Candid Conversations / Library Presentations
Here’s a sampling of the presentation that will be available on the ConVEx‘s platform. During ConVEx, you’ll have an opportunity to join a Zoom room to interact with presenters and your fellow professionals in a small group, live chat setting. Talk about the information you’ve gleaned by watching the presenters’ recorded library sessions and explore the topics deeper with everyone in attendance.
Leveraging Semantic Search to Improve Content Reuse
Discovering content across your publishing ecosystem is a challenge. Learn how semantic search helps you repurpose your content to optimize effectiveness, reusability, workflows, and efficiency. Learn how semantic search establishes similarity between content.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn how semantic search and faceted navigation makes finding items within unstructured data easy.
Meet the presenters
Christopher Will is Vice President of Corporate Sales at Orbis. He is a highly experienced publishing professional with extensive B2B experience delivering innovative content solutions (print, online, SaaS) in the education, government, association, and corporate markets. As the Vice President of Corporate Sales Chris helps lead and manage the sales and marketing initiatives for new client opportunities in national and international markets.
He has worked in a variety of product development, sales, and leadership roles for major international publishers, education companies, and professional associations. In addition to managing commercial product lines for education and trade publishers, his clients have included the United States military, universities, and professional associations.
 Carlos Andino is Vice President of Technology and Solutions. He studied at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez Campus and earned his degree in Computer Engineering. After graduating, he worked for over 8 years performing computer system validations in the pharmaceutical industry on projects including biotechnology, packaging, formulation, facilities, and security.Mr. Andino joined Orbis Technologies in 2011, and took on multiple roles as a validation engineer and then as a software engineer, before moving into leading development projects.
In his tenure at Orbis, Carlos has been a crucial contributor to the development of Orbis Technologies Inc.’s innovative software products including: DataARCH, RSuite Standard, and RSuite Enterprise. His efforts helped achieve the modernization of CMS solutions and building a brand-new User Interface. |
Five Critical Steps for Advancing Your Content Career
Do you feel like you are the captain of your career, or more like a galley slave—chained to a job that you don’t like, or perhaps one that pays slave wages?
In this session professional recruiter and best-selling author Jack Molisani will discuss five key milestones you need to achieve to increasing your corporate value—and thus your standard of living.
“My career has had its highs, its lows, and everything in between. I learned from each win and each challenge, and I’ll share my life- and career-changing realizations with you in this entertaining and informative session.
As a mentor once told me: ‘Learn from the success and failures of others—it’s faster than making them yourself!’”
Want to increase your standard of living? Don’t miss this session!
Meet the presenter
Jack Molisani is the President of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in content professionals (both contract and perm): http://ProspringStaffing.com
He’s also the author of Be The Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon’s Career and Resume Best Seller list.
Reach Jack at [email protected], follow him on Twitter @JackMolisani, and connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackmolisani/
Microcontent & Chatbots: The Next Frontier in Customer Experience
A huge volume of content gets created and published every day in today’s world. Users often get overwhelmed when they navigate across the volume of support documentation, knowledgebases and help content. Making this information quickly accessible and readily available to them is the need of the hour. How organizations extend last-mile support to customers in this post-Covid world where self-service is the norm will play a pivotal role in defining customer experience. Join us in this session, where we will share insights on how help authors, knowledgebase experts, and user assistant designers can:
- Create modular and information-rich content snippets
- Leverage Microcontent for search engine output, feature snippets, in-context Help, and other channels
- Use Microcontent to power next-generation chatbots
Meet the presenter
Vivek Kumar is Director of Products at Adobe; he manages the worldwide business for Adobe Technical Communication products and heads Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing functions. He is responsible for the product roadmap, development, customer success, partner relationships, and go-to-market strategy. Vivek has 20+ years of experience working in the technology industry and extensive experience of working on multiple Adobe products.
Break the Shackles of Content Types: Care about experiences
Content in an organization is owned by multiple stakeholders – from writers to marketers, and from strategists to developers. Hence, content is often authored in various formats based on each team’s preferences and priorities. In an ideal world, we only want to care about delivering context-aware, scalable omnichannel experiences without worry about content authoring formats. A CCMS powered with a strong content ingestion framework can help break these shackles of content types and enable the move towards a standard authoring framework thus empowering Omnichannel experience integration.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Join this session and learn to use a DITA CCMS to:
- Import legacy content (Word, HTML, InDesign, XML, Markdown, etc.) and convert it to structured content
- Help align content, design, governance and systems across the customer journey
- Deliver omnichannel experiences with publishing beyond PDF, HTML5, Mobile Apps and Website
- Implement content-as-a-service and leverage next-generation capabilities
Meet the presenter
Divraj Singh is a Senior Solution Consultant at Adobe, headquartered in San Jose, CA, USA.
As a Senior Solution Consultant at Adobe, Divraj Singh leads consulting for Adobe’s CCMS offering – XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager. Divraj has over 13 years of software development and technical management experience. He is a seasoned expert in the field of content management with experience of working on various WCMS systems and enterprise solutions. He has worked on various software products spanning different technologies involving mobile-web, analytics, personalization, social applicable to several domains like finance, marketing, retail, and healthcare.
Up or Down – Paradigm Shift in Technical Documentation Ahead?
Markup languages have long been the gold standard in technical documentation, when it comes to data validity, versatile and scalable processing, and exchangeability because of open international standards. However, in some areas Mark*down* is making its foray into the world of documentation, often driven by the desire and need of taking a shortcut from development to publication. After a brief overview of Markdown technologies their impact on existing processing models relying on languages such as DITA is exemplified with use cases at a larger software company and it is being discussed whether it’s a friend or foe knocking at the door…
What can the audience expect to learn?
Participants will learn about the current state of Markdown and Lightweight DITA compared to traditional Markup. Technological, and organizational challenges as well as the question of integrated processing are discussed to give orientation as well as to provide an example, whether and how Markdown could somehow benefit in the field of technical documentation.
Meet the presenter
Frank Wegmann has 20+ years experience in SGML and XML processing, both in a research context in the area of natural language processing and, since 2000, in the field of technical documentation. At Software AG he has been involved in custom automated build system for documentation since 2001 and has been redesigning the DITA toolchain in recent years. He is a regular speaker at international conferences and voting member in the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.
User-Centric Content
At Etteplan we produce technical information for our customers in a future proof work method. Technical information that is published today as PDF only is published also as a digital publications using a Content Delivery Portal. This results in having the correct information fast, at the right time, in the right context.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The audience will learn how to publish content online that has been designed as PDF output and start to connect other business units like service and maintenance using metadata.
In this presentation you will learn how your technical information is digital published for on- and offline usage in a smart way to reach your business goals.
Meet the presenter
Pim Bekker is a Senior Solution Architect at Etteplan since 2001, working on XML structured content projects.
He has implemented XML based Content Management Systems for creating technical information in over 175 projects using the best standards available like DITA, SVG and iiRDS enabling future ready content.
Using Keyword Research to Help Users Better Find Your Content
Most users use search engines to find technical content such as product documentation and tutorials. Over 95% of users click on a result on the first page in search engine results, the vast majority of which click on one of the top three results. Therefore, it is very important to ensure that your content appears in those first three results. It is also vital, especially when you are responsible for a large quantity of topics, that it is the topics that are specifically relevant to a users query that rank at the top of the search results.
You will learn why it is important to think about your keywords for search engine optimization at the outset of your content planning. You will be shown various techniques and tools you can use to find out what keywords or key phrases your users will use to find your content. Then, you will learn how to use these to optimize your content.
What can the audience expect to learn?
You will learn how using the right keywords can help users find your content.
This includes: Researching the keywords your users are using, measuring how you currently rank for those keywords, tools and techniques, and how to include keywords in your content.
Meet the presenter
Natasha Mckenzie-Kelly is a content developer at IBM, working on content for CICS. She is the focal for the search engine optimisation of content for CICS, a 50 year old software product which spans many in-service releases and with a large quantity of topics. She is particularly interested in how documentation can be modernised to be more easily found by users.
Bridging Siloes – Unifying Content Strategy While Preserving Specifics
Your company has multiple products, from simple hardware to complex software. Maybe you would like to leverage reuse for multiple divisions but not all divisions? Or align branding, enable content reuse and workflows for diverse teams? Watch this presentation to understand how organizations have solved life cycle and product diversity complexity within a single CCMS deployment.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This session is aimed primarily to information architects and documentation managers looking to maximize reuse and control with diverse life cycles or large and disparate product lines. We’ll present three projects. These will tackle bridging content strategy over diverse product types, extending CCMS usage to teams external to tech pubs, and enabling continuous delivery.
Meet the presenter
IXIASOFT’s Technical Account Manager EMEA Nolwenn Kerzreho has participated in successful global CCMS implementations in heavy machinery, telecom, software, and medical devices. Nolwenn has trained students and professionals in DITA authoring and CCMS handling since 2009.
Mitchell! What I Learned When Converting a WWII Pilot Manual
While there are some good code examples of how to use DITA out there, few run the length of a full manual or use all aspects of the DITA specification. What was needed was a full, real-world example of a manual that could also highlight how certain under-utilized aspects of DITA could be used. In this presentation, Precision Content’s Keith Schengili-Roberts talks about the year-long, collaborative process of converting a 1940’s pilot manual for the Mitchell B-25 airplane into DITA. What he learned along the way about technical writing in an age before computers, working collaboratively in a DITA conversion project, and where DITA was not completely up to the task (and how that helped make some changes that are going into DITA 2.0). Be ready for a high-flying and entertaining talk about a DITA conversion project.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This presentation will help spread awareness of the DITA code examples that are available for people to learn from. This presentation also focuses on what it takes to convert an existing manual to the DITA format, how it was done in a collaborative manner and the shortcomings of DITA that were found (and how they were overcome).
Meet the presenter
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 is the Chair of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee, succeeding in this role from JoAnn Hackos. He is also the writer behind the “DITAWriter.com” website, which has long been a useful resource for technical writers working with the DITA XML standard. He lives in the north end of Toronto with his long-time girlfriend Dhan and her noisy Green-cheeked Conure.
DITA and Markdown
DITA is a great choice for writing technical documentation and, ideally, all contributors to a project should use it to provide content. Sometimes, though, subject matter experts (developers, engineers) prefer to give content in another format. We will explore what possibilities arise when this other format is Markdown, a good match for structured authoring cases in which a minimal markup is enough.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees of will learn: What is structured authoring and what benefits it brings , what is the difference between content and markup, what are DITA’s and Markdown’s strengths, and what solutions we have when SMEs are sending us Markdown: integrating Markdown into the DITA pipelines or getting DITA from them instead”
Meet the presenter
Alex Jitianu has been working for more than 14 years as a software architect for Syncro Soft Ltd., the producer of the popular oXygen XML Editor. During this period, his main focus has been in XML technologies, the development of technical documentation tools and DITA-specific support.
Making our DITA Better – Part II: DIY DITA customization
Almost every organization wants to customize DITA output. Customization can be easy. So, to a certain extent, you can get the output that you want.
If you search on the internet about this subject, there is enough information. However, that information is conceptual. The next step would be instructions on how to make your doc the way you want.
So now, I want to show you how I customize the DITA output so that you can DIY.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn to do DITA customization yourself.
Meet the presenter
Yendra Waney, know as Y, is an information developer with a technical background. DITA XML is the platform for Y when it comes to content reuse, consistency, and multichannel publishing.
Y writes technical documents for the manufacturing industry. Now Y is involved in automated guided vehicles. In the 2018 DITA Europe conference, Y showed examples of scripts to automate manipulations of DITA XML sources.
When done with XML tagging, Y spends time with the family.
Changing Your Management Style to Lead Effective Teams
The world is becoming a difficult place to work as a Project Manager and leader. We’re working globally, across time zones and cultures, with new technology, and industries and projects are losing money at a staggering rate (Every 20 seconds, nearly $1 million is wasted globally due to poor implementation of strategy – PMI Pulse of the profession 2018). We need to adapt. As leaders, we are driving our initiatives forward to success or failure. What can we do to change the statistics? How can we buck the trend of poor performance and reoccuring issues?
We need to learn how to work in this environment and adapt our management style accordingly. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working virtually, on location, with one team or a dozen. The same rules still apply.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This session will provide practical examples for how you can become a chameleon and succeed with complex projects and teams. Gain an understanding of why it is important to have an adaptive management style; obtain some ideas for how you can change your management style towards your team; and define personal changes that you need to be a success.
Meet the presenter
Emily Luijbregts is a Project Manager at Siemens PLM Software who loves sharing knowledge with the community! As a blogger, presenter and mentor, I love connecting with the community and constantly learning how to be the best leader that I can be. I have been actively presenting for nearly 4 years and during that time have helped thousands of Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Leaders progress towards their goals.
I live in the Netherlands with my husband, two dogs and children. When I’m not managing Projects, I’m found out on the trails running with my dogs.
Maximising Reuse with Multi-dimensional Versioning
Version control systems are basically one-dimensional: new versions of documentation units override older ones. But in a heavy reuse environment, each unit may have various valid versions – one for platform A, one for platform B, one for platform A but only in combination with hardware X. Existing version control systems may create baselines out of a multitude of versions for each unit, but they cannot handle multiple dependency dimensions at once.
This presentation shows how to use metadata and XSLT processing to create your own multi-dimensional versioning system, which can be used with any existing CCMS or version control system. This may greatly increase the reuse potential while keeping conditional profiling down to a bearable minimum.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn to see reuse potential at the sub-topic level (e.g. notes, procedure steps).
Learn to think in (very) small documentation building blocks.
Learn how metadata can be used to maximise the reuse potential.
Exploit possibilities beyond what your CCMS has to offer.
Meet the presenter
Jang Graat has studied Physics, Psychology and Philosophy before embarking on a fast-track career in high-performance computing. He taught himself programming in a wide variety of languages and has been an active member of the DITA community since 2007. His main skills are presenting technical information in a way that even his cats would understand, and coming up with new ideas about the world of content use and reuse. He has been a regular presenter at DITA and other content conferences since 2009.
Content for Industry 4.0
We live in a technology world that is changing so rapidly and with the recent COVID-19 experiences, it is important to discover the humane side of technology effectively through content. We need to build information based on what the user needs with the technology they are using rather than delivering content as a standard package.
This is an important aspect to consider as with the more intuitive products and smart devices, creating a personalized experience with the content that is credible, concise and usable to the content consumer is needed. Using and integrating the new edge technology with content helps in including the content component and human component to accomplish the strategic and tactical plans for the organization.
As Technical Communicators or Content Strategists, we must plan and choose media and different platforms for communicating with audiences. This will include considerations for multimedia and multiplatform while exercising techniques like narrative transportation and technology like video stories, pictures, virtual reality, Artificial Intelligence for creating a more personalized experience and virtual tours.
What can the audience expect to learn?
My session will build the understanding of Content or information gap that can be bridged through new technology like Chatbot, Podcast, Video, AI and also the various content development options to be considered to leverage the technology available in the industry for establishing deeper connections of content with the audience for an enhanced user experience.
Meet the presenter
Dr Anu Singh is a technical communicator who considers herself a work in-progress towards perfection. Anu has earned a Ph.D. in English Literature for her studies about the American Literature and Indian Writing in English, and she loves reading about culture, new technologies and stories in the novel or short-story format. Professionally, Anu works in the areas of Digital transformation and Agile, project management, client experiences, and career development for content developers. She strives to function as a servant leader to provide overall guidance, make connections for people, and remove roadblocks, and she hopes that she is achieving that at a small level at least. She believes that there is a lot to discover about the enormity of the human mind, its thoughts, feelings and the social paradigm it creates and coexists in. She is currently working for a team of content developers in India and managing information for eCommerce and Shared Product at the global level for one of the business units at Fiserv.
For Me – AI for User-Centered Content Delivery
The classic work support with detailed documentation is unsuitable for a digitized world and has become obsolete: searching through documents, in texts and instructions is time-consuming and unproductive.
A practical new approach is user-centered assistance services based on technologies from symbolic artificial intelligence (AI). They eliminate the search, provide exactly the required content and match the information to the skills, experience and knowledge of the user. In addition, automated smart services relieve the user of routine tasks.
What can the audience expect to learn?
You will learn how work can be supported in a user-friendly way and with an increase in productivity? With AI based personalized assistance services information is communicated with a virtual assistant: personalized for each step of a process with visual and interactive support via video & voice where required. Networked intelligent information (knowledge graphs) is the base for this.
Meet the presenter
Matthias Gutknecht is a Business Development Manager at STAR Group. He is a subject matter expert on customer and product communications, marketing execution, communication logistics and knowledge management processes. Matthias has more than 25 years experience in research, design, development, selling and deployment of knowledge and content management solutions and services. Before joining STAR AG Matthias was in charge of developing the cross-media communications services offering for Xerox Services Europe.
The Rise of the SME Author
DITA and the concept of CCMS are becoming more and more popular outside the traditional software and high tech domains. With that, the role of trained technical authors is becoming a bottleneck in a lot of organizations. Learn how you can overcome that by enabling subject matter experts (SMEs) to contribute directly in a DITA based CCMS without extensive training and deeper understanding of XML and/or CCMS.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn what best practices SDL developed when implementing DITA based CCMS in industries like finance or pharma where subject matter experts without any knowledge of XML are the primary writers. This also applies to product managers or developers that have to contribute to the creation and/or review of technical content in product companies.
