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October 21, 2020 Thinking of automating your entire conversion process to DITA? Wanting to handle conversion work manually, in-house? Before you proceed, think about how the conversion could help you derive the benefits of DITA that you expect. A simplistic approach may allow you to publish something that looks just like what you have now. But a really good quality conversion will help you to leverage content reuse, personalization and multi-channel publishing, as well as making it easier to maintain and update your content. For example, will your conversion generate keys and keyrefs for variables? How about a relationship table, to prevent broken links? Will menu cascades be correctly marked up, for localization purposes? Presented by: Helen joined Stilo as a technical editor. She now works closely with Stilo Migrate customers, helping them to analyze their legacy content and configure appropriate mapping rules. She also provides Migrate customer training and support. Helen has helped Migrate customers to convert tens of thousands of pages of content to DITA and custom XML. Helen holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and has pursued graduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
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November 18, 2020 Learn how HubSpot Academy, the world’s leader in providing inbound sales, marketing and customer service education, adopted DITA to help solve their content creation, conversion and output needs. HubSpot’s use case is exciting and unique as it pushes the boundaries of what we typically associate with DITA. Rather than producing typical technical documentation, HubSpot is using DITA to produce:
- Complete lessons, courses, and certifications
- Learning assessments
- Powerpoint outputs
- And localizing that content in five languages
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December 16, 2020 A step by step guide to getting started with Schematron and Schematron Quick Fixes. Schematron and Schematron QuickFix (SQF) languages can be used to improve efficiency and quality when editing DITA documents. You can define actions that will add complex structure in your documents, or make modifications in multiple places or actions that will convert a structure into another. These changes are made by keeping the document structure valid and conforming to your project specification and will help the content writer add content more easily and without making mistakes. Join us to see:
- How to create business rules with Schematron
- How Schematron rules are applied
- How to apply specific Schematron rules on all DITA files
- How to develop Schematron Quick Fixes to make it very easy to solve the reported problems
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August 5, 2020 Abstract Business leaders around the globe are looking for ways to replicate the successes of innovative and disruptive organizations like Uber, Amazon, and Spotify that grow exponentially. Rather than adding 10%, they’re looking for 1000%. Exponential growth is deliberate and involves organizations developing capabilities that dramatically outperform the competition. Rob Hanna explores how information-enablement across the enterprise is key to this type of performance and why we need to rethink how we create content to become Exponential Organizations. What you’ll learn
- The definition of “information enablement”
- How your content is tied to your brand’s ability to grow exponentially
- How the 4th Industrial Revolution will impact global businesses, including yours
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January 9, 2019 New privacy regulations (EU’s GDPR, US’s Privacy Shield, and others) are introducing a regime of strict consumer protections. Companies will have to comply with: requiring opt-in to data gathering, rather than opt-out; enhanced protection measures; data protection officers; transparency about data breaches; and many others. We will review the constraints imposed by these regulations, what they mean in terms of content delivery platforms, and how enterprises can meet them and compete successfully in lucrative growing markets. Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a known Web pioneer and the founder of Antidot, the company that puts enterprise content to work. As an entrepreneur, he has been working for 25 years on the development of the Internet and of the Web through several major companies.
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Recorded: March 29, 2016 As we look forward to the 2016 Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference in April, we devote time to identify industry trends. We ask managers, information architects, writers, training developers, and more how they are addressing the challenges of meeting customer information needs. Dr. JoAnn Hackos, President of Comtech Services and Director of the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM), and Mark Gross, President of DCL, walk us through the results of the 2016 Trends Survey, a study we have been conducting since 2012. With four years of data, we can trace the changes in how we think about developing and delivering content. Join DCL and Comtech Services as we review the results of the 2016 survey and compare it with past results. Learn how information developers are coping with new customer demands for innovative approaches to development and delivery. Learn what tools teams are using and how they respond to technical innovations. Presented by: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc. and Mark Gross, DCL Dr. JoAnn Hackos is President of Comtech Services, a content-management and information-design firm based in Denver, Colorado, which she founded in 1978. She is Director of the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM), a membership organization focused on content-management and information-development best practices. Dr. Hackos and colleagues are called upon by corporate executives worldwide to consult on strategies for content management, development and organizational management, product interface design, customer studies, Web and traditional information architecture, and tools and technology selection. Mark Gross, President & CEO — founder of Data Conversion Laboratory, is a recognized authority on XML implementation and document conversion. President and CEO of DCL, Mark also serves as Project Executive, with overall responsibility for resource management and planning. Prior to founding DCL in 1981, Mark was with the consulting practice of Arthur Young & Co. Mark has a BS in Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University. He has also taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of automated conversions to XML and SGML.
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February 6, 2019 With Salesforce supporting many customer-centric processes, it must be able to leverage the technical documentation that’s needed to increase efficiency of these processes. And yet, despite being built around a comprehensive and extensible data model, Salesforce is not equipped for storing and delivering technical content. So what should you do when you are asked to integrate tech doc inside Salesforce? Fortunately, options are available for solving this challenge and making relevant technical content available to support staff and customers. Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a known Web pioneer and the founder of Antidot, the company that puts enterprise content to work. As an entrepreneur, he has been working for 25 years on the development of the Internet and of the Web through several major companies.
