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Recorded: April 20, 2022 Presented by Géraldine Boulez Your technical documentation is one of your company’s most valuable assets. The bad news is: your execs and most of the other departments in your organization don’t know about it. Even worse, some even consider tech content as an unproductive cost and try to cut it to a minimum. Still, your documentation can achieve your company’s most critical goals in all customer-facing areas, and it’s high time your organization understood and embraced the business opportunity brought by tech doc. In this webinar, you will learn:
- How to debunk the most common misconceptions about the business value of tech doc
- How to connect your tech content to your company’s business goals
- and how to demonstrate to your execs how your documentation can effectively generate gains in three main areas of business: Marketing, Customer Support, and Field Services.
Presented by:
Géraldine is passionate about new technologies and their ability to solve people and business problems. This is what has led her to product management, marketing and business development positions in fast-growing tech companies and innovative corporations for over twenty years. Geraldine is VP of Marketing at Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
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Recorded: April 27, 2022Presented by Klaus Fleischmann OK, so we have all understood that terminology is important for content, AI, search engines, consistent naming, etc. But what do you need to do
- to launch a professional and scalable terminology process,
- to convince your boss and your peers that your company needs it and
- to get this off the ground quickly and efficiently with the help of modern terminology software?
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Recorded: May 17, 2022While product cycles are getting shorter in all industries, down to daily releases for SaaS vendors, technical documentation teams have to keep up with the pace. Information needs to be written faster and delivered in sync. Join Fabrice Lacroix, CEO and founder of Fluid Topics, and Gaspard Bébié-Valérian, certified technical writer and functional consultant, as they untangle the complex process of continuous content delivery and unveil new methods and processes to embrace the new landscape of documentation. They will share their insights and experience as they explore the collaborative potential between SMEs and tech writers opened by Docs as Code, examine the tooling behind a continuous documentation flow, and showcase the example of a robot writing release notes. Presented by Fabrice Lacroix & Gaspard Bébié-Valérian: Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation. At the crossroads of engineering and social sciences, Gaspard enjoys exploring the breadth of technologies involved in technical documentation, including structured documentation, CCMS, and collaborative paradigms like docs as code. Gaspard works as Functional Consultant at Antidot helping clients get the most out of Fluid Topics.
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Recorded: June 8, 2022Content fuels your business. It has a purpose and an expected outcome: Deeper engagement. Higher conversions. Fewer support tickets. The list goes on. But does your content live up to its expectations? And if not, what can you do about it? Join Chris Willis, Acrolinx CMO, as he explores the importance and value of content impact. You’ll learn:
- What impactful content looks like and if yours qualifies
- Why content impact outperforms basic quality to deliver better business results
- How technology can help you automate your content improvement
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Recorded: June 9, 2022Terminology only works effectively if the organization manages to agree on consistent concepts and terms. But to achieve a company-wide understanding and agreement a well thought out process and regular interaction are needed. While some organizations prefer a systematic process, others react to ad hoc requests, some are happy with a combination of both. Therefore, we
- look at the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and
- share how to set them up in practice
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Recorded on June 15, 2022The Future of Documents is shaped by a fundamental change in how information is exchanged. This future sees a shift from traditional 'e-paper', formatted and optimized for reading by humans, towards semantically tagged information - exchanged in an open digital format. In this talk, we will share examples from industries that have a history in structured content - such as publishing and technical documentation - as well as from industries that are ‘newer to the game’, such as pharma and financial services.
- The Future of documents, - structured content and semantics from niche to mainstream
- Define Structured Content. What is it, and why is it so fundamentally different from formatted documents?
- What drives organizations to move from traditional authoring towards structured content authoring
- How can industries learn from each other? – Discussing benefits and features.
- Content automation
- Documents as data
- Component based authoring
- Future of documents
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Recorded: May 25, 2022Presented by Helen St. Denis Pretty easily, we can get a basic DITA structure from headings, tables and lists in the legacy content. As well, though, for each different source format there are a number of ways to extract information that can be used to refine the DITA output. Likewise, there are ways to enrich the content automatically. There are, however, some things it can’t do… yet. As more and more types of content are being moved to DITA, a greater variety of legacy formats need to be converted. We’ll look at some of them to see what can be gleaned from each, beyond the basic structure, and some of the challenges that remain. Presented by: Helen St. Denis Helen started at Stilo over twenty years ago as a technical editor. As Conversion Services manager, she’s helped customers convert millions of pages of content to DITA, and worked with organizations with many different approaches to, and reasons for, the move to structured content.
