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Program Titles
A Short Introduction to MadCap Flare
Adobe Technical Communication Suite in an XML Workflow
Developing a Content Management Strategy
Globalizing a CMS-based Website from the Ground Up
In With Wiki, Out With Structure (Hint: It’s not what you think it means!)
Learn How To Use a Wiki At Work
Managing the Move to Structured Content
Metadata, Taxonomies, and Information Architecture: Putting the Pieces Together
Migrating to DITA and Component Content Management for Global Customers
Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML
The Content Providers Crystal Ball
The Journey From FrameMaker to XML
The Structured Content Technology Landscape
Use of Structure and Metadata in Localization
Using a Balanced Scorecard to Measure the Value of Content
Using Help Authoring Tools to Create Test-Bed Content Management Systems
Using Options Efficiently in MadCap Flare
Using Shareware / Freeware Tools
What Gutenberg Can Teach Us about XML
Why Technical Writers Shouldn’t Be “Writers”
WordPress Workshop - The Fastest Way To a Community on the Internet
[Case Study] DITA Cost and Reuse Metrics
[Case Study] Information Quality Management at Cisco Provides Benefits Beyond Improved Quality
Session Details
Adobe Technical Communication Suite in an XML Workflow
Speaker: Thomas Aldous
Time: 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM Date: March 20
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 7
Laptop computer required for this session
You all have heard that the Adobe Technical Communication Suite provides new possibilities for single-source publishing and integrated workflows for producing print, PDF, and online information deliverables. During this workshop, we will cut through the hype and actually use the integration features in Adobe FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and Adobe Captivate, but this time in a XML / Structured FrameMaker Workflow.
This workshop will provide an introduction to using the components of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite for single-source and multi-channel publishing. Students will learn:
- How Using Structured FrameMaker makes planning for single-source a streamlined
- Basics of RoboHelp Importing Structured FrameMaker documents into RoboHelp projects
- Mapping styles and importing FrameMaker TOCs
- Using FrameMaker conditional text and RoboHelp conditional build tags to customize published content
- Using user-defined variables in FrameMaker and RoboHelp to represent commonly-used names and phrases
- Embedding 3D (from Adobe Acrobat 3D) and multimedia content (from Adobe Captivate) into FrameMaker and RoboHelp projects
- Publishing RoboHelp projects
Writing Modular Content: Making Content Behave
Speaker: Pamela Kostur
Time: 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM Date: March 20
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
Modular content is just that—content that is written in modules that are used to construct a document or other type of information product. Modular writing allows you to more easily reuse content, whether you are working in a content management environment or not. Modular content also helps to make your content behave. The structure governing modules can be thought of as the “etiquette of content”. Etiquette tell us how to behave in given situations so we don’t feel out of place; modules tell the content how to behave, ensuring it is not out of place in that particular module.
Modular writing makes sense for several reasons:
- The modular design makes it easier for users to navigate through content. Well-designed modules have clearly-defined purposes and substantive labels, helping users to find their way to the right content.
- Documents can be constructed from modules, allowing for content reuse. For example, a procedure module can be used in a number of different places, as specified in your information architecture. The entire document can also be a module that is part of a larger set.
- Modular units of content can be isolated and updated quickly and easily. Modules can be accessed apart from the document as a whole.
- Modularity allows you to rearrange units as required to accommodate different users—needs or different publications—needs.
Modular writing requires defining what your modules are, describing how they are structured, and writing content consistently. Consistency is key; modules must be structured and written consistently to support content reuse and to support usability.
In this half-day workshop, you’ll learn:
- What are modules
- How can they help you create usable and reusable content
- How to define and describe modules
- How to create guidelines to support modules
- How to write the content that goes into your modules
Use of Structure and Metadata in Localization
Speaker: Douglas Pearson
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:05 PM Date: March 18
Track: Modular Content
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Ambassador 6
A primary reason for migration from unstructured to structured content is the superior organization of data that a structured environment, by definition, offers. But an equally-important advantage of working with structured documents is their ability to contain information about the data in your documents using explicitly-defined methods that are not possible without structure. While there are countless applications for, and reasons to include, metadata in your structured files, the localization process is one such area where the inclusion of metadata can greatly improve and streamline the process. These improvements can be seen with applications used in every stage of the localization process: the authoring/publishing environment (such as Structured FrameMaker), processing tools (such as the ENLASO-developed, open-source Rainbow/Okapi tools), and in Translation Memory tools, both for translation work (such as Trados’ TTX tagged text format) and translation memory management (using the standardized Translation Memory Exchange TMX format).
This presentation will describe the general ways these improvements can be implemented, as well as providing specific examples in each these areas of the localization process. Metadata in XML (or other structured) source files can provide information about the translation and localized content of documents in numerous ways. Do your documents need to include country-specific regulatory statements? Custom iconography for different locales? Special layouts for certain languages? Those are all things that can easily be automated by custom applications as long as the documents’ metadata specifies the target language/locale. Are your structured files used as database files, where text associated with certain elements or attributes is UI text that requires translation, while other elements or attributes contain coding or other non-translatable information? By using the appropriate tools to prepare those files for translation, you can clearly define contextual rules that will determine which text contained in a structured file should, or should not be, translated.
Some specific examples that will be quickly covered include:
• A plug-in to automatically localize numerous aspects of a FrameMaker file (or template) based on the file’s language attribute.
• Automatic insertion of locale-specific text in a translated FrameMaker document.
• Using both general and document-specific ITS (Internationalization Tag Set) rules to control what text in a structured document is to be translated (or not).
• Specifying attribute values in a TMX file in order to improve usability and consistency of Translation Memory.
... and possibly more, if time allows.
Digital Alchemy: Turning Unstructured Content To Gold (Or At Least Something Useful)
Speaker:
Time: 1:45 PM - 2:35 PM Date: March 18
Track: Modular Content
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Ambassador 7
Many XML systems don’t leverage legacy content because it’s considered too painful and/or too expensive to bring older unstructured content to the structured requirements of the new system. Even though the legacy content is technically sound and has application for years to come. The presentation will show what can and what can’t be reasonably done at a minimal expense to impart structure where there wasn’t any before. The tips and techniques discussed can be implemented as part of in-house or outsourced migration efforts as business drivers dictate. Beyond migration, the presentation will also show how reuse can be evaluated on a micro and macro level to build a solid ROI story for funding an XML system.
Adobe AIR and Adobe Captivate: Developing Web 2.0 Documentation
Speaker: RJ Jacquez
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM Date: March 18
Track: Software Demonstrations
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 7
eWeeks Labs selected Adobe AIR as one of the top 10 Products of the Year in 2008, and Adobe announced that in less than a year after its initial release, there have more than 100 million installations of Adobe AIR. In this session, we will explore what Adobe AIR is and why companies around the world, such as eBay, FedEx, Nickelodeon, Yahoo, Salesforce.com and others are using AIR to build the next generation of Rich Internet Applications.
