ConVEx Minneapolis Presentations
The ConVEx Minneapolis program offers career-empowering knowledge, practical solutions, best practices, and the best networking in the industry.
IMPORTANT PROGRAMMING NOTE
The lineup and schedule posted here are based on current commitments from presenters and are subject to change.
Wednesday ~ April 10, 2024
Neuromancer: The Future of Content is Already Here
The emergence of practical Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now a fact of life and, just as was envisioned in William Gibson’s 1984 classic novel Neuromancer, how things will evolve from here is not entirely under our control. This session will explore the concrete ways in which the world of content, the world in which professional communicators operate, has changed, and will change. While there are aspects of this that are decidedly big picture, there are many more that are specific and tactical, and altogether these should guide our investment choices as communicators, as vendors, as customers, and as an industry. The envisioned future re-emphasizes the portability of content between applications and its openness to continual interpretation and improvement by automation.
Joe Gollner, Gnostyx Research Inc.
Joe is the Managing Director of Gnostyx Research Inc. (http://www.gnostyx.com) where he specializes in providing objective and research-based guidance on the development, management, and strategic use of content technologies. In this field, he is a veteran implementer with over 30 years of experience, and he is well-known for mixing leading-edge ideas (and all too frequently concocting them) with highly pragmatic implementation tactics. He has Masters degrees from both the University of Oxford (Literature) and McGill University (Management), blogs about Content and Management (http://www.gollner.ca), and is pursuing doctoral research into the role of AI-enabled text analytics in the management of organizations.
How to Use Product Data in DITA
Using DITA means avoiding copy-pasting stuff. But when you insert product data, you are still copying it from the product database into your DITA content. This presentation shows a much more effective method to do so: as you select the product data, the query elements are automatically injected into the DITA content. This enables refreshing product data at publish time – without having to reopen the topics and changing the product data manually. Apart from efficiency, this method greatly improves reliability.
Jang Graat, Smart Information Design
Jang was born a Philosopher, but had to pick up other skills to survive. He studied Physics, Psychology, Philosophy before embarking on a fast-track career in the international Supercomputer business domain. After writing manuals and creating/delivering training courses around the globe for 15 years, he taught himself programming in a wide variety of languages. He has been presenting many radically new ideas at various conferences for 25 years, concentrating on DITA since 2009. He works from his lovely home in Amsterdam.
DITA Localization Best Practices
We look at the benefits of deploying DITA Localization best practices within development, documentation, and translation teams. Sharing guidance and examples of how to develop these DITA specific processes, achieving high-quality published content on a global scale:
- Localization Principles
- Localization Ready Content
- Terminology & Translation Memory Management
- Graphics & Video
Susy Harrison & Dominique Trouche, WhP
With 27 years’ experience in localization, Susy takes a consultative approach with a genuine passion for providing customer service excellence. She is proficient in leading complex content transformation in global organizations and industries including Marketing, Automotive and Software ahead of Localization. As the Head of Customer Success and Partnerships at WhP, Susy looks to understand customers needs and business objectives to provide solutions to assist them with their localization journey.
Dominique managed several multinational operations in various European countries, the US and South America, prior to joining WhP in 2005 as Managing Director. He opened the subsidiaries in Slovakia, China and North America. Heading Consulting and Innovation at WhP is an expert helping companies engage with their global audience using localization, specializing in: XML Technical documentation, especially DITA, and eLearning.
Developing Structured Authoring Resources for the College Curriculum
As this founding generation of DITA designers, architects, consultants, and implementers reach retirement age, who will step into the field with adequate background to fill those entry-level openings? Although there are many wonderful DITA training options for writers who already have a tech comm job, there are fewer than a dozen secondary education courses focused on structured authoring and even fewer tenure-granting programs dedicated to technical communications. The industry expertise to develop these instructional resources is plentiful. We simply need to create collaborative environments within which academics and industry professionals can develop, review, and distribute resources. The ACM SIGDOC Committee on Structured Authoring (https://sigdoc.acm.org/structuredauthoring/) has identified best practices that industry professionals can consider when reaching out to local colleges.
Stan Doherty, Google
Stan Doherty is a senior technical documentation manager currently developing customer-facing documentation for Google Cloud Platform Storage products. He is also chair of the ACM SIGDOC Committee on Structured Authoring (https://sigdoc.acm.org/structuredauthoring/) and founding member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee (https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita). In collaboration with Bob Johnson, Stan also co-chairs the Boston DITA Users Group (http://bostondita.org/). Stan has managed many DITA migrations from MS Word, Madcap Flare, and Framemaker. Contact Stan at stan@modularwriting if you are considering a migration and want some experienced advice about preparing for and costing a migration.