Meet the presenter
Jörg Schmidt has more than 15 years of experience as technical consultant, account and project manager for XML based content management systems in industries like automotive, aerospace & defense, life sciences and manufacturing. Since 2013 he is working as solution architect for SDL.
Automagically Creating Software Videos Using Documentation
In a world of agile development and continuous software releases, the only way to guarantee that your videos are always up to date is by automating their production. New technology has come to market that makes it possible to transform documentation into high-quality videos using Artificial Intelligence, automation, and text-to-speech. Since the videos are generated programmatically, they can be produced on every software release, rendering video asset libraries identical to their corresponding products. Additionally, this means they can be translated and delivered in any language.
What can the audience expect to learn?
In this presentation you will learn how to: Create a sustainable process to keep your video library in sync with your software releases, use your existing DITA, Markdown and Word documents to automate video production, translate software videos into multiple languages at a fraction of the cost of other approaches, and add a layer of automated testing to your documentation.
Meet the presenters
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Co-Founder / CEO: Dave is a hacker and entrepreneur with deep roots in web tech, recording and editing video, and instructional technology. Prior to Videate, he was the CTO and co-founder of VideoAmp, a leading video ad trading platform. Dave has been a founder of multiple successful startups, scaling engineering teams and building great products. He lives near Austin, Texas and has written volumes of technical documentation and recorded hours and hours of software videos in his career. |
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Chief Marketing Officer: Mark brings intense entrepreneurial spirit and real-world XML content management and tech doc experience to Videate. He began his career as a software engineer after graduating from MIT and has been involved in Enterprise/B2B software sales, operations, and product development at both public and venture-backed companies. He was the founding CEO of Xyleme, the leading Component Content Management System that is the gold standard in the Learning and Development market. |
Measuring Technical Writer Productivity
Organizations often struggle to measure Tech Writer productivity. There is always a debate about the right measure for productivity – is it number of pages, number of changes, or complexity of content. There are some who argue if a measure for productivity is really required and how it would benefit anyone. In this presentation, the presenters relate their current experience on productivity measurement and how it helped to assess the workload and progress of Tech Writers on their various documents and projects. The audience will also discover how this process uncovered problem areas in other departments (delayed inputs or review) and actually helped both Tech Writers and Management.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Your management needs a bird’s eye view of Tech Writer workload. And you want a tool to isolate problem areas, so you can focus on getting your documentation done. The process that is to be discussed, would help with both the objectives.
Meet the presenters
 Vasanth Vaidyanathan is a thought leader in the area of technical publications with 20+ years of global experience. He has successfully led and managed distributed teams and projects both in India and U.S. He is very passionate about improving documentation quality. He is equally passionate about team building, mentoring, and growing employees. He has delivered talks and facilitated discussions in technical communication conferences and events. Vasanth is currently Senior Manager of Learning & Knowledge Services team in KLA, India. He holds a master’s degree in software engineering and has certifications in technical communications management and international business. |
 Vidhya Kameswaran holds a Bachelors in Engineering (Electrical and Electronics) from University of Madras. And a certificate in Technical Writing from CSU DH. She is currently a Senior Technical Writer with KLA Corporation, Milpitas. |
What is the Digital Thread and Why is it Important To Me?
One key benefit of working with structured authoring environments is the potential for reuse of content. Modular content and the interconnected pieces make a spider web of relationships. Tracing a single series of connections creates a single digital thread. These threads may touch many areas of the business that provide inputs into the structured authoring environment. I will explore the idea of linked data sources, managed across a product lifecycle, and how it relates to the creation of documentation.
What can the audience expect to learn?
One key benefit of working with structured authoring environments is the potential for reuse of content.
Meet the presenter
Scott Thompson is an application engineer, with PTC, who has been specializing technical authoring solutions for the past 6 years. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Going The Distance: Migrating learning content to DITA L&T while implementing a new CCMS
The Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) is a global professional body for the insurance and financial planning profession with over 125,000 members in 150 countries. They deliver assessments supported by distance learning solutions to 70,000 learners a year. They’ve been managing their distance learning content in XML and a CMS for some years, for both print and digital delivery. But in order to fully realize the re-use potential of this large body of content and to become more agile and efficient, they have recently migrated their content to a DITA L&T architecture, and implemented a new DITA CCMS.
Join us to hear how CII planned their structured content migration, the challenges and benefits they’ve encountered, and the advantages DITA L&T offered them over other XML standards.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Through learning about CII’s experience, the audience will understand how to plan and execute a migration from structured content to DITA L&T, and a migration from a CMS to a DITA CCMS. In particular, we’ll share lessons learned about:
– Planning and resourcing the migration
– Content analysis
– Technical and change management challenges
– Benefits expected and realized.
Meet the presenter
Maura has over 20 years’ experience helping organizations drive value through improved content strategy, content management systems and tools, and workflow improvements. She has a particularly strong background in commercial publishing, having worked with many of the world’s premier publishing firms including Pearson, Elsevier, and Oxford University Press. Maura understands that changing an organization’s working practices can be a messy business, so she balances finding the right technical solution with a focus on practical implementation, including a solid approach to change management and content governance.
Why You Need Content Transformation for a Successful Content Strategy
Digital transformation is the latest buzzword to describe how companies are re-envisioning content. Digital transformation holds all the promises of content personalization, omnichannel delivery, and single-source publishing. Companies are spending millions of dollars crafting strategies around digital transformation. They are purchasing sexy, expensive tools to take advantage of the new opportunities technology provides for our content.
However, time and again, companies leave out the most important part:
You cannot engage in digital transformation unless you transform your content.
Transformation only happens when you adjust, change, and dramatically improve your content. You cannot succeed with digital transformation by repackaging the same old content in a pretty new technology wrapper.
In this session, Val Swisher explores what it means to transform content and shares concrete steps you can take to begin preparing content for digital transformation.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will learn:
– The difference between content conversion, migration, and transformation
– The pitfalls of content conversion and migration without content transformation
– How to begin transforming your content
Meet the presenter
Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Microsoft, and Juniper Networks. She’s the author of three books. Her latest is, “Global Content Strategy: A Primer,” an introduction to creating and managing global content.
Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.
Who Are You? Developing a Company Voice That is Consistent not Robotic
When we talk about company voice, there is a tension: How do we unify our writing without flattening it?
Developing a company voice requires a discussion about what kind of company you’re a part of, and in this talk, John Baker will provide the tools to initiate or further that discussion.
John will provide a series of questions, reflections, and tools based on his own experience transitioning from an academic writer to leading an Information Development team at a software company.
We’ll examine if and to what extent you should structure your collective voice:
How strictly should your style guide be written?
Should writers have distinct styles?
How can you enforce consistency without sounding robotic?
Should you create a company specific information model?
How does overall company content strategy come into play?
Additionally, all attendees will receive a copy of the Jorsek Content Development Guide. This guide includes our style guide, information model, and information model all in one document. It contains the essentials and serves as a terrific starting point for companies trying to build their own content development strategies.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This talk will empower authors and content strategists interested in developing their company voice.
All attendees will gain clarity on what to prioritize in this process, what questions to ask, and how to move forward.
All attendees will also receive a copy of Jorsek’s Content Development Guide – style guide, information model, and information model all
Meet the presenter
John Baker is the Marketing Content Manager at Jorsek Inc, the makers of easyDITA.
Designing Docs for the Next Generation of Intent-based Information Architecture
Enterprises invest heavily in product designs, while documentation is often an afterthought. However, Documentation completes the user experience of a product, and is hence, an integral part of the product design. A good Information Design resonates with a well-articulated product design and is an essential part of an enhanced product experience. It saves valuable time, eases frustration, and provides customers a hand holding and seamless experience in getting their tasks completed while getting insights into the product.
Technical Communicators need to approach Information Design with a rigorous method to improve the holistic experience of usage of a product. The method explored in the scope of this paper attempts at a perspective on Information Design, from the Products User-Experience.
What can the audience expect to learn?
It introduces a new design methodology that walks the audience through primary and secondary affordances, signifiers, mapping, constraints, feedback and feed-forward – all powerful ideas that helps demystify contemporary IA paradigms and helps them leverage their existing documentation libraries to better hand-hold customers into a seamless Intent-based Information Architecture.
Meet the presenter
Vishal George Palliyathu is a seasoned Information Developer at Cisco, and has led several transformation and migration efforts with a strong focus on better information design and UX during his decade long experience at IBM. He has experience across various facets of Technical Literature Publishing – as a DITA Strategist, Information Architect, Editor, Author, Build Smith and an Inventor with five patents and a paper published on the DITA framework. He has also presented at DITA Europe, tcworld, STC Summit and various other conferences.
Design Evolution
Join Dee Beck, McAfee Content Engineer through the evolution of a design idea from “pencil” sketches to black-and-white wireframes to full-color design mockups. In this presentation, she will show images from each design phase and discuss
- How the Cores & Paths method gave insight into what content was core to the site and specific documents.
- How user study feedback influenced the wireframes and final design.
- How branding guidance affected the final design.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The presentation will discuss how input from different people and places informed and influenced the design and how each version of the design moved the project forward.
Meet the presenter
As the Lead of the Information Architecture group at McAfee, I am responsible for the findability and usability of our Enterprise Product Documentation portal (docs.mcafee.com). Since 2009, I’ve lead our technical team to lay down the foundation of DITA and CCMS towards the executing the vision of personalized content delivery. I have over 30 years of experience in information development and a decade working with DITA and the DITA-OT.
Intelligent Microcontent and the 5 Moments of Need
Microcontent is an extraordinary point of convergence between all types of business content including product, marketing, support, and learning. At the microcontent level, the context of business function fades allowing microcontent to move more fluidly between functions. This is particularly evident in the development of performance support and microlearning.
Intelligent microcontent is designed to scale from traditional book-based publishing down to voice-enabled responses using the same source of content. This strategy translates into new ways of designing learning materials that scale down from classroom instruction to just-in-time microlearning covering the spectrum of the 5 moments of need.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Participants will learn about the
– story of microcontent and information 4.0
– 4 principles of intelligent microcontent
– 5 moments of need, and
– collaborative authoring and publishing practices to support the learning needs of the organization.
Meet the presenter
Rob Hanna co-founded Precision Content in 2013 to change the way writers approach structured authoring. Having spent more than decade 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 this 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 their clients move to structured authoring as seamlessly as possible.
IA Design and Agile Development: Mission (Im)possible!
Does your development team practice Agile methods? Have you struggled to organize the information architecture (IA) design and prototyping activities in alignment with the Agile practices? If you answered yes to either of these questions, join Jennifer Fell and Amber Swope for a lively discussion about Agile for real world implementations.
What can the audience expect to learn?
• Review the primary Agile principles
• Review the primary IA design activities in the context of Agile methods
• Learn practical strategies for performing IA design activities in an Agile environment
Meet the presenters
 Amber Swope is an internationally-recognized expert on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) who specializes in helping teams develop their information architecture and implement DITA. With over 20 years of experience in the information development field and 15 years of DITA expertise, Amber helps teams design and optimize their environments to improve efficiency and reduce costs. When she’s not busy helping to change the world with XML, she can be found playing soccer and enjoying her hometown of Portland. |
 Jennifer Fell is a senior information architect and content strategist with a passion for the business and art of helping clients succeed with content. She has over 20 years of experience providing enterprise-scale content solutions that leverage structured content to create better user experiences, while reducing the cost of content creation and maintenance. Jennifer is also an instructor for the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension certificate program in technical writing and communication. |
Where DITA Meets Aesthetic Design (and why it matters)
When creating technical documentation, educational materials, or other topic-based content, the most important thing is to ensure your publications contain all the information your customers need to succeed.
It doesn’t really matter how your documents look, right? In fact, it’s so hard to create visually-compelling publications from DITA that it’s really not worth the effort. Right?!
Wrong!
Organizations are increasingly seeing the value of investing in a customer’s entire product journey. A consistent and enjoyable experience—from marketing through to purchase, implementation, and beyond—increases customer engagement.
Every step in your customer’s journey becomes part of the story your business is telling.
So what do you want that story to be? Are you creating interesting, easy-to-read, on-brand documents that speak to your customer? Or are you (and your customers) suffering from a bad case of mediocre design?
In this session, we’ll present a case for why good visual design is an important factor for any organization publishing structured, topic-based content, whether it’s technical or educational.
We’ll also demonstrate that creating visually appealing documents using DITA source content is not only possible but achievable, even with automated publishing workflows!
Finally, we’ll discuss strategies for developing a unified, organization-wide approach to design and content management, ensuring that your customers enjoy the best possible experience at all stages of their journey with your brand.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Aesthetic Design has become and important factor in publishing DITA content. This is partly driven by educational and learning content publishers adopting DITA, where pedagogical content is authored and managed in topics which are productised as traditional text books. In addition many technical documentation groups are now being closely aligned with marketing to provide a single unifying experience the consumer.
Meet the presenter
Chandi joined Typefi in 2006, and has over two decades of publishing and media technology experience. His publishing experience ranges from travel publishing at CIO at Lonely Planet to Scholarly Publishing. Chandi is a recognized expert in Accessible and multi-lingual publishing He has acted as a technology consultant to corporations and government agencies around the world, and is a frequent conference speaker in the areas of content management, publishing, media, XML, structured content and digital rights management.
Chandi is a board member of a number of industry bodies and has degrees in Engineering and Computer Science.
Designing the Information Experience
As we move toward a future driven by intelligent technologies, the demands of technical content are changing. Information that’s buried deep within a PDF tome is information that has limited application and almost zero value. By adopting a more holistic and empathetic approach to our content lifecycle, we can design an information experience that not only meets the needs of the technology but that also better meets the needs of the humans who use that technology.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will come away with some ideas that they can apply to their own situations to move from where they are to where they want to be as a content team.
Meet the presenter
Angela Browne has been a technical communicator for 20 years and currently leads a team of writers at SAP SuccessFactors. As a design thinking coach, she works with teams across the organization to better understand their users and design solutions that meet their needs. On her own team, she’s spent the last few years driving strategic initiatives around content transformation, taxonomy, and conversational interfaces.
The Secret Life of Content
What is the journey that content follows in your organization? It sounds like a simple enough question. Even harmless. It turns out, though, it is a difficult question. It is a question that can lead us to open doors that may not have been opened in a long time and others that some might prefer not to see opened at all. But it is a question we must ask if we really want to improve how our organizations work and how we ultimately support customers on their journeys. This talk is about the opportunity that stands before us, as professional communicators, to start making a serious impact on how our organizations function. And amid the digital revolution that is heralding the fourth industrial age, and these forces are very real, we can see how fundamentally important it is to improve the flow of information content within organizations and between organizations and their suppliers, partners, regulators and customers. While this may all sound very futuristic and visionary, this topic could not be more practical or pressing. It is an opportunity that we cannot miss.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This talk will likely introduce a variation on the “journeys” concept – introducing the idea of “content journeys” as a way to think about the work of information development differently. It is a broadening of the landscape where the work of communicators should find application everywhere.
Meet the presenter
Joe is the Managing Director of Gnostyx Research Inc. (http://www.gnostyx.com), where he provides objective and research-based guidance on the strategic use of content technologies. A veteran implementer, he has overseen dozens of content management projects in a variety of industries and in organizations ranging in size from start-up ventures to global enterprises. He has been known to say that he is really a management consultant who happens to be having an illicit affair with DITA. He is a member of the CIDM Advisory Council, blogs as the Content Philosopher (http://www.gollner.ca), and is still working on a book about the effective and sustainable management of content and content technologies.
Using Style Guides to Achieve Content Collaboration and Consistency
Most organizations adopt one of the major manuals of style (like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Microsoft Manual of Style) and develop an internal “house style” that further defines the voice, tone, and vocabulary.
We find style guides everywhere–in stand-alone documents, application templates, in stylesheets–and we find more when we move out of desktop publishing into automated publishing systems.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Defining the levels and types of style guides, some basic tips for getting one started (for each kind), where to start, what to include, and some ideas for making them useful (and usable) by internal and external content developers.
Meet the presenter
Liz Fraley, CEO of Single-Sourcing Solutions, is well known for her advocacy of defining requirements. She has founded two companies, sits on the boards of three non-profits, and is constantly coming up with new ways to share knowledge in the technical communications and content industries. She has worked in high-tech and government sectors, at companies of all different sizes (from startups to huge enterprises). She advocates approaches that directly improve organizational efficiency, productivity, and interoperability. If you ask her, she’ll say she’s happiest when those around her are successful. Her first book, “Arbortext 101: Best Practices for Configuring, Authoring, Styling, and Publishing with Arbortext,” is available on Amazon. She has several more planned.
Aligning Your Content Quality To Your Content Strategy Journey
Content quality plays an important role in your customer’s information needs, as it positively affects how information on installation, training, use, support and troubleshooting is communicated: in a clear and understandable way, which also happens to save costs in the meantime. However, simply using a standardized terminology list or having a style guide in place is only part of the solution. Managing and enforcing on terminology and writing rules across the board, getting people trained, breaking down silos and putting processes and tools in place is what ultimately will help you get there.