You will also see first-hand how Adobe AIR and the new Technical Communication Suite 2 can be used in your own documentation to deliver the same level of Web 2.0 experiences that Rich Internet Applications are delivering today.
Maximizing Use of Author-it
Speaker: Kendra Carter
Time: 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM Date: March 20
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Polo Room
Laptop computer required for this session
Whether you are new to Author-it or have been using the product for some time, this course will show you how to maximize use of the product. This course comprises lectures and demonstrations by an experienced Author-it trainer, as well as hands-on self-paced exercises and discussion.
Key topics covered include:
- Author-it interface and features
- Authoring objects
- Reuse and conditionality strategies
- Managing content
- Importing
- Unstructured vs Structured authoring*
*Structured authoring is a method of creating content that allows an organization to control and enforce the way in which a document is written to help control consistency, format, and style. This course introduces you to how you can implement a structured authoring approach to facilitate this in your organization.
After you have completed this course, you should be able to:
- Explain the differences between a structured and non-structured topis
- Create structured templates using the Structure Builder
- Understand the validation process
- Use release states to enforce structure validation
- Modify a template’s structure
- Publish validated content
Firefox Book Sprint: From Zero to Book in Two Days (Day Two)
Speaker: Janet Swisher & Adam Hyde
Time: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM Date: March 18
Track: FLOSS Manuals BookSprint
Experience level: Advanced
Room: Polo Room
Laptop computer required for this session
You are invited to join as a writer in the BookSprint. In return, you learn about writing in a collaborative authoring environment (a wiki), learn more about the FLOSS Manuals toolkit, single sourcing, and topic authoring, and offer your knowledge of Firefox and web browsing so that others may benefit from using free documentation to learn about free software. Each writer brings his or her own laptop to the sprint. Since the FLOSS Manuals tool is completely web-based, it does not matter if you use Windows, OSX, or UNIX. The key here is that your participation matters. We have set up the online tools so you can contribute from anywhere around the world.
The support team consists of members of FLOSS Manuals writing community with Adam Hyde, the founder and Janet Swisher leading this workshop-style event. Chris Hofmann, Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation is joining us as well.
The outline for the Firefox manual will be completed prior to the Book Sprint, offering a scaffolding for the book. We have gathered documentation wants and needs from the Firefox team and a real book will be available by the end of the two-day Sprint.
To contribute you must register and then select a manual and a chapter to work on. if it is not marked ‘complete’ then press the edit button! It’s as simple as that.
Contributions can include cleaning up layout, spell checking, adding images, proof reading, or taking responsibility for writing one of more chapters. You don’t have to be a technical writer or a super geek, you just need to know how to write.
If you need to ask us questions about how to contribute then just ask us. We look forward to your contribution! For more information on using FLOSS Manuals you may also read our manual at http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManual.
Firefox Book Sprint: From Zero to Book in Two Days (Day One)
Speaker: Janet Swisher & Adam Hyde
Time: 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: FLOSS Manuals BookSprint
Experience level: Advanced
Room: Polo Room
Laptop computer required for this session
You are invited to join as a writer in the BookSprint. In return, you learn about writing in a collaborative authoring environment (a wiki), learn more about the FLOSS Manuals toolkit, single sourcing, and topic authoring, and offer your knowledge of Firefox and web browsing so that others may benefit from using free documentation to learn about free software. Each writer brings his or her own laptop to the sprint. Since the FLOSS Manuals tool is completely web-based, it does not matter if you use Windows, OSX, or UNIX. The key here is that your participation matters. We have set up the online tools so you can contribute from anywhere around the world.
The support team consists of members of FLOSS Manuals writing community with Adam Hyde, the founder and Janet Swisher leading this workshop-style event. Chris Hofmann, Director of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation is joining us as well.
The outline for the Firefox manual will be completed prior to the Book Sprint, offering a scaffolding for the book. We have gathered documentation wants and needs from the Firefox team and a real book will be available by the end of the two-day Sprint.
To contribute you must register and then select a manual and a chapter to work on. if it is not marked ‘complete’ then press the edit button! It’s as simple as that.
Contributions can include cleaning up layout, spell checking, adding images, proof reading, or taking responsibility for writing one of more chapters. You don’t have to be a technical writer or a super geek, you just need to know how to write.
If you need to ask us questions about how to contribute then just ask us. We look forward to your contribution! For more information on using FLOSS Manuals you may also read our manual at http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManual.
All-Around User Assistance: Delivering Layers of Information Efficiently
Speaker:
Time: 1:45 PM - 2:34 PM Date: March 18
Track: User Assistance
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
The best software user assistance is so elegant that users don’t need to look for it. In Doc-To-Help 2008, the embedded dynamic help window and expanded tooltips display relevant information as the user navigates the interface. This session will demonstrate this project and discuss how the interface was planned to include all-around user assistance, how the online Help was structured to work with the interface, and how mappings and other information were managed without the need for custom software development.
This session will also discuss:
- Planning for information layers
- Structuring your help project for embedded dynamic help
- Mapping embedded dynamic help to the interface
- Single-sourcing best practices and methodologies
- Managing the UA in the interface
- How you can duplicate the same sort of user experience yourself
Building Content Models: Constructing with Content
Speaker: Pamela Kostur
Time: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Date: March 20
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
Content models define how information products are structured. They indicate what a particular document—or website, or brochure, or newsletter—contains, and in what order. They impose structure on the writing process so that whoever creates a particular document does it consistently, eliminating discrepancies and the guesswork that often characterize writing. Content models are the specification that writers work from.
Content models are critical in a content management environment; the structure leads to more opportunities for reuse. In a content management environment, content models are implemented in DTDs (like DITA) and modeling your content helps you to determine how to implement the DTD effectively. However, content models also help to support the writing process even if you are not currently in, or considering moving to content management. Content modeling helps you to create your desired structure; you analyze and deconstruct your content to figure out an ideal way to put it back together.
Designing effective structures through content modeling allows you to construct with content more effectively, ensuring consistency, usability, and also allowing for modularity. This workshop will show you how to:
- Analyze your content as a first step to modeling
- Document your desired structure
- Describe your structure in more detail
- Assess your desired structure against existing ones, such as DITA
During this half-day workshop we will look at several sample models, and work on building some of your own.
[Case Study] Information Quality Management at Cisco Provides Benefits Beyond Improved Quality
Speaker: Kent Taylor
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Content Quality
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 6
It seems obvious that the application of quality management principles and processes in a company’s information supply chain would result in improved quality of delivered information products. Less obvious, but equally important, is that a formal focus on information quality can generate time and cost savings that attract positive attention in the executive suite. This case study presents one company’s approach to managing quality in the information supply chain.