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Recorded: August 25, 2022
Digital Transformation is often defined as the process of using digital technologies to create or optimize business processes to improve company and customer experience and meet changing customer demand and market requirements. Digital transformation may involve spending thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars purchasing new tools and technologies. No matter how many new tools and systems and how much money you put toward transforming your organization, a large piece of the digital transformation puzzle comprises a content transformation. CIDM, DCL, and RWS wanted to understand what steps people are taking toward “digital transformation” and where content structure and information architecture fit into the plan. The three organizations launched a three-month long “Digital Transformation Survey” to understand how various industries address the adoption of processes, technology, tools, and information architecture. The results have been collected, analyzed, and discussed. Now it’s time to share the results and our observations with you. No matter what industry you work in, digital transformation is happening on many levels, and understanding how your peers are applying resources, budget, and strategies can contribute to your success. Presented by: Dawn Stevens, President, Comtech Services and Director of CIDM has 28 years of practical experience in virtually every role within a documentation and training department, including project management, instructional design, writing, editing, and multimedia programming. Dawn is the perfect advisor to identify and remove the challenges you face in producing usable, technical information and training content. With both engineering and technical communication degrees, Dawn combines her solid technical foundation with strong writing and design skills to lead our team of consultants and specialists in providing the expertise you need. Mark Gross, President, Data Conversion Laboratory, is a recognized authority on XML implementation and document conversion. Mark also serves as Project Executive, with overall responsibility for resource management and planning. Prior to joining 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. Chip Gettinger is the VP of Global Solutions Consulting at RWS, he manages a team that works with customers in maximizing global content with RWS. He has experience working with customers to develop global content strategies, business ROI adoption drivers, change management, and technology adoption for component content management systems. He speaks and blogs about customer successes working closely with industry standards, partners, and customers in technology solutions and deployments. -
Recorded on August 3, 2022
Harmonizer is a powerful tool created by Data Conversion Laboratory that analyzes large document collections to identify content reuse across multiple content sets and source formats. Understanding the volume and nature of duplication in content is invaluable to effectively implement a reuse-based content model like DITA or S1000D. Harmonizer dives deeper into content analysis and can evaluate, identify, and report not only on duplication at the paragraph level but also duplication within specific XML elements such as topics, tasks, concepts, etc. Flexibility in the level of comparison is particularly useful for performing periodic health checks on structured content to diagnose reuse issues or other issues that can arise after DITA or S1000D conversion.
This webinar will demonstrate Harmonizer’s role in performing a health check and speak to use cases that are important for any organization who has invested in DITA or S1000D. Christopher Hill, product manager for Harmonizer and structured content expert, will also detail new licensing models for the software that enable self-serve content health checkups that improve documentation workflows and ensure your investment in markup continues to return healthy results.
Presented by: Christopher Hill, Technical Product and Project Manager at Data Conversion Laboratory – [email protected] Christopher Hill has 18 years of experience working in publishing and content management. He started his career as a high school teacher but moved into the world of corporate training teaching a range of software and XML courses. He has written and conducted many training courses, was a founding employee of one of the first hosted content management systems and lead the user experience redesign for an enterprise CMS. He now manages the Harmonizer product for Data Conversion Laboratory. -
Recorded: September 7, 2022
Do you know:- Which publishing format is still the most popular among technical writers globally?
- Which major content development challenges have been ranked at the top by technical writers?
- Which authoring and publishing tools are the most popular among technical writers?
- Most preferred authoring methods
- Benefits of adopting XML and DITA-based authoring (structured authoring)
- Most popular tools for authoring and publishing technical content
- Top challenges faced while creating and publishing technical content
- Key metrics that define success for technical content
- Challenges with effective content reuse
- Emerging trends in the technical communication industry
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Recorded on September 15, 2022
3D has become indispensable in engineering departments. But 3D models rarely find their way into technical documentation. In spare parts catalogs, 3D catalogs have become standard thanks to automatic processing. There, people appreciate that 3D views are intuitively understandable and offer additional interactivity in online documentation. What can technical authors learn from the 3D experiences of the spare parts catalog world?
What steps are necessary in a CCMS to not only visually enhance online documentation with interactive 3D data, but also to enable new access to information? Which formats and tools can be used?
