Test Kitchens
Join our exhibitors as they demonstrate their tools and answer your questions about how to make best use of their capabilities.
(more test kitchen descriptions coming soon)
Ovitas
Smart Content Delivery for Parts and Service
This demo will show parts and service content delivered to online and offline Web Applications for Field Service engineers and technicians.
Find and filter information within Service content, order parts and build a shopping cart, all in one platform.
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.
Mekon
Semantic Booster: Powering your AEM tagging with PoolParty’s enterprise taxonomy management
The Semantic Booster for AEM brings the power of PoolParty’s taxonomy management and advanced semantic capabilities to Adobe Experience Manager.
- Editors can manage and approve terms in a central, easy-to-use environment, and sync them to AEM Tags.
- Make full use of multilingual support, hierarchical relations and synonyms.
- Use the autotagging feature to automatically tag AEM pages against taxonomy terms.
We’ll demonstrate how the Semantic Booster harnesses the powerful capabilities of AEM and PoolParty to make tagging simpler and more relevant, helping your users find content more easily.
Meet the presenter
Maura Moran 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.
Bluestream
Uncovering the Value of Metadata Management
What is metadata and why is it so important? The unprecedented functionality of Bluestream’s Extended Metadata Module opens new possibilities. In this presentation Bluestream will show why metadata is vital and how you can extend its usage to provide greater value to the entire organization.
Improving the Salesforce Search Experience
Salesforce is everywhere but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Problems exist when it comes to searching for technical information and the delivery of information can leave users underwhelmed. Bluestream will show how clever integration with a CCMS and delivery platform can greatly improve the user experience.
Meet the presenter
Rik 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.
Zoomin Software
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 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. |
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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..Live Demo: Injecting Docs Inside your Web App
Is there anything tastier than a sneak preview into the inner workings of some of the most successful and innovative companies in the world? Well, pull up a chair and grab a spoon because boy do we have a tasty treat for you!
Lucky participants can join Lawrence Orin as he reveals play-by-play insights into how industry-leading Zoomin customers are now surfacing their technical content right inside their web applications; delivering end users the information they need, right when and where they need it.
How did they do it? Which tech stack did they use? How have they transformed the end user experience? These secrets revealed and more at this too hot to handle Test Kitchen.
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).
GlobalLink
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 As the landscape for consuming content changes, Hal Trent guides and provides solutions to companies to ensure their content management practices stay current and are ready for the future. He believes when content developers understand their content is a service to their customers, silos between content groups are removed, content lifecycles improve, and customer satisfaction grows. As a senior solutions engineer at TransPerfect with GlobalLink CCMS, Trent, works closely with software, translation, and sales teams, to ensure current and future customers are properly advised and provided the best information possible throughout the content management lifecycle. |
Paul Akins has over twenty years of experience helping customers design, implement and capitalize on structured content environments. As a member of TransPerfect with GlobalLink CCMS, he is the product owner of Inspire, the latest generation web based Component Content Management Systems.easyDITA by Jorsek
The Simplicity and Power of a Static Site Generator (SSG)
If you have product documentation, you want a fast and simple way to get it online for your customers. Static websites might be a good solution but preparing your content and integrating all the pieces takes time. At least, it used to…
In this test kitchen, Jorsek representatives will provide a live demonstration of easyDITA’s Static Site Generator (SSG). A fast and intuitive way to turn your content into a fully functioning, easy to use, static website (built with Gatsby) in just 10 minutes. Learn what it takes to publish documentation to a static site so it can be read by your audience immediately!
And it doesn’t cost anything extra. easyDITA includes the Static Site Generator at all subscription levels.
Meet the presenters
Dushko Radevski is a Technical Sales Representative at Jorsek Inc, the makers of easyDITA. Dushko is best described as a problem solver. Every day, he invests his days working closely with technical documentation teams who are looking for help with their documentation creation and publishing problems. Dushko is exceptional at helping to identify underlying issues and bringing the most effective solution to the table. Outside of his role at Jorsek, Dushko has an interest in languages and is currently studying German to add to his multilingual communications capabilities. Dushko presents in a European Prime Time session.
Velizar Demirev is a Customer Success Manager at Jorsek Inc, the makers of easyDITA. In his role, Velizar collaborates with customers throughout the onboarding process to ensure that they end up with an effective implementation of their structured content solution. From there, he works tirelessly as his customer’s advocate ensuring that they receive the highest level of support and that they achieve all their goals and key performance indicators. Velizar is passionate about startups and works outside Jorsek to grow the startup ecosystem in western New York. Velizar presents in a North American Prime Time session.
Oberon Technologies
Making DITA Authoring Easier for Casual Contributors/Reviewers
Documentation teams rely on input from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and managers to complete their publications. The significant burdens of manually capturing or converting content and feedback can often create errors and delays. Ideally, SMEs and Reviewers could use a browser-based tool to provide content and review of the source XML — without having to bother with any mark-up. This Test Kitchen will show you how easily you can capture valuable information from anyone across our ecosystem and easily integrate it into your technical documentation processes.