Attendees will learn about the deployment of formal quality management principles, best practices, and tools in the information supply chain of a large global enterprise. It will cover all aspects of the deployment (at a high level), including:
- General quality management principles and their application to authoring, editing, translation, and localization functions
- Information quality standards and metrics
- Helpful tools
- Deployment successes ... and lessons learned
The Journey From FrameMaker to XML: A Story About Migration and a Rare Bird
Speaker: Lucinda Croft
Time: 12:45 PM - 1:35 PM Date: March 18
Track: Case Studies
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 6
ILOG’s OneContent project was recently awarded the “Rare Bird Award” by the Center for Information Development (CIDM). This behind the scenes presentation tells the story of what it was like planning, managing and doing the migration from FrameMaker to XML resources in a new OneContent management system.
It is a true story about preparing and migrating nearly 4000 pages of FrameMaker documentation into XML files in a content management system with a custom model. It describes how we moved from a familiar FrameMaker and WebWorks tool chain to producing documentation in multiple output formats using Arbortext Epic editor and XHive’s Docato. It explains how we continued to delivery product documentation during the migration process and the various trade-offs we had to make. It shows how we adapted to a changing release schedule and an unexpected delivery. It also presents the work of documentation architects and their fundamental role in this type of project: leading the way and supporting the team.
It describes the phased approach we took to migration: pilot, pet projects, partial source preparation, branching, more disruptive preparation, migration and clean up. It discusses the reuse we did and that which we did not do. It describes how we used workshops and wiki to share knowledge gained from formal and informal training. It shows the delicate balance between working to establish department-wide solutions and best practices while still meeting our local, and very immediate, needs for an answer five minutes ago.
Finally it looks back at the migration project to assess what was difficult, how long it took, how much it cost, the issues that we are still facing and the benefits we can already see. It gives some recommendations for other teams who are thinking about doing this kind of migration and it ventures some suggestions as to what, if we were to do it again, we would consider doing differently.
Learn How To Use a Wiki At Work
Speaker: Stewart Mader
Time: 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM Date: March 20
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 3
Laptop computer required for this session
Attend this one day workshop to learn how to organize your projects, documents, meeting agendas & minutes, and tacit knowledge on a wiki. Discover how you can help your team make the change from trading emails and attachments to gathering, building, and editing information on the wiki. Find out how you can manage everything related to your projects, including background research, notes, URLs, meetings agendas and minutes, action items, and finished documents, presentations, and files.
Topics covered include:
- Your Wiki Isn’t Wikipedia: Six Ways To Use It At Work
- How to Use Your Wiki for Project Management
- Wiki Adoption Strategy: 4 Steps to Success
In With Wiki, Out With Structure (Hint: It’s not what you think it means!)
Speaker: Stewart Mader
Time: 8:30 AM - 9:15 AM Date: March 19
Track: Keynote and Featured Presentations
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 4
Technical writers rely on structured content to keep large amounts of information organized. Business workers gravitate less highly structured, flexible tools like wikis. So how can you bring content out of a wiki in a structured way?
We’ll look at what wikis and structured content have in common. For example: wikis promote reusability of content, structured standards like DITA ensure that content stays consistent. Wikis promote flexibility in authoring, structured standards promote flexibility in the output and use of finished content.
We’ll look at how wikis are evolving as content management tools, examples of success and failure in using wikis for structured content applications, and explore how you can get great content…in with wikis, and out with structure.
What Gutenberg Can Teach Us about XML
Speaker:
Time: 3:45 PM - 4:45 PM Date: March 19
Track: Keynote and Featured Presentations
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 4
Since the 1980s and the adoption of desktop publishing as the dominant workflow, authors have been responsible not just for writing and editing but also document formatting and production—the process of finalizing content for delivery. With XML, production responsibilities are stripped away, and authors focus solely on writing and editing their content. XML also enables the creation of enforceable document templates. The decrease in authoring responsibilities results in increased efficiency and productivity for authors.
In an XML-based workflow, content is formatted automatically when the final output is produced. Instead of formatting content as it’s written, formatting is added as a separate layer. From a cost perspective, this results in eliminating an ongoing cost (formatting while authoring) and replacing it with a one-time cost (development of automated formatting). The cost savings realized from automated formatting are multiplied when you have multiple output formats and especially multiple output languages.
Content customization is a thorny problem in traditional workflows. The best possible solution has been to use conditional text or build tags to flag information as conditional, and then generate several versions of the output files. With XML, it’s possible to ship a single set of content and then display different information depending on the requestor’s profile.
Automated formatting and more sophisticated conditional processing are important but incremental steps forward in publishing. XML technology can also provide the foundation for a new approach to technical content where user-generated content, such as wikis, blogs, and forums, is integrated with the documentation created by professional technical writers. Here, XML can serve as the enabling technology that makes it possible to mix content from many different sources and deliver is to the end user in a unified presentation. Provided that each type of content is stored as XML, we can build software that reaches into the various types of content and extract the relevant chunks of information. This content integration is the new frontier for XML-based information delivery, and I look forward to seeing it evolve over the next few years.
In this session, we will look at two publishing advances separated by over 500 years and consider what lessons we might still have to learn from Gutenberg and movable type.
Managing the Move to Structured Content
Speaker:
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:05 PM Date: March 18
Track: Skills Development
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
Moving from unstructured to structured content is like replacing the engine on an airplane in flight over the Pacific. You have to swap out critical components, test the new pieces, train your pilots, and keep the plane in the air at all times; if you fail, your passengers better know how to swim.
While no airline would do something as crazy as replace an engine in flight, no documentation group will ever have the luxury of stopping its current work to complete a content conversion. You will need to choreograph your conversion with your ongoing work, manage conversion partners, train your team, manage two delivery processes (old and new), and stay sane.
Although the technical aspects of conversion usually get the most attention, the management job is more challenging and much more vulnerable to missteps. Even if you had a perfect conversion facility, the management tasks would be daunting, and you will never have a perfect conversion facility.
This session will focus on management strategies to help you keep your ongoing work “flying” while moving to structured content. You will learn management best practices for:
- Selecting and managing conversion services
- Scheduling conversion with ongoing work
- Tracking and evaluating progress
- Training your team
- Managing your delivery processes
Structured Authoring and DITA
Speaker: Julio Vazquez
Time: 12:45 PM - 1:35 PM Date: March 18
Track: Skills Development
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 3
This session discusses structured authoring and how the design of DITA helps you move from an unstructured to a structured methodology. At a high level, the discussion maps the DITA architecture to the structured environment and presents a methodology to examine information and create a focused model of information content. Both a bird’s eye view of an example and a topic implementation are part of the presentation and I will handle questions at the end.