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Recorded: January 30, 2018 Borrowing the title of Fisher and Ury’s popular work, this session suggests strategies and invites conversation around the challenge of negotiating with your business partners—no matter who they are in your organization. In today’s environment, our technical content organizations are continually asked to support additional services with fewer team members. But doing more with less simply isn’t always possible. Informing a business partner that you cannot support a request can spark a fraught conversation, but adding more to your plate might risk sending your team into overload. Even asking for trust in your decisions as the authority in your area can be tough. Yet these conversations don’t have to become uncomfortable, and can instead provide an opportunity for dialog leading to mutual gains. You can get what your team needs, draw boundaries, and inspire confidence at the same time. Within the context of technical content’s organizational position and business value, this session will cover core negotiation strategies that achieve win-win outcomes and how to avoid zero-sum exchanges. Since relationships are key, we’ll discuss how to identify allies and when to call on them. Finally, we’ll address the inevitable question of data—seemingly irrefutable information that can turn opinion into hard fact. Presented by: Jill Orofino, DellEMC California born and raised, Jill attended UCLA where she received her B.A. in English, and then pursued graduate studies at Boston University. Jill went on to teach at BU for seven years before moving into high tech. Technical content development, research and writing made up the most of Jill’s teaching experience. Jill loves to learn new things and help others reach their goals. Five years into her career in technical content, Jill assumed leadership of a technical writing team at a Boston start-up called Acme Packet. Management was another natural extension of teaching, championing staff members and motivating them. Jill started at EMC (now Dell EMC) about five years ago, bringing with her a focus on customer experience and a drive for simplicity. Jill led the global technical content teams that support core storage for four years before taking a role in Product Marketing. Jill is now exploring a new part of the content ecosystem and its relationship to the unified customer experience.
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April 11, 2019 Salesforce is ubiquitous. It is being used to drive self-service portals, support internal staff, increase sales, and much more. However, Salesforce can now be made more powerful and give you even greater competitive advantage. Whether you are using Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, or Community Cloud, you are sharing your information. Bluestream will show how you can help your customers to easily find great support information through community searches, right beside your community forums, blog posts, and Salesforce KB articles. Dynamically update content through Bluestream’s end-to-end solution. Use XDocs’ sophisticated tags to customize information based on user profiles, permissions, and languages, and deliver customer- and configuration-specific documents, policies, or procedures. Presenter: Rik Page is Sales and Marketing Director at Bluestream Software and has been working with both component content and document management solutions since 2001. During this time he has worked with custom DTDs and Schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200 and DITA. His experience covers a wide range of industries including education, banking and finance, manufacturing and healthcare. A keen advocate of technology and innovation Rik has taken part in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate solutions all over the world.
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February 12, 2020 Products are sold into markets that cross both country and language boundaries, so product documentation must be localized. Localizing documentation is made easier with DITA, a capable Component Content Management System (CCMS), and a Translation Management System (TMS). Even with these systems in place, you must always consider best practices and pitfalls. Jim will begin with an overview of the localization process, of how content flows across systems and organizations. In this context, we will discuss techniques and also wins and pitfalls in automating and streamlining the localization process. In this session, attendees will learn:
- About the localization process-what are the various roles and how does content flow
- About use cases and constraints-what is incremental localization and what is the relationship of localization to the product release lifecycle
- About release management and localization-what role can branching play in localization
- About localization tools-how do CCMS, TMS, and LSP relate in the localization process
- About recent developments in automation-how can the localization process be accelerated through automation and what are the wins and pitfalls of automation
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April 8, 2020 Technical Communication is in constant change: Requirements and expectations from both authors and consumers of technical content have changed dramatically over the last decade. The rise in digital experience innovation creates new customer expectations and demands. And enterprises around the world are exploring new ways to create new Content Interaction Experiences for their customers. In this presentation, Stefan Gentz will give insights from the Adobe Technical Communication Worldwide Survey 2019/2020. TechComm professionals from 60 countries participated in the survey. He will discuss the driving factors for enterprises around the world when it comes to technical communication. Why do companies choose to work with structured content, and why do they go for a CCMS? How do they deliver their content today – and how will they provide content tomorrow? KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Understand the key factors that are driving companies to move to structured content
- Understand which technologies companies use to author and deliver content today
- Know which are the “hottest” content delivery channels in the future to provide technical content to customers
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Date: August 12, 2020 Squatches, yeti, and kraken: oh, my! Learn about cryptozoology, cryptids, and… oh yes: the future of content strategy and digital experiences. Chad Dybdahl, Adobe Solutions Consultant, walks you through importing content from Microsoft Word, creating intelligent, structured content that can then be used across a wide range of delivery channels and platforms. In this session, we’ll see both traditional and headless delivery strategies that will inspire you to think about content in new and exciting ways.
- Strategies to repurpose your technical content in new ways
- Headless content delivery: what is it and why you need it
- Creating structure from (MS Word) chaos
