Conference Speakers

Markus Abt

Markus Abt graduated in Computer Science and is co-owner of Comet Computer GmbH. He is an XML and XSL expert. Together with Professor Sissi Closs, he has successfully implemented DITA   to produce manuals, online help, training materials, and product sheets.

Andrew Bredenkamp

Dr. Andrew Bredenkamp is CEO of acrolinx GmbH, a Ph. D. of computational linguistics, and a long-term advocate of systematic and tool-based quality assurance and functional writing in technical documentation. He serves as a consultant to EU and a wide range of global companies.

Sissi Closs

Sissi Closs is a Professor of Information and Media Technology at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. She is co-owner and Managing Director of the Munich-based companies Comet Computer GmbH and Comet Communication GmbH. Sissi is one of Germany's leading experts in XML and online documentation and has been teaching DITA for more than four years.

Oliver Collmann

Oliver Collmann is CMO of acrolinx GmbH and consultant to the German Association of Engineers and a wide range of companies in the engineering and technology sector. He is the driver of many projects to increase technical documentation quality in the German and European industrial landscape.

Peter Dykstra

Peter Dykstra is the founder and principal consultant at MetaphorX, a consultancy specializing in open source content management solutions for technical publishing. He is former senior vice president and director of product information for Donovan Data Systems,   a New York- and London-based company supplying enterprise systems for the advertising and broadcast industries, where he managed writing groups and technical publishing systems. He is a senior member of the STC and has presented at STC and other industry conferences.

Kristen James Eberlein

Kristen James Eberlein is a Senior Technical Writer and DITA Educator for Systems Documentation, Inc. in Durham, NC, USA. She develops DITA training, instructional materials, and best practices workshops. She worked for six years on contract at IBM as an information developer, team lead, and information architect, where she migrated several large libraries from SGML to DITA.

Bret Freeman

Bret Freeman is Managing Principal EMEA at JustSystems where he consults with existing and prospective clients recommending strategies and technologies to solve various business problems. Bret has more than 15 years experience in content life cycle operations, consulting, and structured authoring implementations, with expertise in the areas of enterprise content management, unstructured to structured authoring migration, technical publishing, multilingual information management, collaboration, knowledge management, and complex workflow design. Bret has led Fortune 500 organizations in various vertical industries in developing and implementing global content management strategies, XML authoring and publishing solutions, and complex multilingual output methods. Bret writes for many trade publications and speaks frequently on a variety of topics in the United States and Europe for such organizations and events as CIDM, local and national Society for Technical Communication (STC) groups, Society of Scholarly publishing, Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), Writers UA, TRI XML, Gilbane, Gartner, DITA Europe and many others.

JoAnn Hackos

JoAnn Hackos is President of Comtech Services, Inc., and Executive Director of The Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM). She is a founding member with IBM of the Technical Committee for DITA at OASIS, co-editor of the DITA specification, and Chair of the OASIS DITA Translation Subcommittee.

Alan Houser

Alan Houser is president of Group Wellesley, Inc., a Pittsburgh, PA-based company that provides authoring, content management, and workflow services to technology-oriented businesses. Alan is a distinguished consultant and trainer in the fields of XML, XML technologies, publishing workflows, and authoring and publishing tools. Alan has an M.A. in Professional Writing from the Carnegie Mellon University, is an Adobe Certified Instructor, and is a member of the exclusive Adobe Community Experts program. He is a voting member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and is an Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication.

Gunnar H. Krause

Since 2002 Gunnar H. Krause has been Specification Manager at Qimonda AG responsible for all technical customer documentation where he introduced XML technologies within his first 6 months. After graduating from University of Erlangen with a diploma in Electrical Engineering in 1995, he worked as an engineer in DRAM R&D within the areas of design, design-for-testability, and testing including knowledge transfer, training, and project documentation located in the US and Germany. He is a member of VDE and Tekom, the German associations for EE and documentation. Aside from optimizing and reengineering he likes Irish folk and plays the fiddle.

Christian Kravogel

Christian Kravogel is Chairman of the DITA Machine Industry Subcommittee at OASIS and since 2004 has been a voting member of the DITA Technical Committee. He graduated as an Electrical Engineer at the University of Applied Science in Lucerne, Switzerland and as an Executive Master of Business Studies at the School of Business Lucerne. After working as technical author and head of the documentation department of an international corporation for several years, he started work as a consultant for technical documentation and XML. Since 2004 his company SeicoDyne has supported many companies in the machinery, pharmaceutical, and software industries, in implementing DITA-based authoring environments, CMS, TMS, XSL-FO, process developments, and much more.