This presentation will not go into a detailed description of DITA but will give a rationale as to why the standard makes sense in today’s market.
[Case Study] Moving from Silos to a Collective Farm: Developing Epson America's Hosted CMS with DocZone DITA
Speaker: Nancy Thompson & Burt Courtier
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM Date: March 18
Track: Case Studies
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 6
The Documentation Department of Epson America, Inc. was searching for a way to more efficiently produce its user documentation in four languages simultaneously to keep up with market demands. We needed to move to structured authoring and single-source publishing without interrupting our traditional documentation projects, without an enormous budget, and without a programmer on staff. Our content neatly fit the DITA information model, so we wanted to quickly author our topics, store them in a trouble-free, single-source repository, and use all the DITA “bells and whistles” to publish them and maximize their reuse over time.
To accomplish this, we are worked closely with DocZone.com as they developed DocZone DITA, a hosted XML-based, DITA-compliant content management system based on the Alfresco open-source CMS platform. The CMS stores our source files, publishes our manuals using the DITA Open Toolkit, and provides a seamless interface with our local authoring tool: XMetal Author Enterprise Edition 5.1.
In this presentation, we’ll tell you:
- What we needed to accomplish to move from document-based silos of information to discrete topics in a central repository, one product line at a time
- How we chose DocZone.com as our DITA solution
- How we worked with DocZone.com to develop our system
- How we use DocZone DITA
Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML: It's Easier Than You Have Been Told
Speaker: Thomas Aldous
Time: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Mirage Room
Laptop computer required for this session
Have you thought about converting to XML, but were afraid it was too 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?
We will first go through the steps involved in analyzing your unstructured content’s inherent structure. Look at different structure standards and create mapping diagrams to the structure of choice. Finally, we will actually convert an unstructured document(s) to XML based on the chosen structure.
Well, if you have a laptop, Adobe FrameMaker 8, and some sample unstructured documents (Word or FrameMaker), we’ll walk through the steps that it takes to convert Word, FrameMaker or any tagged format 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 and import the resulting XML content into a leading Content Management System.
If time permits, we will publish the XML content in the Content Management System to various output formats.
This session is all about getting you started without the hype. This session is a good starting place for those thinking of making the move to structured documentation.
Using a Balanced Scorecard to Measure the Value of Content
Speaker: Joan Lasselle
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:05 PM Date: March 18
Track: Professional Development
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 7
Traditional performance metrics do not capture content’s impact on business performance. A balanced scorecard uses value-based metrics that include quality, customer satisfaction, timeliness, and costs. The balanced scorecard approach goes beyond schedule, budget and traditional productivity measurement to show how a broad value-based definition of success can be measured. A balanced scorecard is especially important when adopting content management, where productivity metrics do not capture content’s total organizational value. Using the balanced scorecard, then, helps make the case for content management, create plans for implementation, and measures the core value of the initiative.
The presentation shares a case study for how Lasselle-Ramsay and Cisco used the balanced scorecard to map business strategy into operational tactics and to measure the overall value of content and the content development organization.
The discussion will focus on the key success factors for implementing a balanced scorecard approach, including:
- Translating business strategy into operational tactics
- Making measurement a continual process
- Creating team buy-in
- Four key measures: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth
- Methodology: how to quantify your results
Think Simple: A Fresh Perspective on User Assistance
Speaker: Scott Nesbitt & Aaron Davis
Time: 12:45 PM - 1:35 PM Date: March 18
Track: User Assistance
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
In the past, user assistance was typically a version of a printed deliverable that was repurposed for online use into WinHelp, HTML Help, and WebHelp formats, among others. Today’s web-enabled world has changed the expectations around user assistance.
Today’s intuitive applications require a help model that is unencumbered by complicated navigation, unnecessary information, and platform inflexibility. That help should be simple, flexible, and designed for the needs of the user. As a developer of online user assistance, the focus is how to move from being a content builder to a content architect.
Many technical communicators view online help as simply being a dump of a user manual (with a few tweaks) into a different format. We believe this is the wrong approach. Online help should:
- Contain only the information that users absolutely need (tastes great, less filling)
- Adopt a flexible format that meets a diverse set of needs
- Be easy to navigate and search
- Avoid distracting the user from the task at hand
- Not be aligned to specific tools
We spend so much time worrying about the usability of the application that we gloss over the usability of the user assistance that’s included with the application. It doesn’t have to be that way. By looking at what user assistance currently is and what it could be, Aaron Davis and Scott Nesbitt will:
- Outline the shortcomings of the universally accepted online help model
- Explain why simple doesn’t mean incomplete
- Explore how to give users the information they want, in the way they need it
- Discuss how to break down the walls surrounding user assistance
- Look at new technology—like RSS, wikis, and social networking—to enrich the overall user experience
Metadata, Taxonomies, and Information Architecture: Putting the Pieces Together: Faceted Search is Really Navigation or is Guided Navigation Really Search?
Speaker: Seth Earley
Time: 1:45 PM - 2:35 PM Date: March 18
Track: Skills Development
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Ambassador 3
There are many ways to consider taxonomy, metadata and IA in content and document management systems but these all boil down to two things: Navigation and Search. Creating an effective user experience is about helping the user meet their objectives and find the information they seek. However, developing and implementing taxonomies in an IA context is not as simple as it seems. Classification taxonomies feed metadata and navigational taxonomies are used to, well, navigate. But these are not necessarily the same. Search can be tuned with best bets and meta data weighting. Navigation can be influenced in multiple ways. Faceted search is really navigation or is guided navigation really search?
In this session we will define these interrelated areas and discuss how they all work together in your content and document management systems to create an effective user experience.
Using Help Authoring Tools to Create Test-Bed Content Management Systems
Speaker: Neil Perlin
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM Date: March 18
Track: User Assistance
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
As content management systems (CMS) spread into technical communication, they add a lot of uncertainty. Adopting a CMS isn’t as easy as changing help authoring tools, where the concepts are similar from one tool to another. CMSs bring new concepts and development processes, and demand more rigorous standards, all of which have to fit into your workflow and culture. And CMSs cost far more than our traditional tools. So buying a CMS can be risky.
One way to cut that risk is to create a test-bed CMS to test the effects on your workflow and culture. Interestingly, help authoring tools like Flare and RoboHelp, among others, offer that capability. How?
Content management systems let authors create content, store it, manage it, find it, process it for output, and control the workflow - help authoring tools offer most of those functions today. Their ability to create and store topics, extract and customize them for single sourcing using features like conditionality and variables, store multiple versions in version control, and create reports, let us create ‘test-bed’ CMSs for evaluating changes on your culture and operations. This session discusses how to do this. It lists the core CMS features and equivalent features in MadCap Flare and Adobe RoboHelp, and explains how to use those features to create a test-bed CMS on which to discover operational kinks that might prevent you from making full use of your real CMS.
