Sessions

Sessions are sorted by morning and lunch keynote for each day first, then by speaker last name.

Keynotes

Content Management: No Mystery!, Mollye Barrett (Day 1, Morning Keynote)

What does content management mean to technical communicators? It's no mystery! The real core of CM is an organized way of creating, collecting, managing and delivering content. Software is a part of the implementation, not the foundation. This session will take a high level view of the content management pieces and how they work together in a system. This includes how a CMS facilitates reuse, how it may change the way we work, the impact of a CMS on authoring and how a CMS changes the once-familiar publishing environment. Technical communicators are making enormous changes in the way they work. Adding a CMS to your tool box means developing a clear end-to-end process for a successful implementation.

Mollye Barrett is a technical communicator and content management veteran. At ClearPath, Mollye presents vendor-neutral content management options that focus on sound process, business case, content reuse, document analysis, workflow analysis, single-source writing and translation. She has implemented XML-based content management systems for both print and online delivery and is a long-time FrameMaker user. Mollye is the Marketing Communication Director for Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) and a member of STC for over fifteen years.

 

Planning for DITA and a CMS, Glenn Emerson (Day 1, Lunch Keynote)

If you are planning on DITA, then you may want to start planning for a CMS. In the same way that some tools are a natural fit for specific types of output, DITA is a logical starting point when it comes to exploring a CMS. By sharing ideas such as the structure of DITA, the use of the toolkit and the customization that is already complete for many software tools, DITA is a natural lead in to a CMS. Content Management Systems are a great equalizer in developing and managing content regardless of the size of an organization and should be part of any comprehensive review of DITA.

Xerox Global Services is in the midst of adopting a DITA and CMS solution, complete with integration to translation systems. This session will explore some of the successes, lessons learned and some of advantages of DITA from an authoring and information architecture perspective, which a CMS should support.

 

The DITA Maturity Model: Fast-Tracking Your Enterprise Content and XML Adoption Strategy, Jake Sorofman (Day 2, Morning Keynote)

This speaker has canceled. A new presenter/presentation is being sought for this keynote presentation slot.

XML and Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) hold the promise of incremental adoption - using select DITA capabilities to start quickly and easily, then investing more over time as your content strategy evolves and expands. But every enterprise is different and every organization is at a different level of readiness for full DITA adoption.

How do you know where to begin? How do you plan for and manage the required investment and associated ROI? How do you move the enterprise content strategy from the back room to the board room and develop a framework for success?

Join this session and you will learn how to:

Jake Sorofman, Senior VP of Marketing and Business Development, North America and EMEA at JustSystems, is a seasoned software marketing executive with a strong product strategy and communications background. Previously, he was VP of product marketing with Mercury Interactive (now part of HP Software), where he was responsible for the Systinet product line. He joined Mercury through Mercury's $105 million acquisition of Systinet Corporation. Before Mercury, Jake led marketing for two WebSphere products at IBM Software Group, which he joined through the 12/04 acquisition of Venetica. Prior to Venetica, Jake was director of product marketing with Documentum, Inc. (now part of EMC), which he joined through the acquisition of eRoom Technology. Jake also has extensive experience in public and analyst relations, having led corporate communications for Ironside Technologies (now part of Infor). Jake has a BA in English and Political Science from University of New Hampshire and an MBA from the McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley College, where he was an American Marketing Association George Hay Brown Scholar.

Publishing: Past, Present and Future, Bernard Aschwanden (Day 2, Lunch Keynote)

This lunch session explores where we started, where we are, and where we are heading in the field of publishing and technical communications. Advancements in publishing have been fast and furious in the past 50 years and it will be interesting to see where we will be in another 50 years. Publishing as we currently know it will be turned on its head as technology such as the CMS, voice recognition and collaborative authoring take hold. Add technological advances including cybernetics, neural processors and full connectivity of to a shared network and the speed by which information is shared becomes almost blinding.

Adobe and Technical Communications (Day 3, Morning Keynote)

Since its release, the Adobe Technical Communication Suite has exceeded expectations. By integrating tools for the technical communicator and pricing it in a competitive fashion, the product lines (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate and Acrobat) seem to break down. Using only one tool isn't the right answer, Instead, by using a full suite of common tools and specializing on a given task, writers are now provided with a full workbench to pick from. Learn about the vision of the Technical Communication Suite and where it is headed in the future.

Integrating the Adobe Technical Communications Suite (Day 3, Lunch Keynote)

How do the tools actually work together? How can you take content created in Captivate and Acrobat 3D, include it in FrameMaker and deliver both a robust and print ready PDF documents and develop online help and web content. The sum of the parts is far more powerful than any one tool on its own and this keynote explores how this is the case. Real content, shared between applications for the overall benefit of the user.

