• Generating tables of contents
• And more as time permits

A key design feature of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is specialization—the ability to design customized information types without designing a new processing environment. Specialized DITA content can be shared, exchanged, managed, and published in the same manner, with the same tools and processes, as the base DITA topic type and built-in task, concept, and reference specializations.

This advanced workshop will step through the process of creating a DITA specialization, from customization of the DITA DTDs to integration of specializations with the DITA Open Toolkit. We will also demonstrate and discuss commercial tools support for DITA specializations.

Workshop participants will learn the following:

• When to consider creating a DITA specialization
• The differences between DITA domain versus structural specializations
• Design approaches for DITA specialization
• Choosing appropriate DITA elements for specialization
• Creating your specialized DTD
• Modifying stylesheets (CSS and XSLT) to provide customized processing and output formatting for your specialization
• Integrating your specialization with the DITA Open Toolkit for automated processing

Students who wish to have a hands-on experience are invited to bring a laptop computer with the DITA Open Toolkit Version 1.4 or later installed and configured. The DITA Open Toolkit is available for download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot.

Writing modular content that can easily be reused is important not only when working in a content management environment, but also in the world of everyday technical communication. Technical communicators are being called upon more and more to create reusable content and to reuse content that others produce. There are several good reasons to adopt writing for reuse, among them:

• Writing for reuse is efficient. It’s costly for several people to create the same product description (or procedure or error message) over and over again. Instead, one person can create it for all uses, based on a standard that accommodates all uses.
• Writing for reuse helps to ensure consistency. When the same product description is used for the manual, the online help, and the brochure, you can rest assured it is consistent.
• Writing for reuse helps to make content more usable. When writing for reuse, it’s critical that you follow standards, which are based on usability. Standards ensure that similar types of content are structured in similar ways. Everyone writing a product description follows the standard for the product description, making it both reusable and usable.
• Writing for reuse helps users to navigate through content. Reusable content is written in modules with clearly defined labels identifying the content’s purpose. Modules can be arranged to accommodate different users and users; the modularity can also help users to easily identify and select the information they need.
• Writing for reuse is efficient for you, for the company you work for, and for your users. However, writing for reuse is different than “starting from scratch” or from writing a in the narrative form that many of us have learned and followed for several years.

This workshop will convince you of the importance of writing for reuse and show you how to do it!

For years, software training was largely text-based… add screen shots in a document, add some text with descriptions and instructions, and voila!  The result worked, but how much more effective might it be if someone actually walked you through the steps on the screen? That’s where Adobe Captivate comes in, letting you create that someone.

The primary use of Captivate is to help capture what’s on the screens as you perform a software-based task, such as using a feature in Word. That series of screen shots is effectively a set of frames that users can play back as a movie that shows how to perform the task. To make the movie more useful, you can add explanations and instructions in text or audio form, special effects, even interactivity features that let simulate real software operations. With these features, Captivate lets you create demonstrations, sales training simulations, marketing presentations, tutorials, even fairly sophisticated e-learning.  With a few tweaks, you can even use Captivate as an ad hoc usability test recorder.

Captivate movies are Flash-based, but you dont have to know Flash or touch any code. Better still, Captivate is quick and easy to learn compared to traditional CBT authoring tools—two days to get up and running, and cheap —US$700.

This workshop presents a quick overview of Captivates basic features in order to provide an overview of the tool as a whole.  In a busy 3 hours, you will:

• Look at uses for Captivate
• Design and plan a movie
• Record a movie to be used as a demonstration
• Enhance a movie with text captions and other frame annotation features
• Publish the finished movie
• Look at some advanced features

The only prerequisites are a basic knowledge of Windows, Internet Explorer, and PC skills in general.

During this hands-on workshop, we will review basic DITA concepts and DITA mark-up as we work with one of the popular DITA authoring tools—XMetaL from JustSystems.

Workshop participants will learn the following:

• Overview of the XMetaL authoring interface
• How to create and modify DITA topics in XMetaL
• How to set and use DITA filtering attributes for maintaining and publishing customized content
• How to create and use reusable content components (DITA conrefs)
• How to create links to other topics and external resources (e.g., URLs)
• How to work with the XMetaL map editor to specify topic collections
• How to publish DITA content from XMetaL
• How to work with DITA specializations in XMetaL

Students should bring a laptop computer running Windows XP or Windows Vista. A trial version of XMetaL DITA edition will be provided to workshop participants.