Presented by:Sebastian Göttel is Head of Marketing and Product Management at Quanos Content Solutions GmbH. The computer scientist has been involved with XML editing systems and content delivery since 1998. In the Tekom environment, he worked on version 1.0 of the iiRDS standard. [email protected]
Hermann Arya is a digital professional with 15+ years of experience in the aftersales project environment. In Europe he was and still is responsible for the revolution and evolution of 3D visualizations in the service information system context. As Head of Professional Service at Quanos Service Solutions GmbH and through the execution of well over 150 customer projects, he has also been able to build up extensive knowledge of the value chain around service information systems. [email protected]
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Recorded on September 8, 2022
Does this sound familiar: there is so much data in your organization, and it is not always clear which sources are up to date and really relevant to business decisions? Terminology can act as the single source of truth, breaking up data silos and providing the same information to every employee. But in order to achieve that, terminology needs to get close to the users and find its way into their systems.
We share how
- to implement the "single source of truth” in terminology work
- to connect your systems, e.g., ERP, CMS, PIM, CAT tools, etc.,
- to distribute the information
- to make this information usable for all
Join us for a tour that starts with your relevant data sources and ends with a clear and concise terminology process as a way of making sense and use of this data.
Presented by Christian Lang Christian Lang, Technical Consultant, has a wide range of experience and interests in the language field, proven by his degree in Japanese studies and translation. He first became involved with terminology management as a freelance translator for the European Patent Office. Since then, it has become one of his hobbies, as has research in the field of NLP on topics such as machine translation, automatic term extraction, and concept maps. -
Recorded on September 28, 2022
Most tech doc websites are barely usable.Why is that? For most people, moving from paper-based documentation to delivering technical content on the web is nothing but generating HTML pages that will turn into a website. But this simplistic view overlooks the difficulties stemming from the specificities of technical documentation and misses the usability and interactivity gains offered by a true digital transformation of tech doc.This webinar will uncover the intricacies of transitioning to a web-based documentation and the cultural and technological clashes it represents. We will carve out the different options you need to consider and the technical choices you need to make, how they vary according to your strategic goals, your corpus of content, and your audience, giving you some key insights for successfully achieving your content digital transformation.Presented by Fabrice Lacroix
Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation. -
Recorded on October 11, 2022
In the past, we have produced documents with a focus on how they look when published. Page layout, font face, font size, bolding and italics have been useful not just to make the documents attractive, but more importantly, to make them easier to read and understand. Nowadays we are told that semantic markup is preferable. Why is that, and how do we add it to our docs?
Presented by: Helen St. Denis
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 millions 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. Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-st-denis-b1b60214/ -
Recorded on October 5, 2022
CPQ systems are just one of several business systems that can be enhanced with the content stored within your CCMS. Thomas and Rik will drill down into this with real-world examples of multiple deployments, including QAD’s own experience. They will discuss the pros and potential pitfalls of these combined systems and explore the best approach to take to maximize their success. Presented by: Thomas Blumer, QADDr. Thomas Blumer is the Director of Knowledge Management at QAD. He has a Doctorate in Business Administration with a focus on Knowledge Transfer in M&A Integrations. In his current role, Thomas is delivering enterprise-wide Knowledge Management initiatives focused on collaborating, accelerating best practices, and leveraging internal organizational knowledge. Thomas' main focus is to provide customers, partners, and QAD employees with the right product knowledge, at the right time and at the right place.
Over the last 30 years, Thomas has worked for several Fortune 500 companies such as HP, UBS, and Sharp and implemented or enhanced knowledge base systems, subject matter expert yellow page systems, and communities of practice.
Rik Page, Bluestream. Rik has worked with component content and document management solutions for over 20 years. He has worked with custom DTDs and Schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200, and DITA, together with various document and content management systems, including Documentum, SharePoint, XDocs, Ixiasoft, easyDITA, Astoria, and Vasont. His practical experience ranges from high volume data capture and content creation to dynamic multichannel delivery in various industries, including banking and finance, manufacturing, central government, and education. In addition, Rik has participated in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate innovative solutions throughout Europe and North America. Rik is also an advocate of Documentation 4.0, a new concept reflecting the demands on content/documentation that results from moving to Industry 4.0 and ‘smart’ manufacturing. -
Recorded on November 16, 2022
Multilingual content is fundamental for successful communication with other people, cultures, and markets. Naturally, the quality of translations is of central importance. Often, these quality assurance processes are unsystematic and rely on spontaneous “feedback” from in-country reviewers. However, more often than not, these review processes lead to long waiting times, frustrating discussions, no real process improvements, and thus impede strategic and sustainable language quality management.
