Past Webinars

  • June 10, 2021 The Xpublisher editorial system organizes every piece of content – regardless of how it will be used later – to provide fast, error-free, and highly cost-effective multichannel digital and print publishing. Preparing your content for a variety of formats and channels couldn’t be easier. In this webinar, Thomas Werzmirzowsky will present new ways of DITA integration with Xpublisher. Xpublisher offers the best possible data quality with XML-based data management and is a pioneer for the challenges of the future by presenting new solutions: the simple creation, management, and publication with DITA. Presented by: Thomas Werzmirzowsky is founder and Chief Technology Officer at Xpublisher GmbH, a leading software provider specialized in the area of XML publishing. Since 2009, the company has been advising numerous leading international companies and organizations from the aerospace, technology, education, publishing, public administration and many other industries in the area of multichannel publishing and accompanying them on their way to digitization.
  • July 21, 2021 With this webinar, we are pleased to announce the release of the first-ever e-learning course to train technical writers and subject matter experts on the use of Simplified Technical English (STE), the global standard for writing clear and concise content. Most of the world’s leading companies have accelerated their digital transformation efforts during the pandemic—efforts that are not slowing down. Content plays a key role in digitalization, as it has an important impact on the customer experience, where good quality content will help grow and create new business and service models and ensure safe product use. Because of this key role, it is important that global writing teams learn how to write content that is accurate, clear, aligned, and easy to find by their customers. Through STE companies can maximize the value of their enterprise content, whether this is for technical documentation, marketing, or support. Technical writers will be able to further improve their skills and show industry credibility through an e-learning course, which one could do at any time and from any location. During this webinar, participants will learn more about STE, the values it brings, and how this e-learning course will help you create the best possible content. Presented by: Berry Braster has been in the technical documentation field for over 18 years and has helped implement content strategies, including the use of DITA and HyperSTE controlled language software. As Technology Director, Berry is involved with connecting technical documentation to IoT, and how to leverage on technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality.
  • August 26, 2021 With the plethora of content available to users today, it’s often a wonder that they are able to find any relevant information to their queries. In fact, it’s the most common complaint Comtech hears when conducting user studies for our clients: “I can’t find what I’m looking for in a reasonable amount of time.” What can we as technical writers do to address that complaint? We hear a lot about taxonomies and metadata and their potential influence in making our content more findable. However, Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its search algorithm that go well beyond this basic categorization. Surprisingly, a significant number of these ranking factors fall clearly within the realm of a technical writer’s responsibilities. In this rapid fire webinar, Dawn presents dozens of proven and speculative factors that you as a technical writer can address to optimize your content for findability. Presented by: Dawn Stevens is the President, and owner of Comtech Services and the Director of the Center for Information-Development Management. With over 32 years of experience, including 20 years at Comtech, Dawn has practical experience in virtually every role within a documentation and training department, including project management, instructional design, writing, editing, and multimedia programming. With both engineering and technical communication degrees, Dawn combines a solid technical foundation with strong writing and design skills to identify and remove the challenges her clients face in producing usable, technical information and training.
  • September 29, 2021 Not all Analytics are created equal. Nor are they fit for the same purpose. Google Analytics and other web analytics tools are incredibly helpful for marketing content. But when it comes to product documentation, they are outranged by dedicated Content Analytics. Next-gen Content Analytics is designed for technical content and understand the complexity and structure of your documentation down to the topic level. Far beyond the web analytics capabilities, they generate the type of insights that benefit not only the tech content professionals but the entire organization. In this webinar, you will learn how the documentation team can capture meaningful content metrics and drive change and improvement to the content, the product, and ultimately to customer service and user satisfaction leveraging dedicated Content Analytics. 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.
  • October 6, 2021 Our content shapes experiences and drives behavior. The question then becomes, is your content causing positive or negative experiences and behaviors? In this presentation, we’ll take a critical look at content operations (Content Ops), the processes behind your knowledge, and how they make or break customer experiences. You’ll learn:
    • Tactics to turn your haphazard workflow into a repeatable process
    • Overlooked signs that your content hinders customer experience
    • How to ensure your content capability can scale with your company’s growth
      Presented by: Patrick Bosek, CEO of Heretto, loves all things content and applies his technical acumen to developing, productizing, and solving problems with product content software. Outside of that, he rides his motorcycle and makes coffee that makes him feel as fast as his motorcycle. He lives in Rochester, NY, with his son, Ezra, and a dog named Lloyd.