Using Shareware / Freeware Tools: Increase Your Productivity and Accuracy
Speaker: Ed Marshall
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Date: March 19
Track: Content Technologies
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
I will demonstrate many shareware tools that “let the computer do the working” (meaning, using the computer to automate repetitive tasks, compare data, find information quickly on your computer, etc.) to help you work more effectively and accurately so you can turn your computer off at night and sleep instead of pulling all-nighters redoing work. I also discuss tools to help keep your computer safe from the talented evildoers of the e-world. I will discuss inexpensive options for backing up your data. I will recommend tools to perform all of these functions.
- Demonstrate tools that process data efficiently and automate repetitive tasks including advanced text editors, powerful file / folder level comparison tools, and advanced search and replace tools
- Discuss tools that keep your computer safe from hackers, viruses, spam, etc. and recommend a set of tools to use
- Discuss the importance of backing up your computer on a regular basis and useful, inexpensive software for doing so
- Discuss how to determine what tools are available, which ones are best-in-class, and the long-term viability of specific tools
Migrating to DITA and Component Content Management for Global Customers
Speaker: Chip Gettinger
Time: 2:30 PM - 3:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Content Technologies
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Ambassador 5
Supporting global markets has fundamentally shifted the way product information is distributed to your customers. Shorter development cycles have become the norm within organizations shrinking time-to-market for new and updated products. This agility provides your organization with new global revenue opportunities, market share increase and a competitive edge.
How do product documentation organizations match these fundamental shifts in product release cycles to meet the needs of a diverse, global customer base? How does an organization manage the localization process while concurrently authoring new content in the base language? How do you distribute and update specific information to your global customers in an on-line forum? How do you incorporate feedback and ideas from your customers back to your content creators?
This presentation provides insights into how Trisoft customers use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and component-based content management (CCM) to solve these challenges. Together DITA and CCM provide a solutions infrastructure to support the fundamental shift to Topic-based authoring matching agile release cycles. Topic-based authoring and CCM provide a core infrastructure to support:
- Advance reuse models to manage varying product conditions for different markets and languages
- Automate processes to manage single-sourcing for on-line help, content-sensitive help and traditional PDF deliveries from the same content
- Advance version and revision Topic and DITA Map management for all languages automating the processing of localized Topics
- Simplification of the management of last-minute product changes and the impact on product documentation to meet global release schedules
Making Content Intelligent
Speaker: Ann Rockley
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Content Technologies
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 5
Intelligent content is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s structurally rich and semantically aware and is therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable.
Intelligent content let’s us deliver personalized content, enable dynamic multichannel delivery, content analytics, document exchanges, reuse, and data integration. With structured content we have the beginnings of intelligent content.
This session provides an understanding of the components of intelligent content including:
- Personas
- Semantic structure
- Metadata
- Xquery
The Structured Content Technology Landscape
Speaker: Ann Rockley
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Date: March 19
Track: Modular Content
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 7
To effectively create structured content you need effective tools. Structured content begins with the authoring tools, is managed by component content management and delivered through publishing engines.
This session provides an understanding of:
- Types of modular technology
- Understanding the options
- Key differentiators
- Identifying your needs
- How to employ use cases in addition to checklists to define your needs
- Developing an effective RFI/RFP
Moving to Structured Content
Speaker: Ann Rockley
Time: 8:50 AM - 9:40 AM Date: March 18
Track: Keynote and Featured Presentations
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 4
Structure defines how an information product is put together and defines how each element is written. Moving to structured topic-based writing can be a challenging task for writers. This session introduces the concepts, benefits, and methods for moving to structured content.
Structured content—as its name implies—is the way the content is put together to sup¬port the elements within the information product. It’s the process of authoring according to standards that dictate how content should be written to support its various uses and users. When implementing reusable content, it’s critical that authors structure and write their content consistently.
This session provides insights into:
- Concepts of structured content
- Benefits of structured content
- How DITA supports structured content
- Matching your content to structure
- Writing to structure
Flatter, Leaner, Smarter: Open Standards and Your Future
Speaker: Mary McRae
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Professional Development
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 3
The challenges faced by today’s documentation and learning professionals aren’t really new - they’re just growing exponentially. As technical communicators and learning content specialists we are asked to produce more content in less time, to translate content into more languages, and to output content into more presentation formats. We now customize the infoset by audience type, by product type, by media type, and oftentimes customer. The applications and systems we use have become highly specialized and tightly integrated. It’s a delicate balance - and then the unexpected happens. New requirements, new information sets, new applications and new systems are introduced. Existing infosets are incompatible. Costly conversions are required. Retraining is necessitated. And every project is now in jeopardy.
There’s a better way - one in which development costs are shared across hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals, where the collective knowledge of the group far exceeds that of any one organization, where partners and competitors alike come together to work on solutions to common problems. Where each voice is entitled to be heard, no matter how small. This is the mission of a Standards Organization.
In this presentation you’ll learn about OASIS - the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards - and the standards its members create that have a direct impact on your job, including structured authoring, translation, and content management. You’ll also learn how a Standard is brought to life, and most importantly, how you can become an active participant in the process and make sure your voice is heard - even if you’re not a member. It’s your future.
The Content Providers Crystal Ball: What Everybody Missed During the Digital Revolution
Speaker: David Esrati
Time: 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM Date: March 19
Track: Keynote and Featured Presentations
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 4
In the fifties, entertainment content was created by business to engage customers with their products: Soap Operas. They gave you “free programming” in exchange for you listening to their brand message.
Somewhere in the next three decades, business stopped thinking they had to pay for your attention and just threw things at you and hoped you wouldn’t duck.
You ducked.
You learned to avoid things that were uninvited, unfocused or unfunny. Soon, cutting through the clutter became very expensive. Finding “your people” got difficult.
Then came sponsored search. A “free service” that you couldn’t live without—without unfocused ads, and delivered in an unobtrusive way. All was well—except, you didn’t realize you were giving away your privacy in exchange for “free service”. The free service established a symbiotic relationship with everyone.
Now, the world belongs to Google. And, you have to pay to play again.
It’s not fair. But, the one small thing that’s missing from this paradigm shift is you—the content creators. Without you, they have nothing to search and stick their ads next to.
The next big thing is how much you can “pimp” your content to a specific audience by knowing that audience even better than Google does. You deliver a group, you get paid. It doesn’t matter if you are creating “The Sopranos” or- a community of users of a specific product—connecting customers to relevant sponsored content is going to be everyone’s job in the next decade.
Attend this lively session tol learn how to start preparing now, for the content creators revolution. After the revolution, you will be the new media of preference for delivering sponsored, relevant information that will connect your community to the things that are important to them ... all while getting paid to do it.