We share how
- to define translation quality
- to measure translation quality
- to involve and instruct all stakeholders
- to manage translation quality actively and sustainably
Join us to learn which aspects and stakeholders you need to take into consideration on your way to successful quality management of multilingual content.
Presented by Klaus Fleischmann Klaus Fleischmann studied translation and IT in Vienna, holds an MA in Conference Interpreting from Monterey, California, and a MAS in Technical Communication from Krems, Austria. In 1996, he founded Austria-based Kaleidoscope, a company implementing content, translation, and terminology management processes for internationally active companies. Kaleidoscope develops online collaboration software for enterprise-level terminology workflow, translator query management, in-country review etc., making the translation quality process comprehensible and strategically manageable. In 2007, he became CEO of Austria´s leading LSP, Eurocom Translation Services. Always active in the industry, Klaus got voted into the Gala Board of Directors in 2015 and 2017. -
Recorded on November 3, 2022For over fifteen years, teams have tried to justify their need for a move to structured content with the same old arguments. In today’s ever-changing landscape, these old arguments are no longer sufficient and, in many cases, not even relevant. In this webinar, we will be looking at other drivers for the move to structure with real-world examples of what can be achieved. Presented by Rik Page, Bluestream Rik has worked with component content and document management solutions for over 20 years. He has worked with custom DTDs and Schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200, and DITA, together with various document and content management systems, including Documentum, SharePoint, XDocs, Ixiasoft, easyDITA, Astoria, and Vasont. His practical experience ranges from high-volume data capture and content creation to dynamic multichannel delivery in various industries, including banking and finance, manufacturing, central government, and education. In addition, Rik has participated in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate innovative solutions throughout Europe and North America. Rik is also an advocate of Documentation 4.0, a new concept reflecting the demands on content/documentation that results from moving to Industry 4.0 and ‘smart’ manufacturing.
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Recorded on December 15, 2022The new 20s have been very turbulent so far, and have shaken many basic beliefs in the industry. It might seem comforting to know that at least Component Content Management Systems still work just as reliably as they did back in 2019, 2014, or 2008... wait. Isn’t it time for a change? Experts agree that even the latest trends like content delivery, ontologies, or the cloud won't bring about the change needed for software to evolve the way technical writers actually use it. If we question our basic assumptions on how a CCMS works, however, we might find some exciting new possibilities. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN An industry expert will highlight the megatrends of the 20s and try to draw new conclusions for CCMSs. And no matter where this webinar will lead us, we'll have plenty of material for discussion at the end. Presented By Sebastian Göttel Sebastian Göttel is Head of Marketing and Product Management at Quanos Content Solutions GmbH. The computer scientist has been involved with XML editing systems and content delivery since 1998. In the Tekom environment, he worked on version 1.0 of the iiRDS standard. [email protected]
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Recorded on November 30, 2022Content reuse has been a topic for content managers for years. And the benefits and practices are now established in many organizations. For the most part, however, content reuse is still limited to the classic, “internal” reuse of an information unit across documentation. Time to say: Let‘s rethink content reuse – beyond internal reuse, to reuse in new channels. In this presentation, Stefan Gentz, Senior Worldwide Evangelist at Adobe, will discuss why we need to rethink technical content and share some ideas on increasing the value of information both within the organization and for the customer. He will share some use cases that go beyond traditional PDF and web publishing and repurpose technical content to create immersive, interactive experiences. Presented by Stefan Gentz Stefan Gentz is the Senior Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe, headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. Stefan’s mission is to inspire enterprises and technical writers around the world and show how to create compelling technical communication content with the Adobe Technical Communication tools. He is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001 / EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert, and Six Sigma Champion. As a sought-after keynote speaker and moderator at conferences around the world, he travels around the globe half of the year. Besides that, he has been the European Ambassador for the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) for many years, a member of the tekom Conference Advisory Board for several years, and a founding member of the tekom iiRDS working group for Intelligent Information and member of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee. In 2016, Stefan Gentz was awarded by MindTouch as one of the Top 25 Leading Content Strategist Influencers in the world and as one of the Top 25 Content Experience Influencers in the world in 2017. Stefan is also the mastermind behind Adobe DITAWORLD, the world’s biggest DITA Online Conference for Marketing and Technical Communication Professionals. Stefan Gentz on LinkedIn https://www.adobe.com/products/one-adobe-solution-for-technical-content.html
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Recorded on December 1, 2022One of the main benefits of using a structured format such as DITA is the ability to reuse content, but realizing where reuse is beneficial and estimating the probable savings can be a tedious and time-consuming task. In this webinar, we demonstrate how you can identify reusable or redundant content in your own documentation and pinpoint potential cost savings using detailed graphical reports with Stilo’s Analyzer. Presented by Jacob Brennan Jacob Brennan is a Technical Sales Product Specialist at Stilo. He works with Stilo Migrate customers and aids in converting their legacy content to DITA. Jacob is a recent graduate from the University of Ottawa holding a BASc. in Mechanical Engineering and a BSc. in Computing Technology.