Ellyn Larson

Ellyn Larson is the Director at Portalyx, an Amsterdam-based XyEnterprise partner specialising in XML publishing and content management solutions in Northern Europe. Her current role is to manage the technical and sales process and the delivery of services for Portalyx. Ellyn is focused on the business and technical aspects of content management and single-sourced publishing. Working with companies in North America and Europe, she has been an enthusiast of SGML and XML for more than 20 years. As an advocate of DITA, she has followed the work done by her colleague, Jan van de Woestijne, who developed a DITA Open Toolkit Plug-in to output valid DITA instances for use by XyEnterprise’s XML Professional Publisher (XPP)

Terry Lawlor

Terry Lawlor is Vice President Authoring Solutions at SDL where he has business development responsibility for SDL’s products and services in the global authoring market sector. Terry has worked with many large, global organisations to improve the quality, consistency, and productivity of their global authoring processes. The experience gained in this emerging market is helping to drive SDL's product and service development strategies.

Terry joined SDL in 2004 as Vice President Worldwide Marketing, with responsibility for marketing strategy and execution worldwide. Prior to joining SDL he was EMEA marketing and business development director at SupportSoft, a support automation and knowledge management company, where he achieved significant growth in EMEA business. Before SupportSoft, Terry held senior sales and marketing positions at database software company Informix Software, and successfully opened up new markets in content management and e-commerce. He is a graduate of Durham University in the UK and has senior management experience in sales, marketing, customer services, and R&D.

Eva Lemaire

Eva Lemaire works as a documentation author at Agfa HealthCare. After studying Germanic languages and Multilingual business communication at the University of Gent, she started her technical writing career at ATEK, an outsourcing agency for technical writers. Afterwards she worked for three years as an Information Mapping trainer for the same company. At Agfa HealthCare, she writes software and technical documentation and guides the writing team as it transitions to DITA.

Celia Marsh

Celia Marsh has over 20 years experience documenting complex software solutions within network communication and mobile telecoms. With Digital Equipment she worked on documentation suites for networking environments that evolved into the Web infrastructure. This included STC award-winning Problem Solving procedures. At Vodafone she was responsible for the delivery of user information vital to maintaining network services globally, subscriber administration, billing, and business critical technologies using a wide variety of publishing methods. Apertio has challenged Celia to find a solution to maintain and enhance an ever growing suite of user and engineering documents written across two continents by many authors.

Michael Miller

Michael Miller is Vice President of Antenna House, Inc., a company that has developed one of the leading XSL-FO software products on the market today. Michael has a degree in Printing Engineering and Management and has been involved in high-end composition, document formatting, and document management for over 30 years. He has an extensive background with structured data, including; SGML, XML, S1000D, and DITA. During his career he has worked in Europe and North America, and has been involved in the implementations of some of the largest fully-automated publishing and document formatting projects.

Julian Murfitt

Julian Murfitt is Managing Director of Mekon Ltd., a company established in1990. Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, Julian began his career in technical sales working in the lift industry and then in Computer Aided Design systems. In the late 1980s, he managed an Apple Mac dealership that specialised in MicroStation CAD software. In the early stages of Mekon, he developed skills in document analysis and design and program management while working on a number of large Civil Aviation documentation projects. He has been involved with the ISTC (Institute for Scientific and Technical Communicators) for many years and until recently held a post on the ISTC council. Julian is an advanced aerobatic pilot and competed for Britain earlier this year at the European Aerobatic Championships in Finland. He is also a member of HNC Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of Directors.

Timo Nevalainen

Timo Nevalainen is a Concept Owner of Learning Solutions at Citec Information, Finland. He holds a degree and teaching diploma in English language and has studied information management and education while working as a technical writer and instructional designer in SGML/XML-based information design and documentation projects in the telecom field. His professional and academic interests include information technology, education and learning, instructional design and blended learning, knowledge management and communities of practice, and information architecture.

Mark Poston

Mark Poston is a senior technical consultant with over 10 years in content and publishing. He has gained broad knowledge and understanding of the publishing requirements of clients. As technologies have changed and moved forward, the solutions he has worked on have reflected these changes. He is now heavily involved in the analysis, design, and implementation of XML publishing solutions and is an active member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and DITA Open Toolkit project. Starting out with Adobe FrameMaker, Mark was responsible for designing many single-source publishing solutions that made extensive use of Adobe Acrobat and Quadralay Webworks technologies. For several years he was the only authorised trainer of Webworks in Europe and developed a deep understanding of the product that allowed him not only to develop complex publishing solutions but also to run bespoke training courses tailored to each client’s needs.

Michael Priestley

Michael Priestley is the lead DITA architect for IBM and co-editor of the OASIS DITA 1.0 and 1.1 specifications. He is an experienced information architect and XML architect, and has presented and published prolifically on information development processes, information design principles, XML development techniques, structured authoring, and Web 2.0, and of course DITA. He is currently supporting new DITA projects and working on DITA 1.2. You can read his blog at http://dita.xml.org/blog/25.