Learn the lessons that escaped newspapers, most magazines, and the TV Broadcast networks while Google ate their lunch. Listen up today, or prepare to go hungry tomorrow.
Reimagining Writing: Freeing Writing Teams To Deliver More Effective Content
Speaker: Lisa Calhoun
Time: 2:30 PM - 3:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Content Quality
Experience level: Advanced
Room: Ambassador 6
Whether it’s Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Information Mapping, or DocBook, at the keyboard the writer is still king. How do you motivate and inspire a legion of writers to work as one? This session, from a leading content agency that focuses on writing that gets results, shares the secrets of building a top-performing writing team in today’s more structured content environment.
Attend this session if you:
- Hire teams of writers and editors
- Are responsible for the results of a finished, large-scale communications project
- Are frustrated by having to dovetail the tone, style and voices of dozens of different writers
- Don’t want to settle for second rate work on large enterprise projects
This practical session will look at real work for major firms. (You’ll have to wait until the session because they won’t let us use their names in this promo copy.)
We’ll dig into a proven methodology for harmonizing diverse tones and styles through rapid training and rapid immersion in the unified mind-voice of the business and the brand. (Yes, it’s possible, and we’ll show you show.) We’ll share top-grading techniques for writing and editing talent that will help you hire better, or outsource more confidently. And, we’ll share how-to guides to designed to take you from strategic to tactical, fast.
WordPress Workshop - The Fastest Way To a Community on the Internet: It's Free, It's Powerful and It May Be Too Good To Be True
Speaker: David Esrati
Time: 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM Date: March 20
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 6
Web 2.0 is a lot like DITA in that content stays separate from presentation until you process it into the final form. The problem is, that process often takes a “long time”, which in the digital age is measured in minutes, not days. Your customers aren’t always willing to wait for your company to respond to their problems in a structured, systemic way. WordPress can be the tool that makes you agile, and most importantly, it can help you reach the first place on Google for every search about your company.
This one day seminar has been given to thousands of people who were looking to understand how their business could use this open source, free tool for a super-efficient, cost-effective way to manage their websites and their customer relationships. We’ll cover how Google works, how community can change your business, and the keys to making content that solves problems including how to make your brand loved.
We’ll study webstats, usability issues and how these two factors can make your site and your content the first place that Google will turn to for answers on your area of expertise—be it your product, service, or industry. Examples of best practices (and what works and what will work in the future) will be discussed. Then, we’ll move into a hands-on, step-by-step familiarization with WordPress and it’s awesome tools to make content generation easy. Even if WordPress isn’t the platform you will want to use- these same principles can be applied to Joomla! or Drupal- two more advanced options that can be considered if WordPress isn’t quite what you think you want.
DITA, Coming to its Senses: Better Communication through Video
Speaker: Sean Healy
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Modular Content
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Ambassador 7
Video is not only for YouTube: it is a powerful means of connecting with your end-users, especially if it is coupled with text-based content. The potential of MPEG-7 as it applies to multimedia and technical documentation is truly remarkable and relatively untapped. The MPEG-7 standard allows for the description of video via XML metadata, and the separation of the metadata from the source video makes it possible to develop powerful XML-based applications that integrate video with your current documentation set.
In DITA, tasks are the main building blocks of its user assistance architecture. Tasks provide step-by-step instructions by describing to users exactly what to do and the order in which to do them. It may be far more effective to show your users exactly what to do and the correct sequence through video as well as by written descriptions and still graphics. Video segments can be managed, remixed, searched, and reused across as many documents as you like. This is possible because of the convergence of greater bandwidth speeds, improvements and cost-cuts in video production workflows, and the emergence of MPEG-7, a multimedia content description standard.
Attendees will learn:
- How to take advantage of MPEG-7 to connect with your target audience
- How to integrate video with your current DITA documentation set
- How DITA information architects collaborate with videographers
- How easy it is for content creators to insert video segment references into DITA source using standard DITA authoring methods
- How to use XSL and XQuery as the basis for video segment retrieval
Globalizing a CMS-based Website from the Ground Up: How to Design, Develop and Deploy a Website for an International Audience
Speaker: Maxwell Hoffmann
Time: 4:10 PM - 5:00 PM Date: March 18
Track: Keynote and Featured Presentations
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 4
In our current economy, your enterprise may become more dependent on World Trade than ever before. How do you get the world to come to your doorstep to do business? That was the challenge facing the Montana World Trade Center (MWTC). They needed a web site that non-technical staff could update via CMS and also have content translated and globalized for international customers. Target languages included Chinese, Arabic and Spanish.
In such a project, there are locale and cultural issues to consider, as well as content translation. What colors and images are considered lucky or unlucky in China or many Arabic speaking nations? What are some of the seemingly innocent images that could alienate the specific international partners or customers you are seeking?
The primary requirements for MWTC’s site included:
- Multilingual
- Better lead generation
- Better SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Ability for non-technical staff to easily add and edit content
- Automated approval processes for content contributors
- Automated translation workflow for language versions
- Subscriptions, Web alerts & memberships
- Schedule content to go live and expire
- Internal search of content and library assets
Although there are many ways to organize a multilingual website project, there are some specific fundamental Phases, Steps and Tasks which should be integrated into every Web Design, Development and Deployment (W3D) plan.
Services in creation of this website included:
- Website Design and Development
- Glossary Development
- Translation and Copy Writing
- Localization of Graphics and Multimedia
- CMS deployment, training and support
- Global Search Engine Marketing (country-specific SEO)
- Website training
This presentation shares lessons learned from a colorful case history and covers the proven ten-phase W3D process to ensure project success on a global basis. Processes will be explained in detail, including which process can occur concurrently:
- Phase I: Discovery, analysis and Project Proposal
- Phase II: Project Planning and Kick Off
- Phase III: Information Architecture (IA): Content, Creative, Technologies aligned with Business Processes
- Phase IV: Production: Content, Creative, Technologies
- Phase V: QA and Testing
- Phase VI: Globalization
- Phase VII: QA and Testing
- Phase VIII: Launch
- Phase IX: Search Engine Optimization
- Phase X: Updates and Content Management
“Information architecture is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint before you dive in and put the thing together. Information architecture (also known as IA) is the foundation for great Web design. It is the blueprint of the site upon which all other aspects are built—form, function, metaphor, navigation and interface, interaction and visual design. Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do when designing a site.”
[Case Study] DITA Cost and Reuse Metrics
Speaker: Mark Lewis
Time: 1:45 PM - 2:35 PM Date: March 18
Track: Case Studies
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Ambassador 6
You’ve read all the papers on ROI for XML and you get it. You’ve already concluded that moving to DITA will save you tons of time and money. But management says prove it. This presentation helps you determine the cost portion of the ROI calculation. What are my costs now? What will my new costs be with DITA? And what is the difference—my savings? This presentation discusses the cost metrics, reuse metrics, in a case study of one company’s journey to DITA. In the end, you should be able to speak the financial language of managers and prove to them in dollar signs the value of moving to DITA.