Publishing to the Product: Docs content in ServiceNow Impact
The ServiceNow Impact product provides customers views and insight into the many ServiceNow applications they do or may have installed. Product content used in Impact was manually cut and pasted from docs.servicenow.com-not a sustainable approach. This paper describes the automated publishing process we implemented to replace the manual process, including the use of metadata in DITA topics to enable the automation and how we created the application-to-documentation mapping.
Eliot Kimber, ServiceNow
Eliot Kimber is a Senior Staff Content Engineer at ServiceNow. Eliot has worked with generalized markup for a very long time. He is one of the founding members of the W3C XML Working group and a founding member of the DITA Technical Committee, as well as co-editor of HyTime 2nd Edition and author of DITA for Practitioners (XML Press).
Introducing the Component Content Alliance: A Resource for content professionals
The Component Content Alliance (CCA) is a new collaborative initiative formed by industry leaders who work in organizations that support content creation and management. The alliance promotes collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the adoption of best practices in component content management — also known as structured content management – across various industries. Comprising leading technology providers, consulting firms, and industry experts, the alliance empowers organizations to drive operational efficiencies, enhance customer experiences, and streamline service and support through optimized content authoring and management processes.
This interactive panel presentation from some of the founding CCA members offers you the opportunity to learn how you can take part in the CCA or rely on the CCA for insights, experiences, and industry knowledge.
Marianne Calilhanna, DCL
Marianne has been involved with structured content since the days of SGML. She helps people understand the true business value of markup languages (e.g., DITA and other types of XML) in an organization’s content strategy. Marianne is the VP of Marketing at Data Conversion Laboratory, an organization that provides data and content transformation services and solutions.
Bill Swallow, Scriptorium Publishing
Bill partners with enterprise content owners to design and build content systems that solve complex information management and localization problems. Often, projects require centralizing and streamlining content development across multiple teams, departments, and regions. Bill expertly balances high-level business priorities with the specific needs of content contributors.
Joe Gelb, Zoomin Software
As President of Zoomin, Joe spearheads the development of advanced technology solutions for dynamic content delivery. Zoomin delivers Product Answers to users whenever and wherever they need them. By turning the underutilized asset of product content into a valuable business resource, companies are able to improve productivity, provider better customer service, lower support costs, and gain actionable insights that help drive more business.
Localization and DITA Overview
I will provide a brief, high-level overview of globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation, and explain why these distinctions matter. I will describe the content round-tripping process and the players involved, and I will outline the types of issues that you or your organization will have to address in order to succeed. And I’ll also touch a bit on what you can expect regarding costs, timelines, and return value.
Paul Wallace, Okta
I’ve been doing doctools and localization for a dozen years. Before that I was a professional Japanese-to-English translator/editor for another dozen years. https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-wallace-doctools-l10n/
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Making the Most of DITA
As we enter our second year doing DITA conversions, we are developing a content strategy to obtain maximum reuse while meeting the needs of our audience and internal stakeholders. In this presentation, we will share that strategy with you as well as the mechanisms we use for approval and implementation and where we are at in meeting our time and cost savings goals.
Bob Peterson & Heather Sigstad, The Toro Company
Bob Peterson has been the supervisor of the Technical Publications team at The Toro Company for 8 years, supporting the team’s major initiatives in DITA conversion, multimedia creation, and app-controlled autonomous machines. At previous jobs, he led the transition to topic-based writing and formalized the methods for reusing content. Bob holds a M.A. degree in English and has taught business and technical writing at the University of Minnesota.
Heather Sigstad has a MS degree in Scientific and Technical Communication and has been working as a technical writer at The Toro Company for 9 years. She has been leading the efforts to convert legacy manuals into a topic-based system and integrate subsidiaries into the TTC publication systems. She is learning DITA information architecture and publication workflow management in Windchill.
How The Content Wrangler Produces Content With Generative AI
Join us for a case study presentation that explores how The Content Wrangler (TCW) is using generative AI to automate and accelerate
content production.
Scott Abel (TCW) will walk you through creating structured and reusable prompts that can be shared with others to maximize return on
investment.
You’ll discover how existing skill sets — like content analysis, modeling, and taxonomy — can help you unlock hidden value and increase
efficiency through AI-powered automation.
You’ll find out how generative AI can supercharge the content production process, helping you reduce the need to perform time-consuming,
repetitive manual tasks, incorporate content from spreadsheets, automate content creation, ensure clarity, and maintain consistency — all
while helping you optimize your workflow.
This presentation will include a demonstration of Promptitude — an AI-driven platform that empowers you to create, edit, and enhance
content efficiently — and of Make — a visual automation platform that allows users to connect and automate their favorite apps and services
without writing any code.
The real-world principles showcased during this talk can be used to automate the production of myriad content types for various purposes.
Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler
Dubbed “The Content Wrangler,” Scott Abel is the Founder and President of The Content Wrangler Inc, a global content strategy consultancy. Scott Abel is a content management strategist and exponential growth evangelist. He specializes in helping content-heavy organizations improve the way they author, maintain, publish and archive their information assets.
Scott publishes a series of content strategy books for XML Press and is the producer of several content industry events including Technical Documentation Roundup and Information Development World.
Accessibility and DITA: A 10-year retrospective
At DITA North America 2014, Bob Johnson presented on implementing accessibility in DITA source to publish accessible HTML. Since then, accessibility enhancements have been added to DITA and accessibility improvements have been implemented in the DITA Open Toolkit. More importantly, accessibility practice and disability rights have also seen significant change in the past ten years.
In this presentation, Bob will review the changes in DITA, in the DITA OT, and especially developments in accessibility practice and disability rights to bring DITA professionals up to date on accessibility facets of DITA and technical communication practice.
Bob Johnson, Jana, Inc.
Bob Johnson has worked with DITA since 2006 as an author, information architect, and content strategist. He has worked with DITA in software, medical devices, and medical reference content. Bob has worked with accessibility since 2008 and is known as an advocate for accessible technical content.
Bob is currently a content strategy consultant with JANA, Inc. In addition, he co-facilitates the Boston DITA User’s Group.
Content Guides: Using specialized bookmaps to manage complex content
For years, Toro Technical Publications had struggled to maintain common structures throughout our publications with similar language in different products. We eventually performed an exhaustive content review and rebuild, using publications we called content guides to track the objects in our pubs and their relationships to other content.
With our move to the DITA architecture, we took advantage of keys, bookmaps, and a few specializations of our own to give the authors a new, more automated version of the content guides. This new system uses overloaded bookmaps in our CMS to contain and maintain relational structures for whole product families. Please join us as we demonstrate our system and discuss how it is changing authoring at The Toro Company.
Andrew Pieper & Anna Eskola, The Toro Company
Andrew Pieper has a BS degree in English: Technical Communications and has been working in the technical authoring field for more than 30 years, the last 26 at The Toro Company. In 2003, he brought XML technologies to Toro and has been leading and developing the information architecture since. In 2016, he became Toro’s Information Architect full time, leading Toro’s efforts to move to the DITA architecture and topic-based authoring, management, review, and delivery systems. He currently serves as the chair for the PTC User: Technical Authoring, Management, and Delivery Technical Committee.
Anna Eskola has a BS degree in Professional Communications and Emerging Media and has been working as a Technical Writer at The Toro Company for 8 years. She is the co-lead for the graphical instructions and user testing efforts at Toro. She is also passionate and well-versed in converting publications to DITA and managing this content using content guides.
The Nuts and Bolts of Developing a Practical Content Reuse Strategy
When College Board implemented DITA XML 7 years ago, they developed a robust content reuse strategy for print publications, especially PDFs. As they progressed through digital transformation in the last 3 years, they began expanding their use of XML to new types of content and additional publication channels. College Board’s vision is true single-source multiplatform publishing for all content.
In this presentation, we will provide an overview of how College Board has recently developed content reuse strategies for emails, FAQ content, and web content. Our goal is to demonstrate a practical approach to identifying content reuse strategies and implementing that strategy in the simplest way possible. We will cover content analysis, revising for reuse, and information architecture.
Jason Reddoch, Content Publishing Operations Mgr.
Bill Gearhart, Ryffine
Jason Reddoch
Jason is a former academic with a PhD in Classical Studies and is passionate about language and linguistic syntax. His love for learning new things led him to pursue a second career in technical writing where he began working in DITA XML and eventually managing content migrations. Jason is currently the Content Publishing Operations Manager at College Board, where he leads cross-functional projects to implement single-source multiplatform publishing.
Bill Gearhart
When not escaping to his favorite fly fishing spots in Pennsylvania and Colorado, Bill specializes in minimalism, user-centered design, and information modeling for single-sourcing and migration to DITA.He draws on over 25 years of experience in developing and managing information and leading innovative global teams.
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Content Operations & UI Copy Process
All too often, content processes are mired in inefficiency, with repetitive manual tasks and legacy processes that slow teams down. Content operations helps to streamline the content creation process, allowing lone writers, small teams, and larger organizations to do more with less.
Though text in the user interface is crucial to the product experience, content processes are often separated from design and development. As teams begin to assess content operations maturity, what does that mean for UI copy process?
We’ll explore how teams manage UI text, and look at ways to remove barriers and help writers, designers, and developers to work better together.
Roger Fienhold Sheen, infotexture
Roger is a UX Writer and Content Operations consultant helping global teams to design product information that is easy to understand, re-use, and maintain.
In his spare time, he serves as the documentation lead for the DITA Open Toolkit project.
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