Paul Preuveneers

Paul Preuveneers joined Mark Logic UK following six years at Elsevier, a leading technical publisher. During his tenure he contributed to the success of projects like ChemWeb, BioMedNet, and PathCon. Later he was the Project Leader for projects like RadCon and Yearbooks which dramatically changed the paradigm for content delivery. An early champion of Agile development, Paul brings a remarkable wealth of technical experience to Mark Logic’s clients. Prior to Elsevier, Paul developed GPS mapping software and holds a degree in Computer Science from Southampton University.

Katriel Reichman

Katriel Reichman is CEO and founder of Method M Ltd. and is passionate about the benefits of structured authoring solutions and successfully implementing documentation solutions. He is author of the “How To Write Winning Documents” series and has led implementation of successful documentation automation solutions. He is the leader of the popular Method M DITA Immersion Workshops. Prior to Method M, he founded, owned, and managed a technical document company with more than 30 in-house document professionals and developed a series of highly successful software applications for technical writers. Besides being fanatical about improving productivity for technical writers and other knowledge workers, Katriel is a fanatic cyclist. When not available at his office or customer site he can be found grunting and sweating off-road.

Yves Rombauts

Yves Rombauts is an independent business advisor at Trisoft, a Belgium-based independent software vendor that commercializes InfoShare, a packaged software solution for Technical Communication Departments (Content Management Solution), enabling them to efficiently create, translate, personalize, and publish their technical product information such as user manuals, service manuals, training material, and online help.

Vince Savard

Vincent Savard is the Business Development Manager for Arbortext Solutions at PTC. Since joining the company in 1997, Vince has played a major role in establishing Arbortext's European operations. Working with both European industry leaders and regulators, he has helped Arbortext become the recognized market leader in the application of XML and enterprise publishing to the pharmaceutical industry. Vince has 15 years of experience in publishing technology. Starting as an aerospace technical writer, he moved from deploying and applying solutions for technical publishing to applying the same standards-based approach to a variety of industries ranging from discrete manufacturing to publishing and life sciences. Vince holds a diploma in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, Canada.

Gary L. Schaffer

Gary L. Schaffer joined Inmedius in 2002 as President and Chief Executive Officer. Since joining the company he has engineered the organization’s rapid growth with the opening of international subsidiaries and global acquisitions. He most recently served as Vice President of Product Management with MapInfo, an international software company based in Troy, New York. Before joining MapInfo, he was President and Founder of On Target Mapping, prior to its acquisition by MapInfo Corporation. While at On Target Mapping, he was responsible for the daily management and creation of a software product portfolio of over 50 products which is used by many Fortune 500 companies including, ATT, Sprint, Qwest, and AOL/Time Warner. He earned his BA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has been a guest speaker at international conferences in Europe, Australia, and the United States, primarily focusing on software products, technical documentation, and technical standards.

Karsten Schrempp

Karsten Schrempp is a partner and the CTO at Dokuwerk Gundlach & Partner. His experience in SGML/XML-based information systems extends more than 10 years. He has worked as an IT Leader, Information Management Freelancer, Project and Sales Leader, and has founded several organizations.

 

Marc Speyer

Marc Speyer has extensive experience in defining and implementing e-Publishing solutions. Prior to joining Stilo, Marc worked at Cap Gemini and Wolters Kluwer where he was a lead architect for editorial, content management, and publishing applications. He has been working with mark-up languages (XML and SGML) since 1995 and has a thorough understanding of the standards, tools, and techniques that can be leveraged to make a complete solution. He has a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology and is a highly regarded expert in the field of e-Publishing solutions, able to apply complex technology to the delivery of tangible business results.

Ben Noz Urbina

Ben Noz Urbina is Business Development Manager for Mekon Ltd, where he provides XML solutions consultancy services to global organisations and SMEs. With years in mark-up technology, training and services, Noz’s expertise is brought into projects for requirements analysis and to address issues of human interface design. Previous to working with Mekon, Noz worked for XMetaL as Partner Manager, facilitating the growth and cross-pollination of a pan-European partner network of Content Solutions and Tool providers and has held a number of business development, technical services, and sales positions where he was able to develop his expertise in a cutting-edge, efficiency-driven, business context.

Andrzej Zydroń

Andrzej Zydroń is one of the leading experts on XML Localisation and Localisation Open Standards. Born in England and educated in France, he began his IT career in 1976. Currently he is CTO of XML-INTL and is involved in developing the next generation of localisation and authoring systems based on advanced linguistic technology. Andrzej is a member of the British Computer Society and sits on the OASIS technical committees for Translation Web Services, XLIFF, and DITA Translation as well as the LISA OSCAR GMX/V, SRX, TMX, xml:tm, and TBX technical committees. He also sits as an invited expert on the W3C ITS (Internationalization Tag Set) technical committee.