Beyond a Single Suite -- How to Manage and Distribute Content in Print and Online (Day 4, Morning Keynote)

A single suite of tools may not be enough for you. If you are in an environment where you need to manage graphical, text based and multimedia content then working with only the Technical Communication suite may not be enough. Your organization may be using Photoshop and Illustrator to develop images, screen shots and animations for use in print and online. If your content is processed for professional print output using InDesign, converted to online formats and managed with DreamWeaver, developed as online multimedia content with Flash and distributed via print and online mediums, you need to know what the tools are capable of doing.

Suite Spot -- A Comparison of Adobe Product Suites (Day 4, Lunch Keynote)

What is the right combination of tools. Summing up four days on technical publishing by reviewing the combined product line offered by Adobe provides deeper insights into how to decide on the right tools. InDesign or FrameMaker? Photoshop or Illustrator? Flash or HTML? Help or PDF? By evaluating the products available in any given product suite you can decide on the right combination of tools. Perhaps a single suite is enough for a department, but in a corporation the net needs may go beyond one set of tools. Find out how to make the right software decisions when deciding between Adobe products.

Sessions (by speaker last name)

DITA Doclet Tool for API Documentation, Mariana Alupului

This session explores the automated DITA development tools for facilitating documentation of Java source code. The session will present a real-world issue and the found DITA solution. More particularly, the presentation explores a software tool and method for examining Java API source code, extracting the embedded documentation, and generating Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) files that contain corrected documentation and comment tags for the missing tags or documentation.

Content Analysis: The Keys to Reuse, Mollye Barrett

Successful content analysis, tracking and reuse are critical to single sourcing and content management. This presentation discusses the process of analyzing content on conceptual, relational and structural levels. We identify basic questions to ask during a content analysis and present a resulting matrix detailing reuse and content structure. We also discuss using the content analysis and resulting matrix to determines content granularity for a content management system or usage for a FrameMaker single sourcing approach

Improving the migratability of your legacy content to DITA XML, Don Bridges

We're not sure if "migratability" is a real word, but we do know there are a lot of things that you can do to make it easier to migrate your content to DITA XML; regardless of the tactical approach. This session will look at the areas of styling, avoiding DITA "no-no" protocols, improving reuse, and pre-tagging to make the conversion piece go as smooth as possible. Based on actual examples, you'll learn things that you can start doing as soon as you get back to your office to avoid post-conversion clean-up.

Introduction to DITA, Kristen James Eberlein

New to DITA? This session will include a technical overview of DITA, as well as information about its history and why it is the XML authoring and content-management standard of choice for so many companies. Expect to leave the session with an understanding of both the key concepts of DITA and what it promises in regard to increased productivity and cost savings.

DITA and Information Architecture, Kristen James Eberlein

In the new world of DITA and topic-based writing, what do you need to consider as you design your online deliverables? How can you use the unique features of DITA and the output from the Open Toolkit to create effective and highly-usable technical documentation? This session will suggest tactics to use as you design the information architecture for a DITA-based information set. It will focus on practical considerations for developing topic guidelines, navigation, and a linking strategy. It will provide concrete suggestions for effective topic titles; placement of task, concept, and reference topics; navigational patterns; use of short descriptions and container topics; linking strategies, and much more.

So We Have DITA, Now What?, Glenn Emerson

Having an architecture to enable content reuse, even if you have a CMS too, is not enough. The way content is planned, developed and managed has to change to effectively achieve reuse of knowledge. This session will share the effort at Xerox Global Services to move from product-centric document authoring teams to collaborative, global content development and management. This is a work in progress, so the session will mix practice and theories of how to tie content development to a user-centered design model.

After the Import: Tweaking CSS to Make FrameMaker Files Look Nice In RoboHelp (With a Little Help From Dreamweaver) , Mary Ann Howell

After FrameMaker Files are imported into RoboHelp, the help output looks a little rough. This session shows how common formatting problems, such as headings that won't break into topics, scrambled nested lists, poor graphics and callout resolution, and white space issues can be overcome. Mary Ann will share how she starts with a FrameMaker template designed for RoboHelp, and then uses Dreamweaver to edit CSS to produce a HTML Help project (.chm).

Using File Management Systems / Source Code Control Systems, Ed Marshall

This session introduces file management systems and describes how technical communicators of all levels can use them to improve their efficiency and save their sanity. The session introduces the basic concepts of file management systems and demonstrates the use of two commonly used systems: Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and Perforce. Topics include initially entering your files into the system, retrieving and re-storing files throughout the project cycle, solving common errors, using tools to analyze differences in files, and using meaningful labels at important milestones in project cycles. Finally, the session reviews the relative strengths and weaknesses of SourceSafe vs. Perforce.