During this presentation, we’ll explain the role of content quality as part of your content strategy, and show you what steps need to be in place in order to make the journey from identifying the need to having it successfully in place as smooth as possible.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Content quality plays an important role in your customer’s information needs, as it positively affects how information on installation, training, use, support and troubleshooting is communicated: in a clear and understandable way, which also happens to save costs in the meantime. However, simply using a standardized terminology list or having a style guide in place is only part of the solution. Managing and enforcing on terminology and writing rules across the board, getting people trained, breaking down silos and putting processes and tools in place is what ultimately will help you get there.
During this presentation, we’ll explain the role of content quality as part of your content strategy, and show you what steps need to be in place in order to make the journey from identifying the need to having it successfully in place as smooth as possible.
Meet the presenter
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.
Tables are Dead, Long Live Tables!
Tables are useful, but annoying. They sometimes feel bulky and inflexible. They are not responsive and don’t always (read almost never) adapt well to smaller devices. The solution? Untable your tables. Remove tables from your XML content. It will enable you to publish better tables. The key as with everything DITA is in unlocking the power of semantics.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This presentation is for anyone who wants to improve user experience and development time.
Meet the presenter
France Baril, owner of Architextus Inc., is a DITA/XML consultant as well as a documentation architect who helps organizations analyze their content and processes, select and develop tools, and learn about DITA and/or XML. She has a unique background with a BA in Communication from University of Ottawa and a BSc in Computer Science from University de Sherbrooke.
The Rise of Taxonomy: What you need to know today
A taxonomy sorts information into useful buckets. This categorization process makes information more usable–it improves navigation, retrieval, and search for your users. But most of us aren’t trained as taxonomists, so how can we ensure that we produce a useful classification system? In this presentation, Lief provides guidance on how to create and work with a taxonomy in your organization. He’ll touch on faceted search, managing taxonomy in the enterprise, and the unexpected challenges that may arise. After a year spent working on a taxonomy for DITA Open Toolkit and other projects, he’ll provide some best (and worst) practices for building classification systems.
What can the audience expect to learn?
As groups are being asked to integrate their work with each other taxonomies help identify overlaps and differences. These overlaps and differences can lead to important discussions to streamline business processes. Attendees will take away an understanding of how to use a taxonomy to benefit their team(s) and work.
Meet the presenter
Lief is a technical consultant at Scriptorium. His content strategy work often focuses on content operations—how your content will be authored and later consumed by people and machines. Enterprise search, findability, accessibility, automation, and process simplification are particular areas of interest for him. In 2019, he earned his master’s degree in content strategy.
Terminology and Taxonomy as Foundations for Content Strategy
Consistency of customer experience is touted as the primary benefit of a unified content strategy. While some content strategists may aspire to destroy content silos, that may not be a realistic goal. The negative impact of silos can be mitigated, nevertheless, by focusing on terminology and taxonomy. Attend this presentation from Ben Colborn and Val Swisher to discover the issues facing Nutanix and how Nutanix applied terminology and taxonomy guidelines to help the company better deliver consistent customer content experiences.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will learn:
– The issues that faced Nutanix which led them to embark on their content strategy
– How Nutanix used content strategy to improve customer experience
– How terminology and taxonomy serve as the critical underpinnings of consistent customer content experiences
– Why content strategy without a focus on terminology and taxonomy is not viable
Meet the presenters
 Ben’s technical publications department is responsible for all product documentation at Nutanix. This domain covers private, public, and hybrid cloud products in addition to APIs and hardware platforms. More recently, the team has been participating in a multi-year, cross-functional content strategy initiative. Ben grew the technical publications team from two content creators (including himself) to 30 in the US and India, developing practices and standards along the way. Previously he worked at Citrix and Sun Microsystems. |
 Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Microsoft, and Juniper Networks. She’s the author of three books. Her latest is, “Global Content Strategy: A Primer,” an introduction to creating and managing global content.Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus. |
SEO for Docs: Measure and improve Search Engine Optimization without selling
If you have come across the subject of search engine optimization, you have probably discovered that most concepts relate to marketing and sales. Learn how Teradata redefined what SEO means to our documentation, how it relates to our business goals, and how we went from novice to experts in just one year.
In this presentation, we’ll share practical ways to measure and manage findability for large volumes of enterprise content. We will cover different aspects of SEO, including technical and content improvements. Being a long-time DITA shop, we will also talk about how we implemented SEO in DITA.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Get practical advice and learn scalable practices for SEO for large volumes of technical documentation, including legacy content and multiple releases. Understand why you need to invest in SEO, and what the opportunities are when you do.
Meet the presenter
Johanna Bryman, Director of Information Engineering at Teradata, has 15+ years of experience with technical writing and managing teams working in a DITA environment. Johanna currently directs a team of writers, architects, and content delivery experts, with a focus on content modernization.
Problem-Finding as Content Strategy: Applying design thinking to the enterprise content problem
Have you ever been tasked with fixing your organization’s “Content Problem?” As enterprises grapple with the evolutionary pains of modernizing and future-proofing their content operations, content teams must find a way to ready themselves for a world that is data-driven, AI-powered, mobile-first, multichannel, predictive/adaptive/personalized, and powered by unicorns. Teams faced with this challenge must wade through the ocean of possibilities to find the right solution – but have they identified the right problem?
Edwina presents uses cases from real work with real clients to demonstrate how Tahzoo practices design thinking as a content strategy – helping clients to identify the right problems to solve and the right solutions to apply.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Use cases and real-world examples of:
– the evolution of an organization’s initially stated problem to the problem they needed to solve
– how design thinking refines the problem statement and focuses the work of solutioning
– how content strategy, information architecture, and technology work together in a design thinking methodology
Meet the presenter
Edwina is a content strategist and information architect with 13 years’ experience thinking about all things content. As a Senior Content Strategist at Tahzoo, she works with cross-functional teams to design and implement content, processes, and solutions that empower users throughout the content ecosystem. A firm believer in the power of content reuse, Edwina can often be found remixing recipes in her Brooklyn kitchen.
From Archaic Silos to End-to-End Digital Delivery: A story of content strategy
Many leaders of content development teams have little or no content strategy, or have experienced setbacks that negatively impact their content strategy. This case study outlines a successful approach used toward people, process, tools, and content to build a content strategy from nothing, and to scale with evolving business needs.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Building a content strategy doesn’t have to be intimidating, and doesn’t happen all at once. Despite setbacks, the results are worth the effort to deliver an excellent customer experience.
Meet the presenter
Kathy is a passionate leader of content development teams. From her work at companies like SAP and ServiceNow, she’s developed a wealth of experience delivering content solutions that support product users along their entire journey. Kathy put that experience to good use in her most recent role as Director of Product Documentation at Automation Anywhere, where she built an amazing team that produces content that supports users of some of the most innovative software in the market.
Adventures in Evolving Content Strategy
This session reviews the evolution of Imperva’s content strategy that transformed a ragtag mashup of disparate content in various formats, spread across a number of locations and managed by various teams, into a single, central entity indexed, publicly available and easy to use. It talks about how we defined a single taxonomy across our expanding product base and integrated SEO principles to transform our new public documentation portal into a top company web asset with the second highest amount of traffic in the organization. And reviews the collaboration and tools that continue to play key roles in fine tuning the documentation portal to create a recognized and valued enterprise asset.
What can the audience expect to learn?
You’ll learn how to develop an integrated documentation portal that can consume output from multiple help authoring tools, and serve multiple user bases, intuitively enabling users to identify and drill down on content relevant to them and serve them in a single, branded and unified front end.
Meet the presenter
Rick Teplitz is the Manager of Technical Writing at Imperva, a leader in application and data cyber security on-Premises, in the cloud and in hybrid deployments. He has almost 20 years of experience in driving change and evolving both processes and infrastructure , and has led the evolution of Imperva’s content strategy through growth and disruption.
Preparing Your Content for Intelligent Machines
Intelligent agents and AI-powered cognitive content solutions perform best with machine-ready content—intelligent content designed to be read by humans and processed by computers. To deliver the right answer to prospects and customers who have questions, you’ll need to optimize your content production approaches and begin crafting content with the precision humans appreciate, and machines require. The path to intelligent microcontent is the next step in our journey in structured authoring. Microcontent will open up new channels for our content while improving delivery across existing channels.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attend this session to better understand the need for intelligent microcontent and its applicability to chatbots, voice interfaces, and intelligent agents. We will explore (a) impact of microcontent and focus on smarter, richer, compact content; (b) the importance of standardized metadata and classification; and (c) use of information typing to support intended reader response.
Meet the presenter
Joyce Lam’s recent technical writing experience has focused on content automation. Her background in video game development drives her enthusiasm for user experience and intuitive design. Joyce draws her creativity from a love and mastery of music, writing, arts, and design. She is currently president of STC Toronto, and is passionate about helping fellow technical communicators succeed while raising the standards for the industry.
The Crossroads of Change Management & Content Strategy
Change management takes care of the people side of change—emphasizing the customer journey and how this journey requires collaboration across communications, training, and content strategy to achieve an optimal end-user experience. Although vital to the successful of change management, content strategy is an often-overlooked component. This session explores the crossroads between these two disciplines within a current large-scale project and how the principles of content strategy inform and engage customer advocacy.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will learn the interdependencies between content strategy and change management from a practical usage perspective. This session will highlight how leveraging the basics of content strategy—content development, usability, personas, journey maps—can lead to better tool adoption and customer satisfaction through the lens of an existing large-scale technology project.
Meet the presenter
Tara Knapp has over 20 years’ experience in change management, content strategy, and communications. As an AVP for Change Management and Communication at Lincoln Financial Group, she creates and fosters environments in which continuous improvement and innovation in business processes, systems and technology are welcomed and recognized while always emphasizing the human aspect. She specializes in change readiness and adoption, stakeholder management, process optimization, and customer experience.
Lessons Learned from My Corporate Gig as a Content Strategist
My team at Oracle reworked our DITA content so that we could collaboratively deliver to an intranet – instead of to individually authored PDFs – all while the product and audience were evolving. Learn what went well and not so well from my perspective as content strategist on this journey:
– Helping experienced content developers understand new “cloud” audiences
– Developing and adjusting “unsiloed” content plans
– Keeping up with in-flight product changes (in an Agile work environment)
What can the audience expect to learn?
The audience will walk away with some tips and tricks for making an “unsiloing” content project go smoothly, as well as some ideas of what to avoid and what to pay special attention to. Throughout the presentation, I will provide examples and analysis.
Meet the presenter
Debra Kahn, formerly a Content Strategist for Oracle, is a content solutions leader and professional writer and editor. The CEO and primary consultant at DK Consulting of Colorado, Debra holds an MA in English and many professional certifications. Her curriculum vita includes teaching technical writing courses at the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Denver.
During her career, Debra has published a variety of content — from technical journal articles, to product manuals, to online content. She has also been the recipient of technical writing awards from the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Her proudest achievements have come from helping teams realize effective content through well-grounded strategy and planning and efficient implementation.
Becoming an Information-Enabled Organization
What do Airbnb, Amazon, Uber, Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify have in common? They are all information-enabled companies that grow at an exponential rate (up to ten times faster than the competition) and do so with appreciably fewer resources than their competitors.
To protect their turf from a capable, innovation-powered adversary, forward-thinking leaders are looking to protect the organizations they serve from disruption. Attend this session led by content strategy guru, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, to discover the common characteristics and capabilities that allow exponential growth organizations to outperform and outmaneuver the competition.
What can the audience expect to learn?
To effect change in the organizations we serve, content professionals must have a solid understanding of what it means for an organization to be information-enabled. We must be able to explain the benefits of information-enablement (capabilities not available to our competition) in ways that are easy for the leaders of the companies we serve to understand and act upon.
Meet the presenter
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.
From Audit Spreadsheets to DITA-XML Pilot Project
You are still hesitant in front of the pile of legacy content you should analyse or you have already invested a lot of effort into conducting a content audit, and celebrated the information model milestone. The next entry in your schedule reads: take a deep breath and enrole some volunteers to start creating topics and validate that information model.
Bad news is, there is no way around the huge auditing spreadsheets; Good news is, you can benefit from them, by generating your pilot project on the fly.
Let’s turn the taxonomy structure, the information model, and the topics matrix from spreadsheets to a DITA-XML pilot project.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Although valuable prerequisites in an implementation project, the research and analysis phases are often done in a rush, if not skipped altogether. They take time and expertise, that are challenging the budgets, the patience, and the focus of any project stakeholders. By having a means to quickly turn the outcomes of a content audit (the taxonomy structure and the information models) into a pilot project will provide one more reason to justify the audit and will ensure a palpable deliverable a lot quicker in the project.
Meet the presenter
Magda Caloian (@thinkDITA) is Information Architect at Vestas Wind Systems A/S in Denmark and founder of DITA users meetups by Lake Constance, Germany. Her work has a double focus: “I assist content writers and managers to discover and adopt the best author experience for their teams; at the same time, I remind writers that documentation has to be easy to find, easy to understand, easy to use.” Her over 15-year experience in technical communication as Information Architect, Consultant and DITA Trainer, along with a BA in Management, an MSc in Project Management, and tekom certification in Technical Communication, shaped an interesting mix of expertise in structured documentation, DITA, and information systems implementation.
Putting Darwin Back Into DITA With an Agile Evolution
For the past decade, Componize has been helping international businesses like Toyota, SAP and Airbus make the transition to DITA. During this time, we’ve had a lot of time to get to know our clients, as well as a range of other potential customers – we understand their needs and we understand their challenges. DITA is clearly a highly acclaimed editorial format, but we’ve noticed a recurring theme when discussing its limitations:
• DITA benefits can often be offset by cumbersome aspects of the user journey. Users feel frustrated that it doesn’t fit with their Agile processes, and additional costs materialise.
• SMEs hold vital knowledge on the intricacies of a business, but it’s too difficult to integrate them into the authoring process because they’re very rarely trained, and ‘intuitive’ XML editors have been difficult to navigate for the uninitiated.
We needed a period of honest reflection: Can the advent of agile methodologies revitalize content creation and maintenance? What role should SMEs be playing in the future of information sharing? It was clear that something needed to change.
Our presentation will propose a Darwinian evolution of the process of creating technical documentation within an organisation. In particular, it will unveil the results of a survey of technical writers from around the world.
Meet the presenters
 Jean-Luc Borie is CEO of Componize Software |
 Frank Shipley is CTO of Componize Software |
DITA Writing and Editing Best Practices
NextGen Healthcare’s User Assistance Department was working with old tools, old styles, and bloated content. We took an ambitious step—working around tight release schedules for complex products—to restructure thousands of pages of our user assistance and move into DITA.
Our mission was to build cost efficiency in creation, management, and delivery, and improve the customer experience with more accessible content targeted to user roles. And we did this without a content management system or trained content architect. We learned a lot along the way.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The presentation will benefit the audience by offering strategies for transitioning to DITA without a content management system or content architect.
Meet the presenter
Jean Tennille has been a technical communicator for more than 20 years, working for companies in mapping, banking, brokerage, and healthcare software. She loves minimalism and is sometimes asked if she can “say more about that?”
Jean translates her early training in finding the gist of an issue for a legal brief, to finding the gist of a workflow. She looks for just the right information to take users quickly through the software interfaces that help them get their real work done.
Trade-offs: The Pros and Cons of Moving to a DITA-based Content Architecture
Moving to DITA and topic-based authoring brings tremendous benefits to an organization. This is well known. It also introduces new headaches. Come to this session to hear from a grassroots leader who moved her content organization from DTP to DITA, and then automated the publishing to a well-known web CMS. There were frustrations and victories along the way, but the team is in a way better place than 11 years ago.
What can the audience expect to learn?
So many people are trying to figure out if DITA is right for their organization. I get asked regularly how I went about it. I’d like to “pay it forward” by sharing some things I’ve learned, including recovering from bad decisions or indecision.
Meet the presenter
Tracy Baker is a veteran technical communicator with over 30 years experience in technical writing, content architecture, content strategy, and wine consumption. She loves finding efficiencies, reducing complexities, snorkeling in Hawaii, and helping others be successful. Solving hard problems with elegant solutions is her career happy place. Come to her session to confirm you are not alone in whatever phase of the DITA journey you’re in, pick up a few tips, and realize that Donna Summer was right…you will survive (the move to DITA).
Applying DITA to the Next Generation of Health Information
At EBSCO Health we provide evidence-based reference information, skills, patient information resources, and shared-decision tools that inform the global healthcare industry. We initially adopted a more generic approach to DITA, but as our product delivery needs evolve, we are finding need for a more flexible, granular content model. As such we are now delving into a new EBSCO Health content model that better suits the needs of all of our content infrastructures, beginning with content which supports our patient/physician decision tools. The new “unit model” will help us achieve our vision of delivering content using a platform-based approach, providing more opportunities for reusability across our current product lines, and provisioning a Content as a Service (CaaS) that dynamically delivers content to partners, customer integrations, and EHR systems. In this session we will sketch out our journey with DITA, introduce the thinking around the unit model, and demonstrate a new interactive decision support application that showcases what we are seeking to enable.