Attendees will get to see how easily DITA Authoring and Review can be with browser based tools that do not require any XML tagging, yet they capture valid XML. Users will get a chance to explore the fit of such tools within their environment and ask senior solution architect any questions they may have.
Meet the presenters
Todd Burdin is a senior solution architect and strategic business consultant with 25+ years of software development and business consulting expertise, encompassing the entire content development lifecycle. He has extensive experience delivering innovative enterprise solutions for content management, structured authoring, and publishing to a diverse set of industries, including equipment manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, legal, publishing, and financial industry. Todd has worked at Oberon Technologies for 6+ years. Previous employers include PTC, Arbortext, Entrusted Solutions, and First Consulting Group.
Etteplan
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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. |
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 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. |
Datazone / Miramo
A Complete PDF Re-design in Under 10 Minutes
A short demonstration of how a PDF design can be completely re-worked in under 10 minutes using only the MiramoPDF’s GUI template designer followed by a Q&A.
Meet the presenters
Joanne Hannagen, Business Development Manager. Joanne joined Datazone 4 years ago and has a background in business and project management.
Corinna Kinchin, CTO and Co-founder of Datazone. Corinna is a graduate in Computer Science from Cambridge University and one of the lead developers of the Miramo product suite.
Precision Content
Serve Up Tasty Morsels of Microcontent with WittyDITA
WittyParrot is a cloud-based microcontent platform used to create enterprise solutions for any number of uses such as sales enablement and product service and support. The platform manages the content broken down into its parts and encases it in a metadata wrapper called a Wit. From here the Wits can be delivered through many different connected channels including Sales Force, Office 365, and even Teams as a chatbot.
WittyDITA by Precision Content leverages the DITA Open Toolkit to burst DITA publications into microcontent blocks and serve them up to WittyParrot along with rich document and CCMS-level metadata. These Wits are continuously updated from the source upon publication, ensuring that your enterprise users have instant access to the latest information.
Come watch Rob Hanna demonstrate WittyDITA and start thinking about how you can unlock the knowledge in your enterprise.
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.
Data Conversion Laboratory
Harmonizer: The First Step in Identifying Content Redundancy
Harmonizer, by Data Conversion Laboratory, is a software application that analyzes document collections and incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) into its text analysis, using natural language processing (NLP) to identify redundant and near-redundant content in the collection. Even with the wide adoption of componentized content management and standards like XML and DITA, there is still plenty of opportunity for copies and near-copies of content to appear throughout repositories. Manually finding these duplicates in even a modestly sized content collection is a real challenge.
Harmonizer simultaneously analyzes across any file format – XML, HTML, SGML, Word, FrameMaker, InDesign, PDF, and others – and is invaluable when planning a content reuse strategy or moving content to a new platform. The software produces reports in both HTML and Excel, providing content analysis and insight to consolidate content and eliminate redundancies.
Meet the presenter
Christopher Hill has 15 years of experience in working in publishing and content management. He started his career as a high school teacher, but moved into the world of corporate training teaching a range of software and XML courses. He has written and conducted many training courses, was a founding employee of one of the first hosted content management systems, and led the user experience redesign for an enterprise CMS. He now manages the Harmonizer product for Data Conversion Laboratory.
WhP
Discover the Solution to Your Linguistic Review Issues
If the linguistic review is under your responsibility, you know how tedious it can be. You have your linguistic provider’s translations in-hand, and you’re ready to hit the “publish” button. Before going ahead, you need to run the linguistic review with your in-country reviewers. You press them to edit the document but they’re busy on another project. When you finally receive their comments, they are in the comment column of a PDF file, so you need to copy and paste them to the translated files – while making sure your translator reviews them. Will you be able to meet your deadline?
Here’s the solution to your recurring linguistic review pains: the Augmented Review, a collaborative web-based tool that enables your reviewers to spot the new content fast, view the original and translated DITA projects side-by-side, and edit the translation dynamically. The tool supports all the features and versions of DITA, as well as MathML.
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.
IXIASOFT
Remote Collaboration in a Challenging Environment
Now that so few of us can do a quick check in across the cube wall or at the water cooler, it is more important than ever to nurture a strong collaborative culture.
Join IXIASOFT as we browse through our intuitive, web-based interface, and explore working with a broad range of contributors to develop content from draft one through to approval.