Creating Visual Training and Marketing Materials Using Adobe Captivate, Neil Perlin

Captivate lets us quickly and inexpensively create visual help that augments standard online help systems, training "movies", interactive software simulations, LMS-aware eLearning, role-playing simulations, and more for applications ranging from training to marketing to disaster recovery. And at the price of US$699 and two or three days of training, it's changing the face of a field once dominated by tools that cost thousands of dollars. In this presentation, Neil introduces Captivate's major features, shows several movies, and illustrate its capabilities by creating a movie on-the-spot.

Using Help Authoring Tools to Create "Test-Bed" CMSs, Neil Perlin

As CMSs 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? A CMS's core functions are to 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, create reports, and more all 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 find operational kinks that might prevent you from making full use of your real CMS.

What's Up With RoboHelp (and Adobe's Technical Communication Suite)
, Neil Perlin

Despite its name, RoboHelp has never been a help authoring tool. Instead, it's an authoring tool that's used to create online help but can also create online reference guides, procedure manuals, SOPs, marketing materials, and more. Yet all this capability was in limbo for several years until Adobe began restoring the tool with two releases in 2007. The latest version offers an updated interface and significant new features. Plus it works with Captivate and Acrobat to build multi-modal help, and with FrameMaker to create a full authoring environment. If you're a RoboHelper who's been waiting to see where it was going, come to this presentation. We'll look at what's changed in the tool, what if offers, and how it integrates with the rest of the Technical Communications Suite.

We Broke All The Rules. Now What? A story of an imperfect implementation, Robert Perry and Kristeen Broussard

Learn how one team imperfectly imported 6,000 unstructured RoboHelp topics into Authorit and localized to Japanese in under 6 months. This session will include:

Defining Structure Applications in FrameMaker, Lynne A. Price

This session describes configuring FrameMaker for a particular XML (or SGML) environment, including associating a formatting template with a DTD or XML schema. Presented material includes an explanation of the basics for new users as well as advanced techniques for those with more experience. Topics include structapps.fm, using multiple application definition files, adding comments to application definitions, and structured read/write rules. Machine-readable handouts include alternative templates to those that ship with FrameMaker for EDDs, read/write rules, and application definition files such as structapps.fm.

Tech Comm Bingo, Lynne A. Price

Test your knowledge of DITA, the Technical Communication Suite, and XML in a Bingo game with questions associated with the squares on the Bingo cards.

Subsetting Publicly Available Tagging Schemes, Lynne A. Price

Many publicly available XML (and SGML) DTDs and XML schemas are intended for use in multiple organizations and hence are flexible to address the requirements of different environments. Since any individual group may need only a fraction of the defined elements and attributes, the complexity of the entire tagging scheme can be overwhelming to authors. The context-sensitive benefits of a structured editor are lost when instead of showing the user the small number of elements his or her organization uses in a particular situation, software displays a large list of elements the original tagging scheme allows.

This presentation shows how to use FrameMaker's read/write rules to create a manageable subset of a large tagging scheme for use within a particular organization. The recommended techniques are also helpful when updating a FrameMaker application in response to revisions of the original XML definitions.

Breaking Out of the DITA Box: A Real-World Usage Case Study, Speaker ToBeAnn and Lynne A. Price

Sometimes, a "canned" structure cannot get you far.  DITA does not fit every document. This case study covers a project that began with DITA, then moved in a different direction. The original goal was to use the DITA DTD without any of the DITA tools. The company had no current need for distributed authoring nor for topic-based publishing. Working with a knowledgeable consultant, they used DITA element and attribute names when there was a close match to our document structures, but then added variations and additional structures that got them to their needed document content/rules.

Building Powerful Corporate Technical Knowledgebase Using DITA, Yaniv Shoshani

How can DITA support corporate wide content requirements? By using a simple methodology you can create a powerful knowledge repository that can serve your entire enterprise. This repository can serve multiple users: the general staff of the organization, customers, partners, support personnel and others. The DITA concept provides tools for creating an intelligent knowledge based repository. In this session I will present the basic concept for taking DITA to the next step.

DITA Authoring in FrameMaker 8, Terry Smith

FrameMaker now includes a set of built-in functions for creating content in DITA. This session shows how to author topics in FrameMaker and organize those topics with a DITA map. We will also look at how to create HTML, CHM, and PDF using options available from the FrameMaker interface.