What can the audience expect to learn?
* A view at a strategic alternative to fully modeling content up-front
* A glimpse at how DITA may be employed to gradually unify siloed content
* An example of modeling content-driven UI components for flexible UI design
The story of EBSCO’s journey will be told by:
 Lee Bryars holds a Master’s in Library and Information Studies, has been working with content at EBSCO since 2010, and is the latest addition to the Content Engineering team. When she’s not wrangling content she is reading, cooking, or hanging out with her family. |
 Samar Guleria is an Agile Product Manager for the EBSCO health products, which delivers clinical decision support solutions, healthcare business intelligence, and medical reference information. Samar has a passion for roles that bridge the gap between technology and people whether that involves software development, business development or product management. |
 Joe Gollner is the Managing Director of Gnostyx Research Inc. (http://www.gnostyx.com), a member of the CIDM Advisory Council, a veteran implementer of content technologies, and a blogging Content Philosopher (http://www.gollner.ca). |
Making DITA Authoring “Easier”
DITA is very powerful and provides the structure for nearly any type of document, as a result, it’s also often too complex for many authors. So, they resist and give up on DITA missing out on the valuable opportunities it can provide for reuse, collaboration and automated publishing. Oberon experts have Best Practices that can make DITA authoring easy for even the most novice writer.
This presentation will provide Best Practices to make almost anyone a DITA content contributor and make your Authors lives much easier.
What can the audience expect to learn?
It will provide attendees with best practices and helpful techniques proven in production environments to simplify the Authoring process when using DITA. Best practices will include tools configuration, content modeling, and browser based authoring.
Meet the presenter
Joe Jenkins is VP of Operations at Oberon Technologies and has over 20 years of enterprise software development, implementation and business consulting expertise in content management, automated publishing, and content delivery across many industries. He is responsible for overall product and business development at Oberon. In addition, Mr. Jenkins performs strategic implementation services activities including development of multi-year implementation roadmaps, conducting requirements workshops, and architecting enterprise solutions enabling content reuse, automated publishing, improved translation processes, and dynamic content delivery. Mr. Jenkins is a frequent speaker at industry conferences on the innovative use of structured content to drive enterprise value.
Making DITA Sexy: How to get your migration budget
Persistently seen as a drain on resources rather than a centre of excellence, this talk will focus on the most effective way for the Technical Communicators to change board perception and ensure project backing. Looking outside the traditional and failed arguments and giving insights to a whole new approach.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This talk will hopefully open the eyes of the attendees and get them thinking in a different direction when it comes to building the business case for DITA. It will make them think about how they are seen and seek to show them a new approach to funding.
Meet the presenter
Rik Page is Sales and Marketing Director at Bluestream Software and has been working with both component content and document management solutions since 2001. During this time, he has worked with custom DTDs and Schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200 and since 2005 DITA.
His practical experience ranges from data capture/content creation through to dynamic multichannel delivery, achieved in a wide range of industries including banking and finance, manufacturing, central government and education. A keen advocate of technology and innovation Rik has taken part in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate solutions all over the world.
Away from the office Rik is a Scout Leader working with young people and helping them to develop new skills whilst having fun.
DITA: 15+ Years Old
It’s been 15 years since DITA was donated to OASIS, and this May will be the 15th anniversary of DITA’s release as a
standard. DITA is no longer a “shiny, new thing” but instead a mature XML architecture.
We’ll consider the following questions:
* How well has DITA lived up to its early claims?
* Has it addressed the problems that it was designed to solve?
* Have other problems emerged?
* How is the landscape different in 2020 than it was in 2004?
Meet the presenter
Kristen James Eberlein is a DITA specialist and chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.
Giant Leap Forward – A Reusable DITA Adoption Plan Framework
Adoption of DITA can seem daunting, given the cost and the migration effort required to move legacy content to DITA. This interactive session will provide attendees with a solid DITA adoption plan using a proven framework and philosophy that can be adapted to other projects. Pam promises to share “real life” DITA debacles and project snafus. The names of the innocent will be protected. There is guaranteed laughter surrounding the good, the bad, and the ugly. Attend this session and become part of the conversation. Shared learning equals successful future adoptions.
What can the audience expect to learn?
In this session, attendees will:
• Gain clear understanding of a framework for DITA adoption
• Take away an adoption plan that can be adapted to other projects
• Understand DITA adoption best practices
• Listen to “real-life” DITA adoption stories
• Learn from the mistakes of others
• Understand the importance of a content inventory, DITA model, migration strategy,
Meet the presenter
Pam Noreault is a Principal Consultant, Senior Manager at SDL Inc. She has over 20 years of experience in technical communications, education, and management. She specializes in content strategy, customer engagement, content conversions, and social networking strategies. Pam has an undergraduate degree in education from The Ohio State University and a master’s degree in English and Professional Writing from Wright State University. When not trying out new gadgets or trying to innovate in the business world, she’s hiking with her three dogs.
Do You Really Want To Make Me Cry? Advice to my former self
Have you ever customized your DITA implementation, and lived to regret it?
In this presentation, I will pull from my own experience and the experience of colleagues to describe what I wish I’d known years ago. If I could go back and start over, what would I do differently to save myself long term pain?
What can the audience expect to learn?
The audience will pick up tips to use in their own DITA implementations, to help make those customizations more stable and maintainable going into the future.
Meet the presenter
Robert D Anderson has worked on SGML and XML publishing tools for over 20 years, nearly all of that with the DITA XML format. He helps lead the DITA Open Toolkit, and has contributed to the project from its first day as an open source project. Robert also writes about DITA and is the co-editor of the DITA specification at OASIS, making him one of those rare developers who spends most days using the tools that he supports.
DITA: Beyond Tools
DITA seems to be springing up everywhere. How do you get people of different backgrounds, with different needs and skills, to collaborate. Authors, editors, reviewers, and so many more…
This session explores content across tools. Starting as Word, imported to a CCMS, migrated to unstructured content, converted to structured, authored in one CCMS and reviewed in another. Each vendor will have their own unique vision for your content, but in this session you get to see maps, topics, tasks, concepts, and references created and worked with across multiple tools, published to multiple deliverables.
This session shows you how content can be worked with from a wide range of sources with the ultimate goal of one set of DITA content, unified, and reused across platforms and tools to ensure everyone can contribute to the best of their abilities and consume content based on any need.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Vendors are geared to their tools. This session shows at least 2 CCMS tools, at least 3 ways to edit content, and the ability to work between them. This helps the audience understand that a solution doesn’t have to be just one tool from just one vendor. It opens the door to finding the right combination.
Meet the presenter
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 to provide the maximum return on investments.
Do you want be a player in DX, IoT advancements, and your documentation benefited from being connected? Wait a minute, guys! There is a catch…
Even though XML based modular content development & Component Content Management are adopted slowly but steadily in Japanese manufactures for years, there are still some opting to use traditional content development tools such as MS Word, Adobe InDesign and Adobe FrameMaker. One of the reasons is that these tools are endorsed by JTCA, Japan Technical Communicators Association, and also supported by technical communicators for years. They want to use these familiar and endorsed tools because efficiencies in these tools are what they are wanted by their clients and managers. However, the things are changing now because of DX, IoT as outside marketing & infrastructure requirements. Now, the compromised modular text-based structural data transmission & processing are required along side of standardized metadata.
One possible strategy to overcome this paradigm is to make all these JTCA endorsed & popular tools, DITA-enabled, CCMS-enabled and Intelligent. InfoParse has been working on this strategy with strategic partners both locally & globally for years and this year, we have reached a point that we can demonstrate these solutions and client use-cases in typical DITA CCMS environments.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Our strategy & use-cases will make content developers and managers change their mindsets that DITA can be very flexible, configurable and open to any non XML specific tools if you have smart thinking & technologies. Balancing things out is what I recommend most, especially if you want to scale out DITA adoption.
Meet the presenter
Tetsuya Sekine is a founder and a president of an independent content strategy organization in Japan. Strategically partnering with partners in Europe, US and APAC, InfoParse has been providing “DITA enabled Smart Intelligent Content Solution”, based on AX focused structured content development framework and component content management technology. InfoParse has been implementing Bluestream XDocs for years and has been customizing & added values to related components, including oXygen, Content Mapper, FrameMaker, IdXML, SuiteHelp, and more. Mr. Sekine has been known as “Mr. DITA Japan”, contributing his times as volunteer to OASIS TC community for years and DITA vendor community starting from SDL DITA specialist.Mr.Sekine is also a regular presenter & panelist in JTCA (Japan Technical Communicators Association) and DCJ (DITA Consortium Japan) and his own DITA & CCMS professional community JDIG (Japan DITA Interest Group).
Using Warehouse Files to Improve the Overall Findability of Your DITA Content
Can a comprehensive index be created in a modern DITA XML publishing environment made up of hundreds of tiny files? And how can an editor and an indexer be incorporated into the DITA environment for better consistency and findability of content?
If you want your content to be found, you need to make sure your content is indexed and consistent across all deliverables and content channels. This means taking advantage of structured metadata and keyword research and the ruthless application of consistent terms to boost the findability of your content.
In this presentation, we’ll talk about one company’s use of warehouse files to bring consistency to index terms and their application to a body of content–a series of published reference books. It’s a microcosm of the bigger picture full of techniques that apply far beyond paper publishing.
Learn how a good editing/indexing team who adopts the same strategies and techniques used by authors working in modern DITA XML dynamic publishing environments bring new and improved value, consistency, and efficiency to your content findability across your deliverables and output channels.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Can you create a corporate index from a modern DITA XML dynamic publishing environment made up of hundreds of tiny files that is synched with Marketing’s keyword research and structured metadata to boost the consistency and findability of product information–and do it quickly, frugally, and efficiently?
Meet the presenter
Liz Fraley, Single-Sourcing Solutions, is a serial entrepreneur. She’s founded two companies, sits on the boards of three non-profits, and is constantly coming up with new ways to share knowledge in the technical communications and content industries. She has worked in high-tech and government sectors, at companies of all different sizes (from startups to huge enterprises). She advocates approaches that directly improve organizational efficiency, productivity, and interoperability. For years, Liz has worked with clients guiding them through the getting started process, enabling them to be efficient content creators. She knows her customers want to do it themselves and that they just don’t want to do it alone.
Enhancing DITA Publishing with Plugins
The DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine has support for plugins which can be installed to customize or enhance the publishing process.
In time SyncroSoft (the company which produces Oxygen XML Editor) has developed and made open source lots of small plugins which can be installed in the publishing engine in order to:
– Dynamically convert file formats like JSON or ASCIIDoc to DITA
– Convert dynamically Excel tables to DITA tables.
– Embed animated SVG and MathML equations in the HTML output.
– Dynamically convert DITA tables to image graphs in the HTML and PDF outputs.
– Embed LateX equations and publish them to HTML and PDF based outputs
– Float images to surround them with the paragraph text in the HTML and PDF outputs.
– Create PDF by styling the DITA content using CSS.
– Present change tracking and comments in the PDF output.
– Embed videos and iframes in the published HTML output.
– Embed HTML content directly in DITA content.
– Add links to online editing tools in the published HTML-based and PDF outputs.
– Produce a single merged DITA document which can be used for quality checks.
– Pack a zip file with all the DITA content in the project in order to share it with others.
I will be presenting small examples in order to show case what each plugin in the Oxygen XML GitHub organization does and maybe give you ideas about how you could use these open source plugins on your side.
What can the audience expect to learn?
You will learn various ways in which your DITA publishing can be enhanced either by incorporating other formats in a DITA project or by enhancing the available output formats to contain videos or automatic generated images, diagrams or equations.
Meet the presenter
Radu Coravu started working more than 10 years ago as a software developer for Syncro Soft Ltd., the manufacturer of the popular Oxygen XML Editor. During the last years, his main focus has been in the development of the visual XML Author editing environment and the specific-DITA support provided by Oxygen. He provides support for complex integrations and helps steer the product in the right direction, all this with some development on the side.
Herding Content – Content Management Reinvented
What do you do when you are faced with more than 15,000 DITA topics, lots of spaghetti reuse, a staggering amount of unorganized metadata, and an ever growing content base? You can either buy a content management solution or design and implement your own. At Salesforce, we embarked on a journey to do the latter. Over the course of a year, we redesigned our content repo structure, created custom DITA 1.3 DTDs with constraints and specializations, cleaned up bad reuse and reapplied proper DITA reuse mechanisms, created classification maps, subject schemes and key definitions for metadata, and pulled it all together with oXygen projects. In this presentation we share our journey, the obstacles we faced and the solutions we implemented.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This presentation will benefit everyone who is interested in content structure and reuse, and wants to learn more about how to organize metadata in classification maps and subject schemes, and why DITA is the way to go. I’ll share the mistakes we made in the past and how we fixed them, how to use automation to clean up existing content.
Meet the presenters
 Sabine Bennett is the Information Architect for the technical documentation team at Salesforce. After obtaining her PhD in Meteorology, she got sidetracked into technical journalism and technical writing. She’s been with Salesforce for 9 years, where she is responsible for all things IA, like DITA, taxonomy, and metadata. When she’s not wrangling IA, she spends her time kayaking, hiking, growing succulents, and traveling. |
 Frank Miller is Founder, President, and Principal at Ryffine. He has been serving in the structured content industry since 2005, working closely with information development professionals to transform their content and their organizations. |
Trends in Localization Practices for Next-gen DITA
In the past year, we have seen DITA early adopters move on to newer versions of DITA, of DITA OT, or even change their CCMS. They’ve made their way to the top of the learning curve and are leveraging the standard’s functionalities to adapt to today’s interactions: chatbots, micro-content, video, and virtual reality. Content creators are also shifting to agile and integrating the constraints of accessibility.
From the start, localization has been a major driver for adopting DITA. Given the content reuse and leaner DTP, the standard enabled to significantly reduce localization costs. Just like DITA, next-gen localization practices are emerging in every aspect of information development: authoring, content management, publishing, review, and maintenance. Localization has also taken in the constraints of agile and accessibility.
Dominique helps content strategists and information architects improve their DITA and localization practices. As a result, his clients typically increase their content publication efficiency by 30 to 40%. With the rise of next-gen DITA, the localization expert has refined his tools and methodology. The conference will be the opportunity to share them with the audience, along with practical examples.
Pre-requisite: minimum knowledge on languages, translation memories and DITA modelling.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The audience will get an overview of the current trends in DITA authoring and management. They will also get a better understanding of how these trends extend to their multilingual content and what they can expect from their localization partner.
Meet the presenter
A graduate of the Ecole Centrale de Paris, Dominique is CEO of WhP since 2005. Before joining WhP, Dominique managed several multinational operations in Europe, the US and South America. Based in Montreal, Dominique strives to make localization rhyme with innovation. His passion for DITA has led him to position WhP as a specialist in DITA localization to help customers enhance multilingual DITA content generation. The company has designed advanced solutions that bridge the gap between DITA and localization processes, leveraging content reuse and collaborative linguistic review.
Dominique is an active member of the DITA community, both on and offline and a fervent long-distance cyclist.
DITA content localization looks complex, but is it really?
Are you considering DITA to trim your content localization costs? Then you’re on track to publish high-quality multilingual content for less. This, however, comes with a bit of a caveat. To lower your localization costs, you need to craft your DITA content. File naming, migrating your translation memory, handling conditional text are a few of the practices that are critical to creating localization-ready DITA content.
We are covering them and many more in this presentation, using real-life examples that can relate to your projects.
Meet the presenter
A graduate of the Ecole Centrale de Paris, Dominique is CEO of WhP since 2005. Before joining WhP, Dominique managed several multinational operations in Europe, the US and South America. Based in Montreal, Dominique strives to make localization rhyme with innovation. His passion for DITA has led him to position WhP as a specialist in DITA localization to help customers enhance multilingual DITA content generation. The company has designed advanced solutions that bridge the gap between DITA and localization processes, leveraging content reuse and collaborative linguistic review.
Dominique is an active member of the DITA community, both on and offline and a fervent long-distance cyclist.
Preserving Intelligent DITA Content Through Delivery Channels
Avoid dumb delivery! You have made the investment and commitment to migrate your critical content to XML and DITA. Now, what do you do with it? One practical application is transforming and using this smart content with Expert Diagnostics Solutions. Deliver your Intelligent Content to guided troubleshooting and diagnostics knowledge portals for call center and field service applications to give the best possible experience.
What can the audience expect to learn?
We all discuss XML and DITA, and the many benefits of working in structured content, but most of the time we don’t talk about practical applications that have real world benefit. This example will show how the investment in structured content and DITA can be preserved and leveraged.
Meet the presenter
Charles Andrews is a director at Ovitas, Inc. in Burlington, MA. He has deep experience working with organizations in the structured and unstructured content life cycle management arena. He has participated in the evolution and implementation of content management from early editorial systems, through the development of structured content solutions for government and industry, to today’s confluence of enterprise information management and social media. Andrews works with organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, standards, and global accounting markets.
