Webinar

  • Recorded on January 11, 2024

    There are many different situations when you might convert content from one form into another, from a one-off migration project, converting everything from a legacy format into an open XML standard, all the way to regularly converting third-party content to bring it into your internal CMS. The tools used to convert vary. Maybe you’re using a vendor to convert content for you, or perhaps you wrote your own XSLT suite, which you manage in-house. Whichever route you take and whatever the purpose of your conversion, there is always a risk that content may be lost or corrupted during conversion. In this webinar, Tristan from DeltaXML will walk through some of the pitfalls of content conversion and show how their new tool, ConversionQA, can help you ensure that your content conversion hasn’t misplaced a single character.

    Presented by: Tristan Mitchell, DeltaXML Tristan is Product Director at DeltaXML, a technology company with world-leading software products for the management of change in structured content. He has a deep understanding of DeltaXML’s product suite and loves to help customers create extra value in their content using change management. Tristan is a father to three daughters, a movie lover, and a keen runner.    
  • Recorded on December 1, 2022
    Stilo logo   One 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
    Presented by: Rob Hanna co-founded Precision Content in 2013 to change the way writers approach structured authoring. Having spent more than decades helping organizations move to component content management he realized that organizations need to take a step beyond technology and expert consultants. Without fostering the necessary standards and skills to work in these new media, organizations would continue to stall in their attempt to move to structured authoring. With this knowledge, he developed the Precision Content® methods, tools, and training. Today, Rob and his team of experts help Precision Content clients make the move to structured authoring as seamless as possible.
  • Recorded on April 5, 2023 
    Let’s face it: the service technicians’ experience with technical documentation is not at all what you, knowledge and product teams, had expected. The latest Insight-Report Service* highlights the top pain points service teams face in their daily work with product documentation and uncovers sometimes-surprising learnings on what they really miss. But this is not all bad news! Let’s tackle these issues and explore cutting-edge content strategies, tools, and solutions that can revolutionize the way your service technicians access and use technical documentation. You’ll discover how dynamic content delivery, truly mobile documentation, and AI-driven content recommendations can make a world of difference for your technicians’ productivity and satisfaction. We will illustrate our point with real-world examples of how organizations have successfully implemented these strategies in record time to the benefit of their entire organization. Join Christopher Rechtien, Innovation Manager at kothes, and Fabrice Lacroix, CEO of Fluid Topics, as they share practical insights and actionable takeaways to make your technical documentation the most useful and acclaimed resource for your service teams. *The Insight-Report Service is a survey designed and conducted by kothes GmbH and supported by leading customer service associations in Europe.   Presented by Fabrice Lacroix, CEO of Fluid Topics and Christopher Rechtien, Innovation Manager at kothes Headshot of smiling man 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: May 17, 2022
      Fluid Topics' logo While 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.
  • Recorded on October 11, 2022
    Logo with the word stilo

    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

    headshot of smiling woman with short dark hair 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/
  • August 28, 2019 Looking for a single piece of content on a web site is often compared to digging in a giant bucket of LEGOs for a single unique piece – an often frustrating and futile endeavor. If those LEGOs are sorted by certain distinguishing attributes, such as color and size, the odds of finding a particular piece increase dramatically. As a result, companies often take a “LEGO-block” approach to their information taxonomies. However, the sorting of LEGO blocks is child’s play, compared to the intricacies of sorting technical content – the distinctions are not always as visible as color or size, and attributes that are that obvious may not be very useful in a search. Nevertheless, there are lessons we can learn from the “LEGO-block” approach. In this session, Dawn draws parallels between sorting LEGOs and sorting technical content, and provides suggestions for going deeper when the Lego model falls short. Presented by: Dawn Stevens is the President, and owner of Comtech Services and the Director of the Center for Information-Development Management. With over 25 years of experience, including 15 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.
  • Recorded on: August 9, 2023   
        Authors, particularly non-technical ones, prefer to work in the familiar environment of MS Office. Office, which has been the de-facto standard for creating hand-edited documents for about three decades now, is a useful tool; however, using the output in any kind of standard environment can be tricky.  Converting from Office to PDF is a common function of many applications but there are some aspects to the conversion process which you may not have considered.  I will be discussing the pros and cons of various Office conversion processes and going over several use cases for using dedicated conversion software.

    Presented by Alex Critchfield

    B&W headshot of man with beard.

    Alex Critchfield is the Support Manager at Antenna House and has been working with automated publishing systems for over two decades.
  • 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.
  • 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
    Presented by: Jim Tivy is CTO at Bluestream and a product architect of the XDocs CCMS. Jim has been designing software technology in the area of XML content for twenty years. In 1999, he designed the first commercial XML database called XStreamDb and was a member of the W3C XQuery working group during that time. In 2005, Jim became involved with DITA as Bluestream added support for DITA to the XDocs CCMS. Since then, Jim has taken a lead role on further features of the XDocs CCMS and participates as a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.
  • Recorded on June 15, 2022
    The 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
    Presented by Jan Benedictus Headshot of a smiling man with short hair in collard shirt Jan Benedictus is Founder and Managing Director of Fonto. His experience goes back to the late 1990's when he started working in the field of online and digital publishing. In 2014, he started Fonto - with the mission to make structured content authoring available for everyone. Fonto, now part of RWS, is the leading provider of user-friendly tools for structured content creation, editing and review. Jan is a regular speaker on the subject of The Future of Documents; sharing Fonto's experiences and insights from working with structured content in various industries.
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