Topic-based Authoring: Getting Your Feet Wet
Speaker: Linda Urban
Time: 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 7
This hands-on workshop provides an overview of topic-based writing concepts and principles, and then lets you try your hand at using a topic-based approach. We will define key concepts (such as topic, information type, and element), look at examples of different types of topics, and discuss pros and cons of a topic-based writing approach.
You will get a chance to work with actual content, as you
- Identify and define information types
- Chunk linear information into topics
- Assess what kinds of changes are required to make individual topics work effectively for users
- Consider how to connect and cluster topics, to provide a cohesive collection of information for users, even when content is complex
Along the way, we will touch on related questions such as:
- How long should a topic be?
- Can a topic-based approach work for complex, highly-technical information?
- What’s the difference between topic-based writing and structured writing?
- Do you need to use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) to benefit from topic-based authoring? Do you need a content management system?
- What benefits can you realize by following topic-based writing principles, and what require assistance from tools and technologies?
- Just how hard is the shift to a topic-based approach?
You are encouraged to bring a sample of your own content (10 to 15 pages or topics, printed single-sided).
A laptop computer is NOT required.
Paths to Success: Networking and Contributing (It's All About Relationships)
Speaker: Linda Urban
Time: 12:45 PM - 1:35 PM Date: March 18
Track: Professional Development
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 7
What does it take to be successful as a technical communicator? Often we focus on skills and abilities. There is always so much more to learn! But there is another set of factors that are equally important. This interactive session focuses on the relationships, attitudes, and actions that can make all the difference. You will have an opportunity to think about your own experiences and discover ideas to help you move in the direction you want.
Linda Urban has been a technical communicator for over 25 years. When she thinks about what has mattered most when it comes to finding and keeping work, it boils down to these principles:
First: Do good work. Write well. Understand your audiences, and write for them. Know your company’s goals and priorities, and keep them in mind. Care about quality and pay attention to detail.
Second: Build your network. Not the calculated—get out there, meet other people, and exchange information—kind of network, but the day-to-day kind that comes as you work with people and build relationships. Your base for networking is created whenever you work with people. People will remember when you were reliable, when they enjoyed working with you, when you helped them out of a tight spot, when you shared your expertise. They will also remember when you didn’t. Strive to have the kind of interactions you want them to remember.
Third: Keep learning. Build your skills, learn new and better methods, and pursue what interests you.
Fourth: Make a contribution. How you choose to contribute will depend on your interests, skills, personality, and time. Be guided by what you enjoy and what gives you satisfaction. Your niche may be participating in a professional organization such as STC, ISTC, or SIGDOC, it may be a special project at work, it may be mentoring friends who show an interest in what you do, or it may be presenting at conferences such as this one. You may be in front of the room, presenting, or behind the scenes. Don’t worry if you don’t like to be in the spotlight. You do not have to be out front to be a valued resource.
Using Options Efficiently in MadCap Flare: Setting Up a Flare Project
Speaker: Neil Perlin
Time: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Rancho Room
Laptop computer required for this session
If you’ve bought MadCap Flare but haven’t taken a course, or even if you have taken a course, you may be boggled by the number of control options that Flare offers. Which ones should you use in your project? What about options that the course touched on but didn’t cover in detail? How do you set up a project for efficient development and maintenance? Where do you start?
This half-day hands-on workshop answers these questions. It starts by reviewing the project control features in Flare and the files that control their settings. The workshop then walks you through the creation of a set of basic control files that are likely to apply to typical projects—topic templates, style sheets, table style sheets, and skins. (Depending on attendee interests and available time, the workshop may look at additional control files such as variable sets, snippets, and conditional build tags.) Finally, the workshop discusses how to distribute the control files to multiple developers manually and programmatically using a new approach introduced in Flare 4—the ability to create a centralized master set of control files and re-use them in other projects semi-automatically.
A Short Introduction to MadCap Flare
Speaker: Neil Perlin
Time: 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Rancho Room
Laptop computer required for this session
If you’re using Flare but haven’t taken any training, even the basic, “standard” features can be overwhelming. The Flare-ish features can be even more so. Flare offers style sheets, for example, like any other such authoring tool, but implements them a bit differently than you may be accustomed to. The result can be confusing at first, until you understand what’s going on.
This half-day hands-on workshop explores the basic tasks involved in creating a project, creating topics, adding navigation and links, controlling styles, and generating outputs by defining “targets.” The focus of the workshop isn’t so much the mechanics of these tasks, although you’ll spend time on them of course, but rather on the design options available for those tasks. And, depending on the available time, Neil will try to answer as many as possible of those questions that you’ve been building up.
Knowledge Archaeology: Raiders of the Lost Art
Speaker: Joe Gollner
Time: 8:00 AM - 8:50 AM Date: March 18
Track: Keynote and Featured Presentations
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 4
Although not quite as exciting as risking life and limb to explore lost civilizations, knowledge archaeology is an inevitable part of each content management project. Knowledge archaeology is the effort of searching for and discovering lost content assets and then undertaking the painstaking process of recovering these assets into a form that can become useful once again.
It is often staggering how much content that the typical organization creates and while much of it can be safely returned to the crypt, there are inevitably treasures that are uncovered that must be converted into a new format so that the embedded knowledge can be put back into service. Sometimes it is a matter of establishing a documentation baseline for an initial version of a product so that the team of technical communicators can commence the process of updating the materials. In other cases, the content that is recovered is critical to the survival of the organization.
A bit like a snake-infested cave, the conversion of content from lost formats into XML, and increasingly into DITA, is a task that frightens many project managers. It is assumed to be difficult and expensive and a task that will depend on the engagement of numerous specialists who write strange programs and talk about stange characters. The real stakeholders in the content would normally wait outside the cave of conversion listening to the struggles occurring under the surface. If all goes well, the hero emerges with the lost treasure. If things don’t go well…
Fortunately, content conversion techniques and tools have evolved substantially over the last 20 years. Today, powerful migration solutions perform the excavation, uncovering the secrets of the legacy formats, and complete the conversion of the content into XML and DITA. With these tools, the main task of archaeology becomes the work of the real stakeholders in the content - the subject matter experts and the technical communicators who understand what the content is good for.
The lost art that is in fact recovered when the state-of-the-art in content migration technologies are leveraged is that of communication. With the right tools at hand, the communicator focuses on making past knowledge relevant to today’s needs and this is not an entirely mechanical process. It is instead a creative process that can save organizations the cost, time and pain of recreating content that already exists.