  • October 20, 2021 Semantics add unique benefits for content, especially within organizations utilizing structured content. Whether content is for detailed product documentation, polished marketing materials, or accurate, insightful employee enablement, all audiences gain by quickly finding what they want. While improving findability is key, providing accurate information recommendations dramatically increases relevancy with minimal use of personal data. From pages to personal assistants, reuse metrics to insights, content that connects to core semantics—the real-world ideas and objects it refers to—becomes truly intelligent. But, of course, benefits like this don't come from just pushing a button—or can they? During this webinar, Joe and Chip will discuss that while machine learning is a good start, it may not give customers the full value, clarity, or futureproofing required. So we challenged ourselves to productize a semantic AI approach that drives a polished end-user experience—and also appeals to busy editorial teams who care about quality but need to beat deadlines. We'll also examine emerging best practices for the practical adoption of semantic AI within your organization. Learn how RWS built a layered solution for Tridion, combining it with the power of semantic AI. These innovations fuse a powerful partnership of Tridion for content management excellence with PoolParty for taxonomy management. The results provide content teams with the power, automation, and accuracy of modern semantics with human validation.   Presented by: Chip Gettinger is VP Global Solutions Consulting at RWS, managing 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. Joe Pairman is Senior Product Manager, Tridion Docs. By looking at customers' underlying needs, and recognizing technical opportunities, he has built truly innovative solutions with strategic value. Joe designed and led the development of a personalized guidance app that helped millions of users without requiring any of their data. He also integrated a knowledge model with granular structured content to automatically give data integrators a broad overview of their available implementation options and next actions. Most recently, Joe brings the power of his first B2B product love –Tridion Docs – to a whole new market and user sector of smart specialists who don't have time to learn structured authoring. Product work is more than just building features – it's bringing people together to shape vision, plans, and priorities across the whole software lifecycle, in a way that keeps the original value when the ground situation inevitably changes. Joe has learned to get things done with solid, secure, engineering without losing track of the path to greater customer value.
  • October 12, 2021 For high tech companies, how to initiate requirements for a CCMS technical product documentation project; develop ROI justification metrics for Executive Management, and conduct a successful implementation.
    • What were the main drivers for you and the company to embark on a CCMS Project?
    • What were the deficiencies of the current CCMS that you were using?
    • How did you obtain C Level Management approval to embrace the initiative and what were the ROI and performance metrics used to evaluate the success of the project?
    • What was the most challenging issue that you encountered during the implementation process and how did you resolve it?
      Presented by: Michael Rosinski has lead a successful career as a technology executive in the enterprise software industry. Presently, Michael is President of Astoria Software which is the premier CCMS – Component Content Management System in the Technical Product Documentation Vertical. At Astoria, he was the first to market to launch the Enterprise SaaS Model and Mobility Platforms. Michael merged the Goldman Sachs venture with TransPerfect, the largest private translation company in the world. Nick Wilhelm started in Graphic design, moved into MDM software training/implementation, and is currently working in technical content development/strategy. For the last 4 years, Nick has been a lead content developer and CCMS administrator at a worldwide testing and measurement product company, Tektronix. He has successfully helped Tektronix transition to a new CCMS tool (Astoria) while working with the engineering and marketing teams to continually improve how Tektronix presents technical content to their customers. Maria-Hélène Soria started working in STMicroelectronics in 1989 as an IT Support engineer on Manufacturing solutions. After 5 years managing IT CAD infrastructures for ST R&D, Maria-Hélène took charge of the patent, project management, and technical literature IT solutions with teams located in France, Italy, and India. For the last 4 years, Maria-Hélène leads the Enterprise Content Management IT solutions team with more than 10 000 internal users at STMicroelectronics. Marc Medjad joined STMicroelectronics in 1995. After several positions in IT & Quality domains as a Program Manager, he has been working for 7 years about the rollout of DITA to a community of technical writers & authors, includes the introduction of a new CCMS, a new way of authoring content, and the localization process.
  • November 11, 2021 Content authors need to consider many factors while converting their existing content to structured content, including analyzing the content at its source. This exercise is interesting yet challenging, vexing, but rewarding. But what are those factors you need to think about for this conversion? For starters, you need to consider:
    • Character styles and how they are assigned (Use the style named Emphasis? Press Ctrl+I? Use a toolbar icon? Is there a difference?)
    • Paragraph styles and how they are assigned (Did you skip bullet 1 and go right to bullet 2 because it looks better and, if you did, what does it mean?)
    • Images and how to import them (Did you copy/paste or use the import setting? If so, how did you import it? As a link to the source?)
    • Links between files or the web (Did it just get typed in, or was this inserted using a linking tool? How will it convert?)