Automating DITA files in Git for Translation to Multiple Languages
International companies need their DITA documents translated into other languages and many companies need to support 40, 50, or more locales. It can be challenging to manage the translation process for DITA files in a Git repository. In this presentation we will show an automated process that is essentially “no touch”. New files or modifications to existing files are automatically identified and a copy is queued to be sent for translation. The file formatting is checked with an automatic 45 point inspection prior to sending, and any errors are immediately sent to the DITA author(s). Well formatted files can be sent by the manager with a simple click of a button. The translated files are checked for formatting upon return, and are automatically placed in the proper location in the repository. Results are displayed in a dashboard and can be viewed/managed in Slack or MS Teams.
What can the audience expect to learn?
DITA files stored in Git (or similar) repositories frequently need to be translated into multiple languages. The problem is challenging enough with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files being translated into multiple locales. Plus there can be incremental modifications to the files, and new locales added. This automation solves these problems.
Meet the presenter
Olivier Libouban manages product development for Lingoport. His team creates software to help companies internationalize and automate the localization of software UI and documentation. He developed an online training program for internationalization (i18n) of software. He has 30 years of software development experience in 4 countries and holds a masters degree in computer science and a diplome d’ingenieur from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) Rennes.
Considerations When Planning a DITA Migration
The technical documentation market in the United States has experienced substantial migration to DITA. Yet achieving expected ROI, both in terms of financials and content reuse, is still a struggle for many organizations. This interactive session brings together key executives who have successfully traversed a DITA migration and are now reaping the fruits of their labor. We’ll discuss planning, resourcing, budgeting, tools selection, data conversion, and training. Most importantly, we’ll share how to evaluate and measure ROI so that your DITA implementation brings the successful results you envisioned.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will benefit hearing honest accounts from people with real-world DITA migration experience.
Meet the presenters
 Originally from the UK, Dipo Ajose Cokerbegan his career as a TEFL English teacher and Information Technology instructor. Now based in France, Dipo has spent over 15 years combining his language and IT skills as a technical writer and editor. He enjoys helping others to learn, supporting his colleagues on the Mammography technical writing team at GE Healthcare, and teaching MS Office Skills at Paris Diderot University. Dipo holds an MA in Multimedia and Multilingual Document Design, and together with DCL, began migration of GE Healthcare’s Mammography documentation from FrameMaker to DITA in 2018. |
| Nolwenn Kerzreho is IXIASOFT’s Technical Account Manager for Europe and has over a decade of experience in the technical communication industry. An international speaker and author, Nolwenn holds a Master’s degree in Technical Communication, Translation, Terminology and Project Management. Nolwenn teaches Technical Communication at the European Master in Translation at Université Rennes 2, where she introduced DITA in 2009. Based in France, Nolwenn has international work experience in the chemical, Telecom, language, and high-tech industries. |
 Brianna Stevens joined Comtech as a Consultant in 2015 and immediately became an expert in creating and implementing DITA constraints. Brianna’s design education gives her unique insight into visualizing the content challenges facing our customers. Her outgoing personality puts people at ease, making her an ideal consultant to involve in user and benchmark studies and competitive analyses. In addition to consulting, Brianna does graphic design for the CIDM and Comtech websites, advertisements, and publications. |
 Brian Trombley has more than 35 years’ experience helping clients implement content-oriented processes and technologies for all aspects of publishing across a wide range of industry verticals. An early practitioner of structured content methodologies, Mr. Trombley was at the forefront of the SGML and XML revolutions and has helped clients successfully manage change and convert and leverage content for maximum business value. |
Best Practices for Automated Conversions and Beyond: Building a feedback loop for continuous improvement, onboarding, and assessment
You’ve made the decision to move to DITA. And you’ve heard conflicting opinions on whether it makes sense to automate a conversion or simply rewrite the content. Bill Gearhart, Senior Consultant with Ryffine, will quiz his panel of leaders who successfully made the transition to DITA through automation. We’ll cover the end-to-end process in depth, provide lessons learned, and give you insights on what works well, what doesn’t, and what we would or would not do over again. Specifically, we will discuss:
* Coordinating the conversion with your information model
* Assessing your content
* Establishing a system for gathering feedback
* Getting to “vanilla” DITA
* Infotyping
* Applying metadata
* Handling reuse
* Putting it all into production
* Extending the conversion for future use
What can the audience expect to learn?
Make sure the move to a new structured authoring environment is a smooth one. The panel will help you in determining the content that is best suited for migration and what should be left behind. We’ll address the importance of developing your information model as the basis for automation, active inspection throughout the process, automated reporting, and continuous improvement.
Meet the presenter
As a senior consultant with Ryffine, Bill specializes in minimalism, user-centered design, and information modeling for single-sourcing and migration to DITA.
A technical communications “lifer,” he draws on over 25 years of experience in developing and managing information and leading innovative global teams.
Successful DITA, Process, and Skill Maturity
Realizing the promise of DITA for automation and increased productivity requires not only technical maturity, but process and skill maturity. With technology automation on the rise, the processes and skills required to build quality data and metadata sources for automated systems are critical.
The unique qualities of the DITA architecture have long promised a future of intelligent content, with specialized elements and attributes to enable automated interchange of content between systems: chatbots, micro-content, “content as a service,” semantic delivery platforms using taxonomy and ontology; all have been part of the vision for DITA from the beginning. These technologies use the XML content as data; success depends on the quality and consistency of the data. The challenge of realizing this vision lies in re-thinking, and restructuring, the way content is produced: it requires both technical and process maturity, as well as skill maturity. Aligning your content strategy to focus on user experience, is the key to maturing the technology, skills, and processes in your organization.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will follow the stages of a DITA implementation as it matures to improve user experience and productivity. Users will learn how roles and skills also mature to support each stage.
Meet the presenter
Deb Bissantz is an account manager for GlobalLink Vasont. As an account manager, Deb helps organizations make the most of their DITA and component content management solutions. Before joining GlobalLink Vasont, Deb worked with and authored DITA content for many years. As a writer and tools administrator, she helped several organizations migrate technical documentation to DITA and to a CCMS. Deb is also a voting member of the DITA Technical Committee. She co-authored the DITA 1.2 Feature Article: “Roles and Responsibilities of a DITA Adoption.”
How to Build Learning and Training Resources with your Existing DITA Content
As organizations grow, so does the complexity of their content. To accommodate this complexity, more and more organizations look to Learning Management Systems as a way to make this knowledge available to anyone who needs it and to provide guided knowledge experiences.
But where does this knowledge come from?
Good news, you might have already created it!
This talk is perfect for anyone considering learning and training opportunities. In this presentation, Stephani Clark will show how you can evaluate, identify, and leverage content from your existing DITA documentation for learning and training purposes, all in one system.
From planning to publishing, this talk will provide you with a greater perspective on how your learning and training efforts can contribute to your overall content goals, not detract from them. Rather than duplicating writing and maintenance, learn how to get the most out of your content, all within one system.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will gain actionable insights on how to:
– Evaluate their existing DITA content
– Identify content to repurpose or reuse as learning content
– Organize this content for Learning & Training outputs
– Integrate learning and training into their content development cycle
– Publish their DITA content into a Learning Management System (LMS)
Meet the presenter
Stephani Clark is the Director of Customer Success for easyDITA, a DITA Component Content Management System based in Rochester. She works to train and assist users of easyDITA’s software.
Stephani lives in Rochester, NY with her husband and two-year old son. Stephani enjoys spending time with her family, cooking, reading, traveling, and organizing anything and everything.
XML Power – How Intel leverages the power of DITA & SVGs
As the worlds largest semiconductor company, Intel creates highly specialized documentation to enable the use of its technologies and intellectual property. When data and images in the Design Rule category of technical documentation were becoming too time-consuming to create and validate, a new approach was developed. The documentation was converted to DITA and the images were converted to an XML-based image format called SVG. A system of metadata tagging was developed for the images to allow for the technical content to be precisely identified, validated, and the values even updated programmatically, increasing efficiency and greatly reducing errors.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Many attendees understand the benefits and power of XML-based DITA for their technical content creation but they may not be aware of or understand how they can leverage some of those same benefits with images using the SVG format.
Meet the presenter
Kresten McGrath is the Documentation and Training Infrastructure Architect for Intel’s Intellectual Property Program Office in Chandler, Arizona.
Kresten has spent most of his 26 year career working as an automation expert, writing software to automate tasks and increase efficiencies. Ten years ago, he began focusing his automation experience on the problems of documentation creation, management, and quality. He is the architect and creator of the Galapagos system, a DITA-based collection of technologies and custom software, that increased the productivity of his technical publications team by a factor of two with only half the resources.
Kresten and his wife Mary Jane live in Gilbert, Arizona, and are the proud parents of 6 children, including 18 year old triplets.
Tips and Techniques For Handling Graphics When Transitioning To DITA
Moving to DITA can be a laborious task, especially if your content is image-heavy. Learning how to properly handle images will not only save you time and energy, but also provide reassurance that your images have been correctly transitioned. In this presentation, we discuss proven methods for retrieving embedded images out of Word and FrameMaker using automation, and then continue by revealing essential techniques for converting TIFs to PNGs and FrameMaker images to SVGs.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This presentation will benefit audience members by teaching them essential techniques for properly handling graphics when transitioning to DITA.
Meet the presenter
Bryan brings a successful track record of over 15 years in high-profile leadership positions in the high-tech and software industries. He is responsible for driving international sales and marketing initiatives at Stilo, and possesses a demonstrated history of growing businesses quickly using ambitious sales approaches. Along with his competitive desire to succeed, Bryan brings creative and effective marketing techniques, strong technical skills, and an extensive knowledge of developing and nurturing loyal customer-bases. Bryan holds a B.Sc. in Engineering Physics with a minor in Computer Science from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.
Managing Too Many Versions in a Single Branch
As we work with Agile Development and Continuous Delivery, we often have to maintain multiple versions of documentation. We also have to handle new or updated features that may or may not be released with any number of versions at the last minute. DITA gives us the tools to do it, but maintaining them by hand can be an onerous task. Follow one method of maintaining dozens of features (~90) and dozens of versions (~50) in a single branch of Git using spreadsheets, ditavals, XSLT, and a bit of automation.
What can the audience expect to learn?
DITA gives us the tools to solve complicated problems maintaining dozens of versions, but we can all use tips and tricks on how to use the tools. Maintaining dozens of ditavals by hand is untenable, but you can do it with a spreadsheet and some XSLT.
Meet the presenter
Zoë Lawson has been working with DITA for over 12 years, first as a writer, then as a tools specialist automating various phases of writing and publishing DITA, as well as migrating content to DITA. Currently a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Council.
Taming the Wild West of Release Notes with Markdown DITA
The release note creation and curation process typically involves chaos, hassle, confusion, and last-minute changes for both the Product Managers who write and review the release notes and (especially!) the technical writer in charge of handling, cleaning up, and publishing the release notes. In one case, the process involved a single, giant Word file that only one Product Manager could access at a time and a mess of Word drafts in which different Product Managers reviewed different snapshots of the release notes (each of which may or may not have included all the latest feedback from other Product Managers!).
As is to be expected for release notes, there are always last-minute changes, but…
You too can conquer the release notes chaos with Markdown DITA and transform the Wild West of release notes into a controlled process in which…
1. Product Managers create release note topics using a customized (free!) Markdown DITA authoring tool.
2. Product Managers submit their content to a dedicated staging folder in the source control system.
3. The technical writer unifies the voice/style of the writing and cleans up the release note content, transforming this content to XML DITA in the source control system.
4. Continuous Integration builds ensure that the latest version of the release note content is always available.
5. The technical writer generates Word review drafts of the latest release notes so that the Product Managers can review and provide feedback using the mechanism with which they are most comfortable.
6. A round-tripping script converts the cleaned-up release note content from XML DITA back to Markdown DITA in the source control system so that the Product Managers can make additional changes to this content as needed.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Creating release notes is usually a hassle, especially with one technical writer trying to corral the disparate content of a bunch of contributing (non-technical-writer!) Product Managers. This presentation explains one way to use Markdown DITA to improve the efficiency and ease of this process.
Meet the presenter
Debbie is a seasoned technical writer, technical documentation infrastructure engineer, DITA geek, and proud member of the Abacus Insights team. In addition to writing, she enjoys troubleshooting, figuring out efficient solutions to challenging issues, and especially helping others. Debbie is a strong proponent of effective, remote, global, cross-functional collaboration.
If there’s anything that she can do to help, please feel free to contact Debbie @ [email protected].
Content as a Service: Providing bite-sized chunks to be consumed through multiple interfaces
Being able to generate output for different delivery methods is great, but what if you turn that upside down, and offer popular content as a service for multiple interfaces and purposes, and leave the incorporation to the dev teams?
Teradata introduced Content as a Service for our very popular analytics function reference content. Single sourced in DITA with our traditional Reference Guide, we exported and transformed appropriate sections into a neutral format, to be used in two separate interfaces, and counting.
Learn about the content transformation and automation behind the service, and how we worked cross-functionally to quickly provide a significantly improved product and content experience for our customers.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn how Teradata uses Content as a Service to quickly scale content delivery to meet multiple needs at once, while enabling real-time updates to in-product content. Understand the simple architecture behind our CaaS delivery form, and how we processed our DITA source to provide content that is helpful in a variety of situations.
Meet the presenter
Patricia Ray, an exceptionally tech-savvy Information Architect, specializes in generating technical content for traditional and leading-edge platforms. Her superpowers include tinkering with development tools to improve existing systems and build new, innovative processes.
Context and Reuse in DITA Projects
The main reason for adopting DITA is its support for reuse. Reuse implies context, as it basically means using the same thing in different situations, that is in different contexts. But in the same time we want some people, usually subject matter experts, to interact with the DITA content as if they are using a word processor, so ignoring the context information. How can we define and control the context, when we should hide it and how we should do that?
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will understand that reuse benefits do not come without a cost and that cost relates to the complexity created by managing the contexts. We will try to define what context means for DITA and understand the inevitable requirement to define formally a DITA project that should express all the deliverables we want to obtain.
Meet the presenter
George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML suite of XML editing, authoring, development, publishing and collaboration tools. He has more than 20 years of experience in working with XML and related technologies, bringing many innovative ideas to reality and contributing to XML-related open-source projects.
He presented at many XML, DITA, and technical communication conferences, giving passionate presentations and challenging the technological status quo, trying to get the audience to think outside the box, and re-imagine the future.
Using Key References, Warehouse Topics, and Ditaval Files to Rebrand Documents for OEMs
Rebranding a library of documents for a single customer can take months without prior planning and a strategy for reuse with substitution.
Tridium sells a software framework that is rebranded by many customers. By providing our customers with “branded” documentation that meets their unique requirements we deliver a highly desirable service and add significant value to the product. This presentation describes and demonstrates how we have shortened our PDF and HTML document branding process time from days and weeks to minutes and hours. We will show attendees how we have worked closely with OEMs to setup branding methods that take advantage of DITA key references and Ditaval files. Following are some of the items that we will describe and demonstrate in the presentation:
- How we setup Key References and Keydef Maps
- How we design and use Warehouse Topics for branding and consistency
- How and why we use Ditaval files in the branding process
- How we use a Branded Bookmaps to control branding from the top down
- How we work with our OEM customer to meet their specific branding needs
What can the audience expect to learn?
- Attendees will see how to put their DITA documents to work with:
- Key References and Keydef Maps
- Warehouse Topics that work for authors and customers
- Ditaval files that are judiciously used in the branding process
- “Super” Bookmaps, that are used to isolate and control your customer’s branded content
Meet the presenter
Julie Atkins is an experienced senior technical writer who specializes in topic authoring using DITA-based schema to create and deliver audience-appropriate technical information via print and online media. She develops technical writing practices and procedures, is an experienced computer systems analyst with significant knowledge of hardware and software product development, and has worked with translation and localization services.
Getting Pushy With DITA: The Costs and Benefits of Conref Push
DITA features acquire a different luster as they are adopted or ignored:
– Some just sparkle for years — key-based referencing, branch filtering
– Some spark and then fade — scoped keys, release management metadata
– Some lurk in the shadows — conref push, Classification maps
The DITA 1.2 feature dubbed “conref push” prior to its release in 2010 had a “break-glass-in-case-of-emergency” feel to it, something to be investigated when all else had failed. The mysterious counterpart to the popular “conref pull”, the “conref push” filter allowed writers to define content in one DITA topic that could be “pushed” into a different, unsuspecting topic at build time. The primary use case — changing the content of a topic that you could not edit directly — seemed mysterious and sketchy at best. The risks of allowing writers to hijack one another’s content were more obvious than the benefits, so the “conref push” feature has remained on the periphery.
This presentation takes a sober and fresh look at the feature:
1. Requirements — both the documented and undocumented to use it successfully
2. Risks — how extreme are the risks and how have writing teams successfully mitigated them
3. Use cases — how have writing teams successfully used conref push to address the following:
a. Updates to content that a team does not own
b. Human-authored updates to machine-generated content
c. Dynamic content creation for infobots and personalized web sites
d. Content badging
e. Link management and encapsulation for shared topics
What can the audience expect to learn?
It’s going to be a little time before DITA 2.0 and LwDITA are ready for prime time. Keeping DITA tech weenies engaged with the lesser-known features in DITA 1.2 and 1.3 makes sense for a Spring 2020 conference. Besides, the requirements and use cases for this particular feature have been under-documented and under-promoted. There’s a lot more there.