Strategies for Conditional Text in FrameMaker 8, Terry Smith

In addition to its original method for showing and hiding conditional content, FrameMaker 8 now has conditional expressions for regular FrameMaker and attribute filtering for structured FrameMaker. Conditional text processing in FrameMaker can be both powerful and surprisingly complex. Depending on which method you use, there are implications for both authors and template developers. This session shows detailed examples of how to produce the same output using each of these methods and explains the advantages and limitations of each.

From MS Word to DITA - A step-by-step process (case study), Barbara Stuhlemmer

Our client is a medical device manufacturer in a heavily regulated and documented industry. They have been writing and maintaining documentation in MS Word since their inception. Last year they came to us to add another module to the user manual which technically added another model, bringing the manual to include content for four models. The information was confusing and difficult to manage. Some common information was throughout each module as well as in the shared chapters. A change in one model meant an update for the entire manual. It was also determined that the content was going to be translated and may be used to create online and/or embedded help files. We decided with the client that the best course of action was to convert the manuals to XML using DITA standards, add model specific variables to shared information, and separate out the model specific content. This presentation will discuss the process involved in making the decision to change and the steps we took to convert the content and design the layout to be able to publish four model independent manuals using DITA 1.1 and bookmap.

Understanding the Structure and Benefits of DITA, Hal Trent

If you are investigating content management, XML, and DITA to determine if these technologies are right for your company, this session is for you. In this session, you will learn that DITA is a standard for authoring topic-based technical information, that using DITA provides significant business advantages, and that you can get started immediately with the DITA Open Toolkit.

Reducing Translation Costs with Scalable Vector Graphics, Hal Trent

During their enterprise-wide content management implementation, ITT Fluid Technology recognized a need for a single graphic file format.  ITT FT, with assistance from Comtech Services, tested a variety of formats and ultimately selected Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).  This session will discuss the benefits of using the SVG standard, including translation cost reduction and delivery method versatility.  The SVG standard is supported by many of the Adobe products and is easily integrated into the DITA publishing pipeline.

Using Semantic Elements, Julio J. Vazquez

This presentation describes the rationale for using appropriate semantic elements for your content. Some useful common elements are discussed in relationship to their domains and when to use them correctly.

Understanding Structured FrameMaker: The Files Behind Round Tripping XML, Kay Whatley

Structured FrameMaker is a powerful tool for authoring structured content. Getting a structured application set up takes more than just a FrameMaker template or a DTD/schema. This presenter shows the structapps.fm and files corresponding to the round trip process. Coverage includes review of template components, the Element Definition Document, and more.

XML Basics, Leigh White

This session covers what you need to know about XML. The presenter explains what makes an XML file, how external files (DTD, schema, style sheets) work with them, and the benefits of structured authoring XML offers. This presentation, offered early in the conference, will help those new to XML and DITA to understand what all the fuss is about.

Converting FrameMaker 8 Content to Online Help Using RoboHelp 7, Leigh White

RoboHelp 7 is a powerful tool for content creation, but what if you maintain your content in FrameMaker and you want to convert it on an ongoing basis to online Help with a minimum of manual tweaking? This session demonstrates how to set up your Frame docs for optimum conversion and how to set up a RoboHelp 7 project for multiple outputs, including context-sensitive help.

To CMS or Not to CMS?, Leigh White

This session focuses on two main questions. First, while every documentation group needs to manage its content, to what extent do you need to manage yours? How do you determine your audiences? How do you categorize your information so that you can best deliver it to multiple audiences in multiple formats without duplicating content? The second question is how do you track that information, its categorization, and its reuse? Do you really need a full-blown CMS or can you use other, less-expensive tools to do the job? This session offers a case study of one group's solution and offers alternative ideas to help get you started managing your content as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Selecting a Component Content Management System for use with DITA, Scott Wolff

There are a wide variety of Component CMS applications to choose from, many which list DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) as a supported XML standard. Is your organization planning to use DITA as a structured authoring solution to create reusable topics? Investing in a Component CMS application can help manage those topics as controlled information assets. However, comparing CMS application features can prove to be an enormous challenge. In this presentation I will focus on the CMS features that are needed for support of a DITA based information model. The presentation will feature screen shots provided by a variety CMS vendors to help illustrate the DITA oriented features we will discuss.

Developing an Task Based Information Model for DITA, Scott Wolff

DITA provides an excellent set of base information types from which to create technical documentation. However, successful information design requires understanding how to design an information solution that addresses both customer needs and authoring requirements. In this session we will discuss how to develop a DITA based information model by defining customer goals, tasks, product taxonomies, product life cycles and creating a customer focused documentation strategy. DITA provides several mechanisms for reusing information. Come learn how information modeling and reuse planning work together to create highly reusable information components that maximize your investment in structured information.