The Sound of Music 2.0: The Making of a Rich M(use)ical Experience
Speaker: Rahel Anne Bailie
Time: 2:30 PM - 3:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Modular Content
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 7
Some organizations may treat the departments that create content like cost centers. Others treat their content like the valuable asset that it can be. It’s content - text, music, and videos - that brings potential customers to their sites, content that persuades them to make their purchases, content that instructs them in how to make their purchases, and content that makes up the product being sold.
In the music industry, the quality of the user experience - in other words, the quality of the content and how it comes together - is paramount to keeping ahead of the competition. Take a peek behind the curtain at the techniques that allow disparate types of content to converge and be served up in a way that forms a unique combination of magic that each vendor hopes will be the winning formula.
In this session, we will look at the different experiences offered by several leading music services, and at the various ways that they combine their content. We will also look at the related roles that various content structures play, from microformats to XML, and the role of content management systems, in the delivery of that content. As well, we will look at how to take the lessons from this high-profile industry and apply them to create high-value content and a good user experience in our own organizations.
APIs and SDKs Workshop
Speaker: Edward Marshall
Time: 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Mirage Room
Laptop computer required for this session
This half-day workshop introduces technical writers to the area of documenting APIs (application programming interfaces) and SDKs (software development kits). Writers should consider this area as the demand is often greater than the supply of writers; hence you can get higher pay than for other types of writing. Also, you often get greater flexibility in telecommuting / working remotely when doing this type of writing.
Tools used to generate the documentation from the source code, “a single source of truth”, such as Doxygen and Javadoc will be demonstrated.
Attendees will actually use these tools in hands-on exercises to generate documentation from sample source code. They will be able to use these completed examples as part of their portfolio when applying for technical writing jobs in these areas. The completed exercises will be reviewed and discussed. Common errors in coding for both tools will be discussed.
A new and growing area of opportunity, Web Services, will also be discussed and demonstrated.
Before You Touch the Tool: Techniques for Development of Structured Content
Speaker: Rahel Anne Bailie
Time: 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Hospitality 1419
Creating usable structured content depends much less on the tool, and much more on the ability of the author to apply sound communication theory to content as it’s being written. The principles behind the Nurnberg Funnel, along with minimalist writing, Plain Language, and translation-ready writing, allow authors to create crisp content that satisfies not only the “4Cs” of good writing, but also lays the groundwork for creating structured XML content.
Controlled Authoring Workshop: Learn How Standardizing Content Will Improve Quality and Reduce Content Creation and Translation Cost
Speaker: Berry Braster
Time: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Hospitality 1419
In today’s business, products and processes are becoming more complex, while companies increasingly have to translate their information into different languages as their products enter a global market.
However, information that is difficult to understand due to the use of ambiguous words and complex sentence structures can lead to:
- Damage, injury and costly legal liabilities
- High translation / localization costs
- Unsatisfactory translation quality
- Higher technical support costs
- Unnecessary costs resulting from miscommunication (such as recall costs)
Therefore, in order to better communicate technical information to a global audience, it is essential to standardize on terminology and style. Controlled authoring makes documents clearer and more readable for a global audience, which applies to both non-native English as well as native English speakers. Furthermore, controlled authoring enables writers and editors to increase the clarity and consistency of technical documents, resulting in faster, clearer and more accurate translations.
Steps of implementation
In order to successfully implement the use of controlled authoring, the following steps are necessary:
- Standardize on company terminology—In order to eliminate ambiguity in company terminology, it is necessary to create a dictionary that distinguishes approved words vs. non-approved words.
- Training—Tedopres offers classes to train writers, editors and engineers how to write in a clear and understandable way, and how to optimize documents for translation. The training comprises lots of hands-on exercises, focusing on workarounds for common problems.
- Controlled authoring software—Tedopres’ HyperSTE controlled authoring software helps writers and editors to ensure compliance with corporate terminology and style guide rules; as an interactive checker tool for the writer and as a quality measurement tool for the editor.
Results
The use of controlled authoring will result in the following benefits:
- Quality assurance, quality control and quality measurement for content
- Cost savings for translation and localization (up to 40% per language)
- More accurate translations and improved translation quality
- Compliance with corporate style guides and writing standards
- Reduced safety risks and liability claims
- Improved technical support
- Reduced time to market
- Efficient authoring
- Increased benefits for DITA, S1000D, SCORM, XML and Content Management due to optimum reusability
Developing a Content Management Strategy
Speaker: Seth Earley
Time: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Hospitality 517
Strategy is an ambiguous term. The strategy for developing content, messaging and branding? Is it the technical strategy for implementing the CMS? The strategy for selecting a tool? Strategy for migrating and tagging content? Change management/educational/adoption strategy? Globalization strategy? And so on. In this session we will review the core components of a content management strategy and ways to execute and “operationalize” strategy.
Attendees will learn:
- Various approaches to developing a content management strategy
- How to most effectively gather requirements
- How to correctly drive technology selection with business requirements
- What to do when you cannot drive technology selection with business requirements
- How to keep your strategy from becoming “shelf ware”
Building a Search Strategy
Speaker: Seth Earley
Time: 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM Date: March 17
Track: Pre-Conference Workshops
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Hospitality 517
Developing a search strategy cannot be an afterthought. Search needs to be considered in the context of information architecture, taxonomy, and content management. Organizations are struggling with unifying their content management tools, enterprise information and search systems so that information can evolve with changing markets and business processes yet remain in context to user needs. How can you create a search strategy that will address diverse business and technical requirements without creating redundant integration points as new repositories and applications are developed? This session provides practical approaches to developing an actionable search strategy including checklists and example questionnaires as well as illustrative findings and approaches.
Why Technical Writers Shouldn’t Be “Writers”
Speaker: Alan Porter
Time: 2:30 PM - 3:20 PM Date: March 19
Track: Professional Development
Experience level: All levels
Room: Ambassador 3
Why don’t people respect the documentation we create as much as we do? Maybe part of the problem is that the vast majority of us are writers. We love the written word. Perhaps, we love it a little too much? We need to ask ourselves is the written word the best thing for documentation? Is it the best thing for us as an industry, and is it the best thing for you as a content developer.
This presentation will take a look at why we are so focused on the written word, and present a few ideas about better ways for us to deliver our message to the end user in a way that increases customer satisfaction, and might even gain docs a little more respect.
The presentation will discuss what we as documentation professionals can learn from just observing the world around us, and how people communicate. It will also look at the impact of new Web2.0 technology and social networks, and how they will change the way we need to view documentation design, distribution and usage.
If you are involved in any aspect of documentation design or content development, then this is the presentation for you.
Feedback from previous attendees at this presentation has included comments such as “inspiring,” “totally changed the way I look at how I deliver information,” and “made me take a close look at how I write documentation”.