Meet the presenter
Stan Doherty lives in the the Boston area and works as a consulting user assistance developer at Oracle Corporation.
He serves as a founding member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, secretary for the OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee, and co-coordinator of the Boston DITA Users Group. Feel free to contact Stan if you are considering DITA, DITA tools, and DITA-aware CCMSs.
Contact: [email protected]
Auditing for Reuse Opportunities
Optimizing reuse allows companies to save costs on localization, reduce liability, and improve efficiency, consistency, and quality both of the source English and the localized content. However, planning for reuse is not a “one and done” activity. Auditing your content periodically can help you improve your reuse. We will discuss practical tools and tips for identifying and analyzing reuse opportunities, as well as some measures you can take to prevent unnecessary content creep. Come prepared to share your ideas, too!
What can the audience expect to learn?
- 2-3 methods for auditing for reuse
- Strategies for identifying and preventing content creep
- Understanding of some of the reuse pitfalls
Meet the presenter
Katherine (Kit) Brown-Hoekstra is an STC Fellow and former STC Society President, certified trainer for the STC Certified Professional Technical Communicator (CPTC) program, and a member of the Colorado State University Media Hall of Fame for the Dept. of Journalism. She is an experienced consultant with over 25 years of experience in technical communication, much of it working with life sciences companies and localization teams. As Principal of Comgenesis, LLC, Kit provides consulting and training to her clients on a variety of topics, including localization, content strategy, and content management. She speaks at conferences worldwide and publishes regularly in industry magazines. She recently edited The Language of Localization for the Content Wrangler and XML Press. Her blog is www.pangaeapapers.com.
Implementing Custom Templates to Maximize Content Reuse and DITA Acceptance
Since our implementation of a DITA CMS a few years ago, we’ve made an extensive use of templates. We’ve had a huge return on investment with these templates. We’ve reached over 90% reuse in some product ranges, and we’ve seen new users adopt DITA faster. We want to share our experience and tips.
What can the audience expect to learn?
You need to make DITA authoring more easily accessible to beginners. You also want to maximize content reuse & translation savings. At BIOMERIEUX we’ve reached up to 90% content reuse and our new users are rapidly efficient in DITA authoring. Attend this presentation to discover all the powerful advantages of using custom templates in DITA.
Meet the presenters
Frederic Fontbonne has been working for over 20 years in the technical writing field and for 7 years at the Product Labeling Department in BIOMERIEUX, an In-Vitro Diagnostics pioneering company. He was employed as a technical writer and participated to the selection, validation and implementation of a DITA CCMS tool. He is now responsible for planning migration activities and supporting tech writers and translation coordinators in their use of the system.
Yamina Dessein has been working for 5 years at the Product Labeling Department in BIOMERIEUX, an In-Vitro Diagnostics pioneering company. Now an Information Architect & Stylesheets Developer, she supports a documentation team of around 30 in creating and migrating Instructions for Use in a DITA-CMS.
Put the Principles into Practice: Creating Content for Reuse
Content reuse can bring big savings in your organization in terms of time, energy, and money, if you do it strategically. Reuse done right helps create better customer experiences. And it’s a key factor in being able to produce content at scale.
Content creators now have the opportunity to make a much bigger impact on the business. When content is created with reuse in mind – even content that “everyone knows” will “never” be reused – your body of content can transform into a powerhouse of business assets. The content can work both smarter and harder to serve your business goals.
In this interactive session, you’ll learn:
– Why creating reusable content is the key to, well, everything
– The best practices for creating reusable content
– How to analyze existing content for reuse potential
You’ll also put the principles into practice. We’ll work with sample content to experience exactly what it takes to optimize content for reuse. This session is a facilitated knowledge transfer and practice session, not a “presentation.” Writing will be involved. You have been warned!
At the end of the session, you’ll have experience and a checklist that you can apply immediately to your own content.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Participants will get hands-on experience working with content in a new way. Participants will develop awareness and skills to change the way they create content. These skills can be applied immediately any content creation environment.
Meet the presenter
Regina Lynn Preciado is a senior content strategy consultant. She helps companies transform how they organize, manage, and leverage content. Regina has helped organizations of all sizes make content work for people (instead of the other way around). She works with communicators in marketing, documentation, support, and training — sometimes all at once!
Regina lives a dogspotting lifestyle. Her professional goal is to work a picture of her dog into every presentation, in a seamless and logical way.
Making the Right Business Case for DITA and Getting It Approved
Too often information development takes a proverbial backseat to other projects and priorities from the business perspective. While we all understand and believe in the critical importance of providing information to the end user, we have to make a near perfect business case in order to achieve our ultimate goals.
In this presentation I’ll demonstrate how to build a business case to both, win the support from the team and more importantly get the support of the executive team in order to get the necessary budget to implement DITA. While every situation is different, I’ll present best practices and help define a template that can be easily customized to every company and situation. This presentation will show how to define your goals, win support from within your team and then based on quantifiable and prioritized analysis to engage company leadership to get your budget approved.
This is a compelling story of how NextGen User Assistance realized that while we were performing well currently, to thrive in the future we must fundamentally change our organization by adopting an enterprise-wide DITA-based content architecture, common processes, and a single toolchain and most importantly how to build the best business case for it.
I’ll show how we did this by presenting our actions as a flexible but repeatable process, including:
* Performing initial research and analysis
* Working with vendors to identify the best approach and complete gap analysis
* Educate your team and win their support for moving to DITA
* Working all levels of management to review and iteratively improve your proposal, making the business case better
*Finally getting to present and win your case with the executive team
What can the audience expect to learn?
While every company is different, there is a set of best practices and core concepts that can be applied to make the best business case for each member of audience. This presentation can be a template that can be easily customized and applied by everyone.
Meet the presenters
 As a director of user assistance at NextGen, Vlad’s focus is on developing and implementing a content strategy designed around principles of minimalism, user-centered design, and DITA. Vlad led his team to successful implementation of DITA and git/oxygen toolchain last year (2019) after working hard with outside vendors and his executive team to establish the correct business case to get the necessary approval to start the journey of implementing the DITA based eco-system.A writer by trade, Vlad has been building and leading teams for the past 10 years across multiple product lines, locations and continents. |
 Frank Miller is Founder, President, and Principal at Ryffine. He has been serving in the structured content industry since 2005, working closely with information development professionals to transform their content and their organizations. |
Keeping With The Times
coming soon
What can the audience expect to learn?
coming soon
Meet the presenter
Toni Mantych is Senior Director of Product Content at ServiceNow, where she leads a large, globally distributed technical content group and drives product and cross-functional content experience initiatives. Before joining ServiceNow, she was Director of Content Strategy and Architecture at ADP and taught numerous graduate courses in the Technical and Professional Writing program at Portland State University. She frequently speaks and leads workshops on content strategy and content experience topics. In September 2017, she was recognized as a Top 200 Content Experience Strategist.
A Match Made in DITA
3M supports tens of thousands of products and systems ranging from simple to highly technical in nature. This means that technical content needs to be consistent, cohesive, and accurate so that it’s usable for customers. How is 3M managing this task? The company has started an initiative around digital transformation, placing more effort on automated processes that allow employees to create digital content more efficiently and put it online faster. This case study shows how 3M is moving to structured content using XML and DITA with tools such as Structured FrameMaker and Adobe Experience Manager XML Documentation.
During the pilot phase, one division at 3M partnered with Scriptorium to create automated outputs that would enable content creation with consistent formatting and digital publishing in less time. Working together, 3M and Scriptorium created document standards that can be used across the company. This result has helped communicate the value of expanding the pilot and partnership across 3M globally.
3M and Scriptorium have a shared future goal of creating automated outputs for cohesive and consistent content that meets the needs of all divisions and regions at 3M. In this future partnership, 3M and Scriptorium can re-leverage lessons learned during the pilot for a successful implementation, including issues related to content strategy, content history, and content design.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This case study will offer practical advice for starting a pilot project to demonstrate the need for widespread digital transformation. Attendees will learn what questions to ask before the pilot begins, ways to deal with unexpected challenges that arise, and how to learn from the pilot’s successes and mistakes before taking the project to a larger scale.
Meet the presenters
 Teeghan Herian is a Technical Content Management Supervisor at 3M Company in St. Paul, MN. She has 15 years of content management experience in healthcare, manufacturing, software and engineering. She has led a content management system pilot at 3M and is playing an integral role in scaling it across the company. She has completed a B.S. in Biology from the University of MN Twin Cities and an M.S. in Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of MN Twin Cities. |
 Gretyl Kinsey has been deploying content strategies as a technical consultant at Scriptorium since 2011. She develops content systems for companies in a variety of industries, including education, life sciences, finance, and high tech. An experienced interviewer and researcher, she identifies content problems, recommends solutions, and builds business cases to support them. Gretyl also creates courses for the open-source DITA training project at LearningDITA.com and has been a driving force behind this resource since its inception. She gives presentations on DITA, content strategy, and other industry topics for conferences, webcasts, and podcasts. |
Mastering Efficiency and Impact in Content Creation and Delivery: a Mastercard Case Study
Authoring and delivering personalized content are major factors in attaining a successful customer experience.
In this presentation, you’ll learn how Mastercard transformed its content strategy to deliver targeted content to a global audience and elevate the customer experience; all while improving efficiency in content development and management.
We’ll be revealing the methods, technologies, and processes one Mastercard team used to boost its Voice of the Customer score. You’ll also learn how Mastercard envisions the future of personalized content delivery, supported by AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning), and how they plan to measure impact on customer satisfaction, retention, and productivity.
What can the audience expect to learn?
• How to operationalize an efficient content strategy using people, processes, and tools
• The relationship between customer experience and productivity in delivering scalable and personalized content
• The importance of taking advantage of disruptive technologies (AI, ML) to author and deliver content
Meet the presenter
Jill Sheffield is currently leading the Content Strategy and Development team at Mastercard with focus on creating an ultimate customer content delivery experience. Jill joined Mastercard in 2008 with over 15 years’ experience in the Payments Industry. In her career with Mastercard, Jill leveraged her passion for technology, asset-based thinking and helping others in their career journey, to lead numerous global Operational Support teams, including an 18-month international assignment in Poland. Prior to joining Mastercard, Jill managed several Operational, Quality Assurance and Support teams.
Jill has a strong belief in giving back as shown with her community involvement and volunteerism. She volunteers for several Mastercard-sponsored programs including Girls4Tech and several Business Resource Groups. In addition, Jill is an integral volunteer for Safe Connections of St. Louis by donating her time and talents as a steering committee for one of their primary fundraising events.
Fast, Flexible and Fine: Doing more with DITA
Leading professional development provider The Institutes increased its publishing output by 1900% in the first five years after adopting a DITA/Typefi production process, and now offers customised content on demand—all without compromising on design quality.
The Institutes is the leading provider of professional development for members of risk management and property-casualty industries in the US, and produces a range of print and digital course materials, including textbooks, course guides, review notes, and flashcards.
Prior to implementation, The Institutes spent months creating content for each individual product and then weeks manually copying and pasting the content into Adobe InDesign for publication.
As The Institutes had to continually update the curriculum based on industry changes, its priority was to maintain the existing products rather than to create new ones. Finding and updating the changes and additions and then copying and pasting into InDesign simply did not allow time to create new content without significantly increasing staff resources.
The Institutes decided this was an untenable process for growth, and decided to implement an XML-based solution based on DITA. This would enable them to organize their content in Learning Objects (LOs) within an XML-based content management system for flexibility and ease of reuse.
Rapidly producing professionally-designed publications was also a requisite part of the solution. The production team wanted to continue using Adobe InDesign, the market leader in page layout software, so they chose InDesign Server-based publishing automation platform Typefi.
The first year of implementation included converting the content to XML, organising the content in LOs within Documentum, and creating dynamic Adobe InDesign templates for automated publishing with Typefi.
This involved significant changes to the workflow, including restructuring the authoring process, and learning new tools. The production team also learned how to create InDesign templates that maximized the potential for automation while maintaining the professional design that customers expected.
Over the next five years, The Institutes increased the number of new products from four per year to over eighty, without additional staff. Within that timeframe, The Institutes also completed a complete rebranding without a hiccup, and were able to meet requests for customized content within 24 hours.
Each Learning Object now comprises content files that form the basis of textbooks, assessment files which become course guides, key points which become review notes, and glossary terms used for keywords in the textbooks and also for flashcards.
Initial authoring takes place in Microsoft Word. Content is then converted to XML—applying structured templates—and stored in the CMS. Graphic designers focus on digital asset building, creating the figures and charts that illustrate the content, and inserting metadata and links to the digital assets within the CMS.
Once the content and digital assets are ready, the designers create a product map using DITA. The product map—an outline of the Learning Objects included in the final product and the relationships between them—is then run through Typefi, which applies the XML to InDesign templates and automatically lays out the textbooks, course guides, review notes, and flashcards.
The layout process takes one hour, on average, and proofs are sent to the editors for a quick review. Any last-minute changes needed are made in the CMS and, an hour later, the final version is ready to publish.
As of 2019, The Institutes’ CMS contained over 8,000 Learning Objects! The organization continues to develop the publishing system to maximize efficiency, and to offer content to their customers in new and refreshing ways.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Professional development provider The Institutes achieved a 1900% increase in publishing output after adopting Microsoft Word and DITA for authoring, an XML-based CMS, and Typefi and Adobe InDesign for automated production. Learn how The Institutes realized this dramatic improvement without increasing staff, and how they can now meet requests for customized content within 24 hours—all without compromising on design quality.
Meet the presenter
Caleb drives the vision and strategy for Typefi’s products, and cultivates strategic partnerships with developers to extend Typefi’s core capabilities. He is an award-winning designer and Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign with over a decade’s experience designing, developing, and implementing publishing technology. He holds a Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Deliver Customer Success from the Outside In
To meet a customer’s information needs requires us to deeply understand — and meet — the customer’s definition of success. Customer success depends on understanding two key points:
1. The customer experience begins long before first contact and well after a purchase
Then we’ll get hands-on in this session with some tools to discover where our customers’ experience begins and how to discover their needs from an outside-in perspective. So then we can take these tools back to our organizations and use them with our friends in other parts of the company to ensure we capture the entire customer journey and develop cross-functional alignment.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The audience will learn and practice how to use two key tools to define their organization’s customer experience and define what is their customer’s successful outcome. But learning tools is not enough. Audience members will also develop a plan to engage other parts of their company with these tools to align their organizations around improving customer experience.
Meet the presenter
Theodore Wolff has a decade of experience in technical documentation across hydraulic machinery manufacturing, semiconductors, and agriculture machinery. He is currently the global team leader for technical documentation at Danfoss Power Solutions where his team helps to engineer a sustainable tomorrow. At Danfoss, Theodore has led a team out of the desktop publishing world and into the topic-based world of DITA. Now he and his team are turning their attention to helping their organization make a shift to a customer-focused mindset.
The Politics of Metrics
The truth is in the data, but sometimes the truth can be hard to swallow. As business leaders become more data-driven and reliant on KPIs, they must be prepared for the political pitfalls that come with sharing data up and down in the organization. Come hear from a diverse panel of leaders from content, user experience, support, and tools teams discuss their experience navigating the politics of metrics. The panel will share key lessons learned from failures and successes as well as real-world strategies for data success.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The panel will share key lessons learned from failures and successes as well as real-world strategies for data success.
Meet the presenters
Sunny Yang is an Experience Design Manager at Adobe, leading a design team that helps creative people quickly access an entire world of creative content from Adobe. Sunny has previously designed well known mobile and web products at Motorola, Samsung, and Yahoo!
Laura Bellamy is the Director of Content Strategy & Operations at VMware. She leads a global team of content professionals who are focused on addressing cross-divisional content challenges. Laura has diverse industry experience as a technical writer, information architect, and information development manager. She is a co-author of the book DITA Best Practices.
Jenifer Schlotfeldt is the Content Experience Architect for IBM Cloud, leading a team of software engineers, designers, ContentOps, and content designers. Not only is the team supporting continuous delivery of the IBM Cloud Docs and IBM Cloud API Docs, but it also embraces DevOps and Design Thinking practices. She is also the co-author of DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA.
Amanda Washington is the Senior Manager of the Project Management Office (PMO) and Business Process for Worldwide Customer Experience at Electronic Arts, Inc. She leads a team to deliver business improvements through process, training, tools enablement, and governance. Amanda’s background includes experience in technical writing, information development management, and project management.
