Past Webinars

April 6, 2022 Content reuse is one of the many advantages of moving to DITA and a structured standard. It helps us reduce the amount of overall content we have, improve consistency, and decrease redundancy. However, it is difficult to visualize this value before the conversion takes place. Estimates can be off, and it is hardly ever clear how much content we can actually reuse from our documentation. Typos and partial matches only complicate our futile estimates. Narrowing the scope of this approximation by investigating similar matches in our source content before conversion can provide valuable insight to the potential benefits of moving to a structured standard. Join TJ Dhaliwal in this session as he uses Stilo’s Analyzer and Migrate to investigate source content for similar and exact matches. Then, further use that information to plan for conrefs, keyrefs, and topicrefs before any transformation takes place. Conclude by deduplicating exact topic matches and realizing some of the potential that was uncovered in the beginning.   Presented by: TJ Dhaliwal is a Technical Sales Product Specialist at Stilo, helping customers uncover solutions to their content conversion needs. With a strong technical background in engineering combined with a passion for public speaking, he’s been able to successfully bridge the gaps between project stakeholders. As a problem solver, TJ has helped several enterprise-level companies convert tens of thousands of pages of their content to DITA.  He’s recently taken lead on and helped bring to market Stilo’s newest product, Analyzer.

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

Presented by: Stefan Gentz the Global Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe. 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 TCS tools. Stefan is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001 / EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert and Six Sigma Champion. Stefan is a popular keynote speaker and moderator at conferences such as tekom, tcworld, Information Energy, Intelligent Content Conference, Congility, LocWorld, TCUK, STC, GALA, ELIA, TTT, Translation Forum Russia and many other. He is also a member of the Conference Advisory Board of the world’s biggest TechComm event, the tekom / tcworld Conferences, and an Ambassador for the Globalization and Localization Association. He is also an active social networker on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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 Twitter | www.publishingsmarter.com

June 3, 2020 In these difficult times, it’s absolutely critical to demonstrate your value to your organization. As a technical communicator, your mission is to make sure you’re getting the right information to the right people. Part of the solution is to find the right tools – but they will only take you so far. Good content is crucial. You must write content in a way that best suits your audience and best matches their search patterns, so they can organically surface the information they need. Join Lawrence Orin, Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert at Zoomin, as he takes an intriguing look at content strategy, and reveals a down-to-earth, practical approach that will ensure your writing is making a visible impact on your company. In it this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Practical steps to improving your writing skills
• Best practices for structuring content
• How to tailor your writing to your audience

Presented by: Lawrence Orin is Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert at Zoomin, where he leverages his experience as a past customer to help new customers with their implementation and content strategy. He previously led documentation teams at Radvision and Riverbed, as well as other teams in technical support and customer services. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from University College London.

March 3, 2021 This webinar is free. Agile development makes specific demands on documentation teams, whose content creators need to be nimble, describe features in a piece-meal fashion, and find ways to report on their content development progress. Structured content is ideally suited to these needs. But experience has shown that some teams find it hard to move fully to an Agile methodology, often using an uneasy mix of waterfall and Agile processes. Precision Content’s Keith Schengili-Roberts will talk about the current state of Agile and structured content, and also give an introduction to the Iterative and Incremental Development (IID) methodology, a recent Agile offshoot that works well for technical writing teams. If you are wondering about what the impacts are of working with Agile or are simply looking to optimize your DITA-based documentation processes, this presentation is for you! Presented by: Keith Schengili-Roberts is a Content Specialist and Information Architect at Precision Content. Keith is also an award-winning lecturer on Information Architecture at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, and the Chair of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee. He is also the writer behind the “DITAWriter.com” website, which has long been a useful resource for those working with the DITA XML standard. He lives in the north end of Toronto with his long-time girlfriend Dhan and her two noisy green-cheeked conures.

Recorded: February 23, 2022 Structured content provides numerous benefits for organizations with authoring, managing, and delivering information. Perhaps your organization has realized these benefits—but what’s next? A formal content classification system, or a taxonomy, provides a framework that supports search, filtering, classification, consistent terminology, and more. The combination of taxonomy and structured content opens up compelling possibilities for digital delivery. Add continuous updates and advancements in business data, and you can transform the customer experience—but you may feel a little exposed out on the leading edge of technology. Sarah and Chip will present and discuss emerging trends, techniques, and technology for your digital information initiatives. During the webinar you’ll learn:

• How do you select and manage a good taxonomy?
• Classifying content – human, machine, or a combination?
• Coordinating taxonomy terms across various teams and languages
• Taking advantage of Semantic AI
• Business drivers examining tagging quality vs. quantity
• Best practices and actions for you

Presented by: Sarah O’Keefe, Chief Executive Officer, founded Scriptorium Publishing to work at the intersection of content, technology, and publishing. Today, she leads an organization known for expertise in solving business-critical content problems with a special focus on product and technical content. Sarah identifies and assesses new trends and their effects on the industry. Her analysis is widely followed on Scriptorium’s blog and in other publications. As an experienced public speaker, she is in demand at conferences worldwide. In 2016, MindTouch named her as an “unparalleled” content strategy influencer. 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.