    • Page layout, tables, design, variables, equations, and so on
    What do you actually need to do to start analyzing the content? How do you deconstruct your source documents? What can you do with just the features available in your authoring tool to make it easier to comprehend what you are dealing with? In this webinar, we will identify the most common “gotcha” issues, share a few useful tips and tricks to reduce the volume of these glitches, and offer you a sneak peek into the workflow to take legacy content and plan your conversion to structured content. Although this is not a ‘one and done’ approach, this session should give you a fair idea about the early steps you need to consider while thinking about DITA, content strategy, content management systems, and automating of the conversion process from ‘been there’ to ‘done that.’ Presented by: Bernard Aschwanden is an Adobe Consultant and the CEO of Publishing Smarter.  A service provider specialized in content creation, management, and distribution, headquartered in Barrie, Canada. Bernard Aschwanden and his company Publishing Smarter, help clients reduce costs and improve the quality of content.  A past President of the Society for Technical Communications, he trains, writes, and presents on communications, publishing, and single-source reuse. Publishing Smarter helps companies automate content processes to publish better, faster, and smarter and provide a maximum return on investments.  Bernard Aschwanden on LinkedIn@aschwanden4stc on Twitter@publishsmarter on Twitterwww.publishingsmarter.com
  • January 12, 2022 Moving to structured authoring and implementing a CMS are critical projects that will generate long-term efficiency gains and significant savings. But before you get there, there are great hurdles to overcome. First and foremost, there's winning budget approval from your execs, who will have a singular focus on risk and ROI. Second, you need to maintain a high level of commitment and buy-in from those executives over the years that re-engineering of content production can last. Too many content restructuring projects fail or don’t even start because they cannot demonstrate a quick and tangible return on investment - and this is where Dynamic Content Delivery changes the game. Dynamic Content Delivery provides outstanding content experiences to your users and creates immediate value for your company without requiring a big bang in your writing process. It earns you internal support, money, and time you can leverage to optimize your content restructuring process. In this webinar, you will learn:
    • How Dynamic Content Delivery generates value from your existing content, no matter the writing tools and methods you are using now
    • How to achieve quick wins and build a fast ROI to gain support from your Execs for your content project
    • How to optimize your project to move to structured authoring and make it a success
    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.
  • December 14, 2021 Attend this webinar if you’re looking to:
    • Provide your audience with content that is accurate and compliant
    • Align your global workforce with One Voice
    • Accelerate your time to market thanks to less time for review and editing
    • Reduce your source content and translations by 40%
    • Show industry credibility by complying with industry standards to help open new markets
    With Heretto, Schematron, and HyperSTE you will get one platform to create, manage, and personalize your enterprise knowledge for any audience, on any channel, and in any language. Join us on December 14, where we will discuss these values as well as how they are delivered. Presented by: Berry Braster has been in the technical documentation field for over 18 years and has helped implement content strategies, including the use of DITA and HyperSTE controlled language software. As Technology Director, Berry is involved with connecting technical documentation to IoT, and how to leverage on technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality. Jarod Sickler is the Documentation Manager and a Customer Success Manager at Heretto. He’s also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester, specializing in metaphysics and epistemology. His dissertation focuses on the role and importance of the grounding relation in the overall metaphysical structure of epistemic justification. Slowly but surely, he’s making progress on his thesis. If you’re in the market for an effective sleep aid, he’ll happily share his research with you. Whether it’s in his research, documentation, or customer implementations, Jarod enjoys thinking through complex problems and finding the simplest and yet most powerful solution. In his spare time, Jarod tries to convince his kids that he’s still cool. They aren’t buying it.
  • December 1, 2021 Developing robust content models can never be a once-and-done endeavor where IAs are required to incorporate all aspects into the design prior to authoring. Instead, an iterative approach is needed to allow for incremental improvements not just during setup but long into production. Join Precision Content’s President and Chief Information Architect, Rob Hanna, to explore methods the company uses to refine models and update the content corpus through scheduled refactoring activities. Presented by: Rob Hanna is an award-winning technical writer and content strategist and an industry leading expert in structured XML authoring, DITA, and content management. In 2014, Rob was awarded the rank of Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and earned the Enterprise Content Management Specialist (ECMs) designation from AIIM. In 2017, he was named one of the top 25 global leaders in content experience strategy by Mind Touch. He founded Precision Content in 2013 after nearly 20 years in the industry as a technical writer, information architect, knowledge management specialist, and taxonomy expert. In 2018, Precision Content joined Google, Adobe, and Acrolinx on the list of "Top 100 Companies that Matter Most in Digital Content Industry" by EContent Magazine. See http://www.linkedin.com/in/singlesourceror for more information.
  • December 8, 2021 Kaarin Gordon discusses the choices and challenges for efficient content reuse facing Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research Organizations. What they want is a set of tools and platforms for easy content reuse, automatic propagation of changes from a single source, and content governance. What they have is Microsoft Word; it’s easy to use but limited to cut-n-paste content reuse. What they must deliver is multi-lingual content for a variety of uses – faster, more cost-effectively, and at lower risk. Join Eric Kuhnen in conversation with Kaarin Gordon for an engaging discussion of how component content management systems amplify or ameliorate some of the difficult content complexities that organizations face today. Presented by: As the Vice President of Life Sciences Technology Solutions at TransPerfect, Kaarin Gordon works closely with organizations on solutions to more effectively develop, manage, translate, and deliver multilingual content. She has spent 20+ years working with pharma, CROs, and medical device companies and focused on developing and implementing solutions that address global content challenges and result in decreased cycle time, reduced risk, increased consistency, and lower costs. Kaarin has a BA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Columbia University. Eric Kuhnen is the President of GlobalLink Vasont, one of TransPerfect’s GlobalLink CCMS solutions. He has more than 30 years of experience in product research, development, and management. Prior to his current role, managed global operations, product management, pre-sales, and marketing for Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc. He has also held profit-loss responsibilities with GoRemote and Oracle Corporation. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.
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