What We Don’t Talk About: Unspoken Obstacles to Cross-Functional Content Efforts, and How to Overcome Them
It’s now accepted wisdom that companies benefit from providing “unified content experiences” that allow users to easily access and navigate between different types of content. Creating such unified experiences requires us to work effectively across traditional functional boundaries. Understanding the roots of why cross-functional collaboration is difficult can empower us to be more successful at crossing the chasm between silos. Drawing on recent research about diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias, as well as the presenter’s experience advocating for and leading cross-functional and enterprise content initiatives, this session will examine–and provide strategies for countering–some of the ways in which our behavior and even our language can unintentionally handicap our efforts to partner effectively.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This session aims to:
1. Help participants understand the roots of why cross-functional collaboration is hard
2. Raise participants’ self-awareness of their own behaviors, language, and mindsets that might be helping or hindering such collaboration
3. Provide some antidotes to some common root challenges
Meet the presenter
Toni Mantych is Senior Director of Product Content at ServiceNow, where she leads a large, globally distributed technical content group and drives product and cross-functional content experience initiatives. Before joining ServiceNow, she was Director of Content Strategy and Architecture at ADP and taught numerous graduate courses in the Technical and Professional Writing program at Portland State University. She frequently speaks and leads workshops on content strategy and content experience topics. In September 2017, she was recognized as a Top 200 Content Experience Strategist.
The Position of Tech Comms in relation to Marketing and Support
Abstract coming soon
What can the audience expect to learn?
Coming Soon
Meet the presenter
Jill Orofino, Red Hat – Bio Coming Soon
Whose Content Is It Anyway
Technical writers, subject-matter experts, marketing and sales teams, and information architects often hold nominally conflicting views of the ‘ownership’ of content. Differing views can create varying degrees of friction in the content creation process. This presentation uses anecdotes from real-world organizations that faced related issues, describing how the issues played out and how they were (or weren’t) resolved. Based on these experiences, I’ll propose a new way to think about ownership of content that can enhance collaboration in content production.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This presentation is for various stakeholders in content creation and delivery. It aims to propose a mind-set about content that can foster better collaboration in content production.
Meet the presenter
Tom Comerford is senior consultant with Supratext, providing expertise in all aspects of the content lifecycle. He has worked with content technologies in various industry segments for three decades. His particular areas of interest are content quality and localization.
Tom’s experience with content engineering includes clients in manufacturing, financial services, education, and healthcare. He has assisted companies in optimizing their DITA implementations, including specialization and output formatting, to achieve productivity gains and a positive return on investment.
Tom is co-secretary of the OASIS XLIFF Technical Committee, which defines an XML standard for interchange of data for translation and localization, and formerly an adjunct instructor in technical communication at Temple University College of Engineering.
Research as a Common Denominator for Cross Collaborative Success
How you ever came away from a workshop thinking, “what was the point of this”? Have you ever participated in a workshop and felt, “Did I have an impact”. Are you trying to facilitate a workshop with high stakeholder tension? The IBM Cloud content experience team will share our case studies of two instances of how research paved the way by kicking off the workshops with user generated insights and data.
What can the audience expect to learn?
We will walk through two case studies of how user research was planned, executed, and presented for design thinking workshops involving our multidisciplinary product team. Attendees will walk away with an understanding of how to leverage a KANO model for prioritizing features and how to set up a content journey playback template.
Meet the presenters
 Mina Adame is a Product Designer for IBM Cloud. Mina uses design to engage, empower, and propel learning experiences for the platform. In her free time, she helps with Diversity and Inclusion efforts in regards to the tech space. |
 Missy Yarbrough is a Product Designer for IBM Cloud. Missy collaborates with various internal stakeholders from multidisciplinary teams to bring about better cloud platform experiences. She also enjoys introducing and discussing the value of design in everyday life activities. When she’s not in the office, she is often traveling, listening, and observing people’s incredible ways of fulfilling life. |
How Jane Says, Does, Feels, and Thinks about Docs
Ever wonder what Design Thinking is? Or how you can apply it to documentation? We’ll share with you examples and show you how to work with user personas, empathy maps, and journey maps to align your team and improve the content experience.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This panel includes a Content Strategist, Design Researcher, and two Designers. They will help you to understand how to apply design thinking to docs.
Meet the presenters
Jenifer Schlotfeldt is the Content Experience Architect for IBM Cloud, leading a team of software engineers, designers, ContentOps, and content designers. Not only is the team supporting continuous delivery of the IBM Cloud Docs and IBM Cloud API Docs, but it also embraces DevOps and Design Thinking practices. She is also the co-author of DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA.
Mina Adame is a Product Designer for IBM Cloud. Mina uses design to engage, empower, and propel learning experiences for the platform. In her free time, she helps with Diversity and Inclusion efforts in regards to the tech space.
Missy Yarbrough is a Product Designer for IBM Cloud. Missy collaborates with various internal stakeholders from multidisciplinary teams to bring about better cloud platform experiences. She also enjoys introducing and discussing the value of design in everyday life activities. When she’s not in the office, she is often traveling, listening, and observing people’s incredible ways of fulfilling life.
Mallory Anderson is a User Researcher for IBM Cloud. Mallory leads generative and evaluative research for platform teams working to improve the user experience of finding and consuming content on the platform. She connects her team(s) with users and works closely with Designers to help facilitate the Design Thinking process to align teams around real user needs.
It Takes a Village
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you knew there was a problem but weren’t sure what to do about it? That was us. We knew the experience around our releases wasn’t as good as it could be, but we weren’t sure how to tackle it. As a content team, we had tried over the years to tweak the release notes here and there in reaction to specific feedback from customers. But it wasn’t really solving the bigger problem. Learn how we used Design Thinking to go from a general problem to a specific one and then to design an information experience that addressed that problem and improved customer satisfaction.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Attendees will get an overview of the Design Thinking process including empathy maps and current-future-barriers. You’ll also learn how we partnered with other teams throughout the process and how we sold the proposed changes not only to our customers but also to the rest of the business.
Meet the presenter
Angela Browne has been a technical communicator for 20 years and currently leads a team of writers at SAP SuccessFactors. As a design thinking coach, she works with teams across the organization to better understand their users and design solutions that meet their needs. On her own team, she’s spent the last few years driving strategic initiatives around content transformation, taxonomy, and conversational interfaces.
APIs Here We Come
API documentation –now there’s an opportunity! Or if we’re being honest, here’s a hole in the technical writing field. So how do you get ahead of API documentation needs? Well that’s the good news bad news question – the bad news – you’re already late to this party. The good news, there are fewer people who even know how to get to the party. Let’s start with some basics.
APIs documentation is not hard. API documentation delivery is what’s at issue. The tools to deliver API documentation have not kept up with the need to deliver API documentation. So we’re all in a similar situation as when CCMS’s were fragile and delivery was a separate problem instead of part of the whole documentation environment.
My writing team was challenged with delivering API documentation in a browser-based format and kept in sync with the code which it was related. What went into that challenge was determining:
• Who is writing APIs in our engineering teams?
• How many APIs are they writing?
• What tools are they writing in?
• What standards are they using?
• Anybody familiar with best practices?
• No standard tool for writing APIs
• No standardization between APIs
• No billboards anywhere to tell the engineering teams – Pubs needs to know about your APIs
• No one was thinking about how they were going to deliver API documentation at scale
Solving these questions as well as getting ahead of the coming APIs was not an unusual task – all writing teams come across these types of issues – these were not new problems but the technical writing team being involved in the APIs was new territory. As usual, some engineers were happy to have pubs involved others were questioning our talking to them in the first place.
Again, nothing new to a pubs team – just a new area of content.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Audience will learn about one effort to deliver API documentation in sync with APIs in a browser based format
Meet the presenter
Peggy Sanchez is a Senior Tech Pubs Manager within the Knowledge Management team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She has a degree in Scientific and Technical Communication and a Masters in Management of Technology. She is an agent of change and relishes the opportunity to modernize the HPE Knowledge Management environment with the other KM managers. She is an experienced presenter with CIDM, LavaCon, and Content Wrangler. Has led her teams in the adoption of DITA, implementing a CCMS- repairing the tech pubs team after a poor CCMS implementation, adopting portal delivery, and developing API documentation and delivery AND keeping it in sync with the code.
Peggy lives in St. Paul and is raising 4 backyard chickens– Lily, Pinkie, Lulu, and Pecky Sue.
The Evolution of an Industry
As technologies continue to advance, the ways that users consume, and expect to consume, information is also evolving. As a result, the roles, responsibilities, and skills of the technical communicator continue to shift and expand. It is not acceptable to simply produce long, static, user manuals in PDF formats. Instead, we must consider embedded user assistance, videos, virtual and augmented reality, chatbots and other forms of artificial intelligence. We are an industry in flux. We are no longer “writers” but information architects, user experience designers, taxonomists, and programmers. We must collaborate with marketing, training, customer support, and engineering to support user information needs along their entire journey. This presentation examines the current trends in technical communication and what they imply about the skills you should be acquiring today to be ready for tomorrow.
Meet the presenter
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.
Docs and KBs: Hell or harmony?
Knowledge bases and documentation have a fraught relationship. While they serve the same purpose – to educate customers with much sought after knowledge – knowledge bases have long stood independent and attempts to integrate complex, task-based documentation into knowledge bases designed for support articles aren’t very harmonious.
But a fragmented publishing experience means a fragmented and siloed experience for users – and that’s bad news for all of us. So is there a way to unite these warring foes in a way that provides the best of both worlds?
In this talk Lawrence Orin, Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert at Zoomin Software will guide participants through best practices and pro tips for blending docs and KBs to provide a seamless unified user experience.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn the dos and don’ts of blending docs and KBs
Learn best practices for blending docs and KBs
Understand how to provide a seamless unified user experience while increasing efficiency behind the scenes
Meet the presenter
Lawrence Orin is Zoomin’s Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert, offering customers a deeper understanding of content strategy, and helping with their implementation with his experience as a customer of Zoomin in his previous positions. Prior to that, he was Documentation Manager at Riverbed, where he used Zoomin’s help portal to publish modern help content for customers of SteelCentral Aternity, searching in any Aternity publication, in any version, and featuring innovations like fail-safe context sensitive help, glossary popups and much more.
Lawrence also formerly led the documentation team in Radvision, where he pioneered blending marketing content into technical writing to create more sales-driven documentation. He has also led teams in technical support, customer services, and has worked as a programmer and graphic designer. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from University College London (UCL).
Driving One Story for Your Customers!
ServiceNow is expanding at lightning speed! And with that growth comes a bottoms up environment of creating pockets of content teams all across the company. All of these groups strive to provide the best content for our customers but lack a unified approach. This is not an uncommon experience in many of today’s companies. Come learn how the largest of these teams, ServiceNow’s Product Content organization, is working to intentionally collaborate with all customer-facing content teams to ensure a consistent message for our users, wherever they may be in their customer journey.
This session will explore understanding how to identify the other content teams in your organization (not as easy as it sounds!), how to entice them to carve out time for collaboration, and how to gain executive sponsorship for ongoing, intentional, cross-team content planning. We’ll provide specific strategies you can take back to your organizations as we walk through several of our current initiatives including:
· Participating in cross-functional go-to-market teams
· Providing pre-sales support
· Creating a comprehensive In-product help experience
· Supporting customer portfolio expansion
· Ensuring maximum return on investment for customer satisfaction
· Investing in user research to validate all of the above
What can the audience expect to learn?
We want to inspire content teams from any part of an organization to work together for the clearest message! We’ll provide examples of actual initiatives currently in progress. We’ll share how our various content teams come in and out of the content development cycle as our products go through development and how to coordinate those efforts.
Meet the presenters
 Lisa Hultman is a Director of Product Content at ServiceNow. She has extensive experience leading technical training and writing teams building content for both software and hardware solutions. She is super passionate about cross-functional collaboration to ensure consistent messaging for customers. Having had her organizations fall under Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product Management, HR and even Finance over the years, she is well versed in collaborating with all functional teams. |
 Katie Ott is a Director of Product Content at ServiceNow. Throughout her career she has led several initiatives focused on reducing costs, innovating content delivery models, and developing and managing high performing teams. She finds the most joy when collaborating with other teams to drive efficiency in business process and consistency in customer experiences. |
Cross-Functional Collaboration for Content
Creating and maintaining meaningful, findable, useful, clear, accurate, and connected content is a purposeful journey. Content is an all inclusive buffet. Every piece of content needs to be presented effectively for the users to pick what they want to consume when they visit your site and that piece they consume should satisfy their appetite. Stale, out-dated, irrelevant content are never served on a buffet table. And getting quality content ready for consumption needs seamless collaboration across the company.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The audience will learn about the need for cross functional collaboration, challenged, a tips and techniques to overcome these challenges. This presentation will include a discussion that will enable audience to share their learning from cross functional collaboration experience with the group.
Meet the presenter
Kavitha Kandappan
Manager, Technical Writing
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Collaboration is the Key to Success
It is easy to talk about concepts like Collaboration. It is much harder to actually get people to do it. People naturally dislike change and working with “someone” from a different team/group/department/location/newly acquired company is one of the changes that most people naturally are reluctant to make. Another potential roadblock to establishing and promoting collaboration is the innate fear of knowledge sharing – e.g. if I keep all the knowledge to myself, I am indispensable to the team/company. Without willingness to share knowledge, working with others through a collaborative process will be limited at best. There are other natural impediments to building a real culture of collaboration.
In this presentation I will talk about how establishing a focus on now just WHAT we do but HOW we do it, both in terms of every contributor understanding the importance of both and management working to develop their employees to balance the two sides of performance. The HOW we get to the WHAT is the foundation of establishing and evolving the culture necessary for true comprehensive and unfiltered collaboration.
In addition I will present some thoughts and ideas on how to build better collaboration by employing the right tools as well as establishing the right processes.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Collaboration is one of the key elements for success regardless of what you do and how you do it. It is easy to preach the idea, but you need a good strategy to get people to actually collaborate with each other. Audience will learn key aspects from engagement to promotion to utilization of tools and building processes to improve collaboration.
Meet the presenter
As a director of User Assistance at NextGen Healthcare, Vlad’s focus is on continuously developing and implementing the right content strategy that meets NextGen’s business needs and more importantly provides value to the users. Currently, Vlad’s team is moving forward with a new (to them) DITA based Oxygen/Bitbucket toolchain where the focus is on content developed on principles of minimalism, user-centricity and most of all making user experience as seamless as possible.
With 25 years of experience in information development, Vlad has been focused on building and leading teams for the past 10 years working across multiple product lines, locations and continents.
Don’t Forget the Technical Writers!
Much of the conversation (and tool development) these days centers around how to involve subject matter experts in the content creation process. It’s true that an increasing amount of content is being generated by non-writers: engineers, developers, business analysts, support personnel, and so forth. If that’s the case, then where does it leave the technical writer? Far from pushing technical writers out of the content creation process, the shift towards SME-created content leaves technical writers positioned to add a completely different value to content.
In this presentation, Leigh shares a few anecdotes from her own and others’ careers that illustrate how technical writing has moved from, “Let’s just try to get the updated manuals out the door at the same time as the software,” to “How can we get manuals and online help out of the same source,” to “How can we use XML to create intelligent support chatbot responses?” Leigh also discusses the many hats that today’s technical writers must wear, and how in fact, technical writer is fast becoming an obsolete job title, being replaced by other titles such as content architect, information architect, or content strategist–all indicative of the shift from creating content to curating, organizing, and managing content to deliver the best user experience.
Finally, even though this presentation focuses primarily on the changing role of technical writers, you can’t get away from the tools. Leigh also discusses some of the technologies and tools that today’s technical writers must master to ensure they can take their place in this new post-content-creator era.
What can the audience expect to learn?
While a lot of the current focus is on how to integrate SMEs into the content creation process, that discussion leaves technical writers a bit at sea as to what their role will evolve into. This presentation will offer some insights into what those new roles might be and how to prepare for the transition.
Meet the presenter
Leigh White is a DITA Specialist at IXIASOFT, where she works with product integrations,product design, and marketing communications. Leigh has spoken on DITA, content management systems content conversion, and DITA-OT plugin development at a number of conferences, including DITA North America, DITA Europe, Intelligent Content, Lavacon, Writers UA, DITA Netherlands, and Congility. She is the author of DITA For Print: A DITA Open Toolkit Workbook and a contributor to The Language of Content Strategy and The Language of Technical Communication. Leigh is also a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.
Happy Healthy Technical Writers
As the worlds largest semiconductor company, Intel creates highly specialized documentation to enable the use of its technologies and intellectual property. Documentation is often created by subject matter experts (SMEs) who hand off their content to the technical publication team to include in the next revision of the documentation. The tech pub team was being overburdened with defining who should be including in the documentation creation and review phases of a document’s lifecycle and the tracking to see if all inputs had been received. This overhead was estimated around 40% of tech writer time.
A system was developed that tracked and exposed all phases of the documentation creation lifecycle, from document seeding, collaborative editing, tech pub review, group & final inspection, to publishing the final content. Notifications of SME tasks were automated as well as the tracking of completion so all could see what. This system also protected the tech pubs teams from undeserved blame when SMEs were late or did not complete their tasks by the required deadline. The tech writer overhead was reduced to less than 10% and job satisfaction increased because more time was spent doing technical writing and the blame for late work was not attributed to the technical writers.
What can the audience expect to learn?
The problems tech pub teams face are largely the same. The ideas this presentation will discuss of how Intel solved these problems could be applicable to any tech pub team and may inspire others to develop a similar approach of crisply defining documentation lifecycle phases, automating to reduce overhead, and protecting the tech writers for being blamed.