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Recorded on January 11, 2023
The results have been collected, analyzed, and discussed. Now it’s time to share the results and our observations with you. Join Dawn Stevens as she shares the results of the 2022 CIDM Benchmark Survey on translation and localization practices in our community. She’ll examine the trends and answer questions such as:- What strategies, processes, and measurements do companies use to ensure the quality of translated content?
- What content components do companies translate—just body text or do they translate images, metadata, and video too?
- Which are the most common languages into which technical publications are translated?
- How much do companies spend on translation and does cost affect translation decisions?
- Which translation tools do companies use now?
- What activities do companies depend on their LSPs to perform?
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Recorded on January 12, 2023
Is your content CCMS-ready? Have you optimized your content versioning and lifecycle management? If you want to fully leverage your CCMS features, it’s time to update your IA.
In this webinar, Amber Swope, Information Architect at DITA Strategies, and Wiegert Tierie, VP of Strategic Accounts at RWS, share tools for transforming authored content so that it is CMS ready. Learn how to evaluate your map structures, topic structures, metadata, and content reuse strategies.
Presented by:Wiegert Tierie, Vice President of Strategic Accounts and Tridion America Sales Team Lead, brings over 25 years of experience in numerous senior leadership roles. He is an ambitious visionary executive that uniquely combines strategy, sales, and marketing experience with an extensive background in financial, business process optimization, and product management to offer our customers a competitive edge, building their brand and their go-to-market strategy. To deliver results and success for the key customers he works with. Earlier Wiegert worked with Tridion, the leading Dutch Customer Experience and WCM vendor, and successfully launched numerous projects with Marquee brands. Prior to that, he played a key role in the introduction of Adobe Acrobat in Europe. Wiegert earned a Master of Science in Business from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). He loves the outdoors, sailing and currently lives near St. Petersburg FL (he moved from San Francisco, CA in May 2020)
Amber Swope is an internationally recognized Information Architect, Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) expert, and information architecture (IA) consultant. With over 20 years of information development experience and 15 years of DITA expertise, Amber specializes in helping organizations create opportunity through IA. She helps teams build scalable IA solutions to future-enable their content and empowers team members to advance their architecture as it evolves to meet new business needs. -
Recorded on January 26, 2023Traditional web analytics are an invaluable tool that can help you understand how your content is performing in the real world — but they often don’t tell the whole story. Site visitors, time on page, and bounce rate numbers tell you what is happening, but they miss one critical detail: why. In this discussion, learn how collecting qualitative analytics about your content can help drive more actionable feedback by adding a third dimension to the insights you receive about your content. Here are the key takeaways:
- Why traditional web analytics only tell part of the story
- How consistently aligning content with your brand identity impacts the bottom line
- Types of qualitative analytics and their impact on content performance
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Recorded on January 19, 2023Providing excellent customer service that keeps your customers happy without driving service costs up is always a challenge. It becomes even more critical when you have thousands of customers, and their number is growing.Our client, a Swiss manufacturer of high-end digital printing systems, faced those challenges and quickly realized that enabling self-service documentation was key to unlocking their growth while raising their service levels up to the company’s standards.In this session, we are going to discuss how by introducing structured content, standardizing the content processes, and changing the way the content was delivered to customers, the company changed the service culture from “call for solution” to “information self-service”.Join Fabrice Lacroix, CEO at Fluid Topics, and Alex Masycheff, CEO at Intuillion, as they explain how:- The documentation team realized that PDFs were not efficient in providing customers and service teams with relevant and useful information.- They started providing customers and field operation teams with a self-service platform that delivered personalized content on spare parts and product documentation.- Service engineers got access to the most up-to-date product information.- The entire company improved the ROI as a result of making these changes.Presented by: Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation. Alex Masycheff is the CEO of Intuillion Ltd. (http://intuillion.com/) that develops solutions for managing, automating, and delivering enterprise content. He has been in the content industry for 25+ years. He leads implementation of XML-based solutions in many companies, including Kodak, Siemens, Netgear, and EMC.