Meet the presenter
Kresten McGrath is the Documentation and Training Infrastructure Architect for Intel’s Intellectual Property Program Office in Chandler, Arizona. Kresten has spent most of his 26 year career working as an automation expert, writing software to automate tasks and increase efficiencies. Ten years ago, he began focusing his automation experience on the problems of documentation creation, management, and quality. He is the architect and creator of the Galapagos system, a DITA-based collection of technologies and custom software, that increased the productivity of his technical publications team by a factor of two with only half the resources.
Becoming a Data-Driven Documentation Team
Across the organization it has become essential to collect metrics that measure our success against key performance indicators (KPIs) and take actions to improve. Yet documentation teams continue to deliver thousands of pages of content without any meaningful data upon which to measure productivity and success. Backed up with data, forward-thinking companies are discovering the tremendous impact technical content has on customer enablement, self-service, support, marketing and sales enablement.
In this session, Joe Gelb, Founder and President of Zoomin Software and Lawrence Orin, Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert will help participants understand how to start using data in a meaningful way and truly catapult your team’s efficiency. We will distinguish between useless analytics, scorecard analytics and actionable insights.
How can you measure the performance of your content and how to improve? How can you demonstrate their your impact on the whole organization? How many users failed to find answers they seek? Are your readers reading old content? Is your most important content also the most popular content? The answers to this and more in our presentation.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn how to leverage data and analytics tools to incorporate a data-driven approach to documentation.
Find out how metrics such as content traffic and utilization, search analytics, and content aging can translate into actionable insights.
Learn how actionable insights make your teams more productive, your content more relevant and build prestige across the organization.
Meet the presenters
 Joe Gelb is Founder and President of Zoomin Software. Joe has over twenty years of experience helping enterprises implement, maintain and capitalize on structured content. At Zoomin, he has spearheaded the development of advanced technology solutions for dynamic content delivery. Prior to founding Zoomin and Suite Solutions, Joe was the CTO at Live Linx, a leading provider of software and system integration services for technical product information, where he designed and implemented solutions for aerospace, defense, manufacturing and hi-tech companies. Joe holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. |
| Lawrence Orin is Zoomin’s Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert, offering customers a deeper understanding of content strategy, and helping with their implementation with his experience as a customer of Zoomin in his previous positions. Prior to that, he was Documentation Manager at Riverbed, where he used Zoomin’s help portal to publish modern help content for customers of SteelCentral Aternity, searching in any Aternity publication, in any version, and featuring innovations like fail-safe context sensitive help, glossary popups and much more.Lawrence also formerly led the documentation team in Radvision, where he pioneered blending marketing content into technical writing to create more sales-driven documentation. He has also led teams in technical support, customer services, and has worked as a programmer and graphic designer. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from University College London (UCL). |
How DITA is Sold
abstract coming soon
What can the audience expect to learn?
coming soon
Meet the presenters
coming soon
The Metrics Dashboard: A “cross-check” for quality issues
In aviation, pilots perform an “instrument cross-check” to identify potential problems in-flight. While you can’t always describe the problem, you know it when you see it. You can use a similar instrument scan in DITA using a metrics dashboard to identify potential quality issues.
What can the audience expect to learn?
We will demonstrate how a metrics dashboard assembles the important quality information from your metrics reports and creates a complete picture of your content quality. We will examine best practices to identify potential quality issues.
Meet the presenters
 Alicia Abuan is the Conversion Specialist for Digital Aviation Learning and Development at Boeing. She is an expert at moving legacy content to DITA. She investigates and applies the best options for converting content, from manually converting content in-house to using tools that automate the process. |
 Scott Hudson is a Staff Content Engineer at ServiceNow. He has extensive experience in designing and maintaining content models, mapping and migrating legacy data, implementing DITA publishing and content management systems, optimizing the DITA authoring experience, creating author assistance using Schematron and Vale, and evaluating new information technologies. He is a shameless Sci-Fi geek and FIRST robotics mentor. Visit his blog at: http://shudson310.blogspot.com |
What I Learned From Data to Influence My Content Strategies Decisions
How many times have you heard “your docs could be better” without any accompanying actionable details?
I’ll share different metrics we’ve leveraged for making strategic decisions about our content experience. Examples will include actual data for areas like ContentOps, Design, Development, and Content.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This talk will empower writers, content strategists, and other content creators to use data to impact decisions.
Meet the presenter
Jenifer Schlotfeldt is a senior content strategist and the content experience architect for IBM Cloud. Jenifer leads a team of software engineers and content designers that own the IBM Cloud Content Experience. Not only is the team supporting the continuous delivery of the IBM Cloud Docs and API Docs, but they also embrace DevOps and Design Thinking practices. She is also the co-author of DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA, published in 2011.
Exploring Content Usefulness and Effectiveness Through Real-Time User Feedback
Background: According to a recent report by Acrolinx, nearly half (47%) of business to business buyers view 3 to 5 pieces of content before contacting a sales representative. Prospective customers search for solutions online by visiting company websites, reading product documentation, and reviewing white papers to learn more about potential products. Based on these findings, creating effective and informative content can impact business decisions and add value to a company. The purpose of the current project is to conduct extensive research on the ServiceNow Product Documentation website (docs.servicenow.com) to explore content usefulness and effectiveness and evaluate the impact on customer satisfaction.
Methods: To collect real-time feedback from users interacting with the Product Documentation website, we deployed a site intercept survey that is triggered based on specific user behaviors. We developed 4 specific blocks of questions based on user behaviors to explore content usefulness and effectiveness. When a user searches on the site and selects a result from the suggested list of options, the search block of questions pops up after a 1-minute delay with questions related to the search experience. The excessive scrolling block of questions pops up after a user scrolls up and down 3 times on a page of content. To evaluate multimedia content, the multimedia block of questions pops up after a 3-minute delay on any pages with YouTube embedded links. Finally, a general block of questions appears after a 1-minute delay on all other content pages. To allow for pooled data analysis across triggers, we included some consistent questions regarding user role, reason for visiting the site, experience with ServiceNow, and any other content resources the user accessed to try to accomplish their goal.
Results: The survey went live on October 27, 2019 and within the first 24 hours, we collected 529 qualified responses. To date, we have collected N=2,450 survey responses with the largest blocks of data coming from the general (N=968) and excessive scrolling (N=825) blocks. Additionally, we have N=427 responses for the search trigger and N=230 for multimedia. The most common reason for visiting the Product Documentation site across all triggers is to solve a problem (25%) or learn how to use an application or feature (37%).
Implications: Next steps are to continue to analyze the data to explore relevant trends. Importantly, we want to use the data to generate specific research questions related to content and identify methods to improve the user experience through ongoing projects to improve Product Documentation. Our long-term vision is to continue to innovate on how we present product content to ensure users are successful in navigating the site to find the content they need to accomplish their goals.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Given the impact product documentation has on purchasing decisions and customer satisfaction, innovative methods to explore content usefulness and usability are essential. Site intercept surveys collect real-time user feedback that is directly attached to a specific content experience and can be leveraged to evaluate key content metrics. These data are benchmarks to explore how content improvement activities affect user experience.
Meet the presenters
 Michelle Takemoto is a behavioral scientist with over 10 years of experience using evidence-based principles to drive engagement, adherence, and outcome improvement using both in-person and digital modalities. She graduated with a PhD in public health specializing in human behavior and has expertise in user-centered study design, behavior change, and quantitative and qualitative methodologies. She is a UX researcher at ServiceNow focusing on the product content ecosystem and is proficient in engagement to encourage continued participation with a digital platform using innovative methodologies. |
Katie Ott manages several teams for the Product Content organization at ServiceNow including, Release Notes, HR, and ITSM. She is also the Product Content lead for the Employee Workflow and is leading efforts around research and metrics for the entire Product Content organization. Prior to joining ServiceNow, Katie was at HP where she worked to define and implement requirements for a second-generation content management system, helped merge several documentation teams into a central function, aligned internal processes across functions including localization, CSAT, operations and support, and eventually took over management of the printer documentation, unassisted support, localization, and multi-media teams. |
Tell Me What You Need: User Experience Design for Documentation
As technical communicators, we often hear what customers want from documentation. How do we know we are providing what they need? To validate our content and innovate with confidence, we must talk to customers. By embracing the user experience, we get out of the lab and away from the computer screen.
When we talk to customers to find out what they need, we can:
- Learn more about how our customer engage with our products.
- Test the content that we provide and determine how to improve it.
- Confidently innovate new content delivery in the right direction.
Based on actual examples of user testing and design validation, you might see something that you can apply in your work. For example, we were able to get answers to the following questions:
- Are customers interested in a new type of documentation?
- Before we make changes, are we making the best choice?
- Do we provide what customers need to install or get started?
- Does the content help customers do their jobs?
What can the audience expect to learn?
Providing customer documentation is time-consuming and costly. Usability testing is a way to interact with customers. Learn about how we can use customer interaction to validate what we are doing now and anything new that we want to provide. This session includes examples of real testing and practical examples that you might want to adapt for your organization.
Meet the presenter
Carol Nugent is a Senior Staff Technical Writer at VMware. She started out in the information business with a Master of Library and Information Science, working in university and public libraries. Libraries were where she directly interacted with customers, taking their requests for information and drilling in to find out what they needed. When she moved to the technical communication space in 2001, working for hardware and software companies, she missed the direct customer access. To expand her skill set, she trained to be a Certified Usability Analyst. Putting her training to good use, she continues to write, test, validate, innovate, and to write.
Designing the Information Experience to Drive Customer Success
“Exceeding customer expectations” or “Providing the best customer experience” is a goal almost every high tech organization aspires to achieve. It’s measured through NPS, customer surveys and customer forums. A key piece of that experience is the information the customer is provided, whether through the user interface or the content delivered.
Rocket Software launched an effort to align the efforts of the under-resourced UX and ID groups across business units. In this presentation I will share how I organized and aligned UX and ID efforts, defined and prioritized initiatives, began building a user research practice, and integrated the principles of good design and information development to drive change and improve the overall customer experience.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This presentation will answer the what, why and how of aligning UX and ID, as well as the challenges and pros and cons. The audience will take away some ideas for consideration in working with their UX and UI design functions, whether integrated with information development or not, to improve their focus on the user experience and drive improvement initiatives.
Meet the presenters
Pat Burrows’ career spans the full arc of our industry in various roles from Technical Writer to Manager to Director and Consultant. Working in both high tech and the scientific industries, Pat has led multiple global teams in both content development and information architecture and has helped small companies and large corporations “think inside the box” about the creation and delivery of their content. Her expertise is in change management and leading shifts in mindset for structured authoring and digital experience, motivating teams to deliver future-state results, and shaping the intricate politics that can define the direction of information development.
Turning Tunnels Into Windows: Achieving a personalized, unified digital experience
All content teams aim to create great customer experiences with their content, and many have data to suggest they’ve succeeded. Yet, customers are still unsatisfied.
In this session, Megan Gilhooly, VP Customer Experience at Zoomin, discusses constantly increasing customer expectations for personalized content experience, shares the unintended consequences of exposing content silos to customers, and provides practical advice for solving the issue. Spoiler alert: you probably won’t like the answer, but you need to hear it!
What can the audience expect to learn?
1. Understand the importance of a unified, personalized customer experience with content
2. Discover how your organization might not be creating the experience customers desire
3. Learn the most important step in overcoming siloed content experiences.
Meet the presenter
As VP Customer Experience at Zoomin Software, Megan Gilhooly has made it her mission to change how organizations think about product content. Prior to this role, Megan spent two decades managing content teams, driving content strategy, and delivering stellar information experiences at companies like Amazon, Ping Identity, and INVIDI Technologies. Her experience includes streamlining content for Support, Sales, Product, and Marketing. As a former online retail business owner and Certified Scrum Master, Megan brings a unique perspective to managing information development and content strategy. She has a BA in Speech Communication, an MS in Journalism, an MS in Strategic Management, and a Masters Certificate in Technical Communication.
Integrating Portals to Improve Customer Experience
In mid-2019, Allscripts introduced a new portal for clients and employees to access product documentation. This product documentation portal was part of a larger client portal experience, so a seamless experience was important. Accomplishing this meant collaborating with internal partners and our documentation portal vendor to set up:
– Single sign-on (SSO) – SSO gives clients who have signed on to the client portal access to the product documentation portal without having to sign on again.
– Preferences – Preferences are shared between the client portal and the product documentation portal, enabling clients to choose the products they want to see on their documentation homepage.
– Integrated search – Integrated search enables clients to search for product documentation while outside the product documentation portal. Also, with the new topic-based search, clients see specific topics rather than entire guides in PDF form.
– Personalized documentation – With SSO and shared preferences, clients see only their products on the product documentation homepage. Clients can subscribe to notifications about updated documentation and create custom libraries to organize their content.
In late 2019, a new client portal went live, offering more opportunities for integration, including one-click access to the documentation portal and promoting documentation and release notes on the product menu giving clients direct access to their most requested documentation type.
In 2020, we will continue to improve the client experience with more usability testing, more personalized content with in-product help, and exploring additional opportunities to integrate the client portal and product documentation portal.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Working on this project over the last year and a half has inspired me to think creatively and not let the current restrictions of a tool or limitations of my ability to stop me from reaching out to others to help create a solution that exceeds our clients demands. I think that sharing our story will inspire others.
Meet the presenter
Dana Aubin is an Expert Technical Writer at Allscripts, LLC, a healthcare IT company. In addition to working with developers and clinicians to create quality content for multiple software products, Dana is part of the technical tools team in the Documentation Center of Excellence. She serves as the backup administrator to the product documentation portal, which she helped to implement. Although she still considers herself a DITA novice since diving into it last year, Dana enjoys learning new things and has immersed herself in the world of structured content. In her free time, she enjoys learning French, teaching her old dog to do new tricks, and experimenting with 100 ways to cook an egg.
Embracing Intelligent and Relevant Content for Customers
Research reveals that customers can waste time looking for technical information and then deciding on the relevancy of the results. This can lead to frustration by providing inappropriate information for the context, forcing them to sift thought to find the needed details. Information silos can exist within your organization with poor methods to link and navigate across content types. These challenges frequently extends to employees and partners trying to access technical information from older portals and intranets.
>The volume of technical content we create and manage has exploded in recent years, but have you kept current to manage it with modern digital techniques? Many organizations have adopted structured content management with a taxonomy to categorize information. New techniques and technology are emerging to manage intelligent content with a headless CMS using dynamic delivery. Results show dramatic improvements with customers and employees for gaining information and knowledge from your content.
Unified collaboration, knowledge centralization and find-ability are critical components in the journey towards this operational excellence. More significantly, intelligent content is able to deliver itself to the right person and the right time.
What can the audience expect to learn?
Learn to take advantage of emerging techniques for managing digital customer experiences with content from a variety of sources.What are the best practices you can hear about to extend into your own organization?
Meet the presenter
Chip is VP Global Solutions Consulting at SDL, managing a team who work with customers in maximizing global content with SDL technologies. 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.
Supporting the Content Delivery Needs of Manufacturing and Service Teams
Focusing on typical content types (e.g. Work instructions, parts catalogues, safety procedures, etc) we examine how delivery is integrated with Change Management and Maintenance management/scheduling applications. We show how to support the creation and moderation of supplementary content within the delivery environment. We also show how to enable users to acknowledge important content while tracking and reporting those acknowledgements.
The presentation also discusses the challenge of supporting content delivery for users who need to work offline (e.g Field Service, Sales, etc). This includes access to offline access content while retaining functions normally only available online, including capturing and syncing supplementary content created while offline.
What can the audience expect to learn?
In this presentation you’ll learn key techniques and considerations for:
1. Preparing your content for smart delivery to Manufacturing and Field Service teams
2. Enabling user contributions within the delivery environment.
3. Integration with maintenance management and change management systems
4. Taking content offline efficiently while keeping it in sync, and the reasons customers need this capability.
Meet the presenter
Joe Girling’s 17 years with Adobe Systems, Frame Technology and Interleaf combined with his aerospace engineering background, have exposed him to many content delivery challenges. He brings a unique perspective to planning and implementing dynamic content delivery solutions for internal teams within the manufacturing and engineering industries.
The Next Era of Content Analytics
Understanding how product documentation is consumed can fuel your company with data that has the potential to transform operations and impact strategic decisions. To gain this insight, you need to change the way you track and mine the behavior of users when they search, read and interact with your technical content. By combining the latest delivery, text-mining and analytics technologies, you will transform tech content into a sensor and its delivery into a data generator. You will thereby unleash the tremendous potential of information innovation, increasing its impact for many different activities and constituencies of the company.
What can the audience expect to learn?
After reviewing the flaws of the “old” approaches to content analytics, we will study how to properly capture the interactions of users with content. We will also explore the different levels of value that we can derive from modern delivery, text-mining and analytics technologies. We will see how those new technologies can multiply the value of tech content.
Meet the presenter
Fabrice Lacroix’s career is intimately linked with the internet. A system developer in the telecom industry, he rose to the position of CTO in 1994, helped create the first French ISP and develop many breakthrough technologies. Fabrice founded Antidot in 1999 and Fluid Topics in 2013.
Fabrice is a board member of several companies where he advises on innovation and the evolution of the software industry. He graduated from ENSIMAG (the “French MIT”) and holds a MS in computing from Imperial College, London.