The test kitchen will show how IXIASOFT CCMS:
- Provides a user-friendly interface accessible to all, without compromising the power of structured authoring
- Guides users to reuse the right content in the right place
- Highlights new and revised content for reviewers and editors
- Accesses historical inputs, and sorts by commenter, string, or other filter
- Assigns and manages workflow with multiple contributors
- Reviews content with large groups
- Supports a decisive, efficient review process, with commenting and discussion of review content in real time across large groups
- Manages traceability, including approval workflows
Meet the presenters
Nolwenn Kerzreho is IXIASOFT’s technical account manager for EMEA and has over a decade of experience in the technical communication industry. An international speaker and author, Nolwenn helps documentation teams industrialize, rationalize and automate their documentation production to publish to web, mobile and print faster, enhance content consistency, reduce time-to-market and costs within controlled processes.
You can usually find Nolwenn behind her desk, at the IXIASOFT booth or speaking at various industry events, visiting customers around Europe or teaching at University Rennes 2, where she introduced the new curriculum for technical communication in 2012. Based in France, Nolwenn has international work experience in the chemical, Telecom, language, and high-tech industries.
Robert Bredlau is a strategic business professional with over 20 years of experience. Before joining IXIASOFT, he was a member of the executive team at companies like Acrolinx, e-Spirit, and Day Software (acquired by Adobe), and led the international business transformation across Europe and the United States.
Nolwenn & Robert present in a European Prime Time session.
Sharon Figueira has worked in the technical communication domain for about 20 years, primarily working for global tier one enterprise level companies. I played a leading role in two major migrations into DITA/CCMS, first at Kodak, and secondly at Ericsson. For the last two years, I have worked for IXIASOFT as a pre-sales consultant. I live on an organic farm on a tiny island in beautiful British Columbia. Sharon presents in North America Prime Time session.
SDL
Collective Spaces for Unified Collaboration
Authoring, review and approval processes are critical for many forms of business content. SDL Tridion Docs 14 expands the process of knowledge creation by making it easier for anyone in the organization to author and review content with browser-based interfaces. Draft Space maintains a structured content approach while eliminating the need for your contributors to understand and work directly with the underlying XML. Review Space offers a highly intuitive way to collaboratively review content and provide feedback, while maintaining strong audit capabilities. Together, Draft and Review Space allow technical writers, subject matter experts, reviewers, and others to collaborate in the content authoring, review, and approval processes in an intuitive way while preserving all the benefits of structured content authoring.
Meet the presenter
Sara Pawlowic is a Solutions Architect for SDL. She has worked in component content management and automated publishing for 20+ years, and enjoys working with SDL customers to define content best practices.
Scriptorium
DITA to InDesign
Join Jake Campbell as he shows you how Scriptorium’s DITA to InDesign plugin can turn your structured content into styled and formatted InDesign output.
Meet the presenter
Jake Campbell works with clients to identify design goals for their content and how to use structure and automation to achieve them.
With a background in education and software QA processes, Jake is adept at helping maintain workflows and coordinate efforts between Scriptorium and their clients.
Adobe
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Chad Dybdahl is a Solutions Consultant for Technical Communication at Adobe.
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Ayush Gupta is a Product Manager responsible for product roadmap, prioritization, customer success, partner relationships, and go-to-market strategy. He has 10+ years of experience working in the technology industry and extensive experience in building and scaling enterprise products.
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Wortimla RS is a solutions consultant for Adobe’s Tech Comm suite of products. An experienced technical writer, Wortimla has worked across multiple disciplines in both large and small technology companies before she became a consultant. She loves how technical writing and technical communication tools play an integral role in digital transformation and focuses on guiding organizations future-proof their content creation ecosystem.Syncro Soft / Oxygen
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 Alin Balasa started working more than 12 years ago as a software developer for Syncro Soft Ltd., the developer of the popular Oxygen XML Editor. He is currently part of the team that develops Oxygen WebHelp and Oxygen Feedback. |
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 Mihaela Calotescu is a software developer at Syncro Soft Ltd. for about 12 years. In the past, she worked on the development of the Oxygen XML Editor. During the last years she is part of the Oxygen Web Author and Oxygen Content Fusion team. |
 Bogdan Dumitru has been a software developer at Syncro Soft Ltd. for 4 years. He is currently part of the team that develops Oxygen XML Web Author and Oxygen Content Fusion. |
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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.Ryfifine
Ryffining Your Content: Create a quality checklist and automate it
Come join the Ryffine team as they walk you through establishing a quality checklist to assess the maturity of your content. Ryffine will share how they assess content and discuss how you can modify it to meet the needs of your organization.
The Ryffine team will then demonstrate how to automate these quality checks using standard tools and technologies.
This presentation will benefit two camps:
– The group that wants to learn about what is involved in a DITA conversion and understand the types of automation they can apply to achieve various levels of content maturity.
– The group that wants to perform quality checks on existing DITA content and automate correcting those issues where possible.
Meet the presenter
Micaela Monroe is a Content Strategist at Ryffine. She has been serving in the industry since 2014, working closely with large companies and software engineers to implement DITA in new and creative ways.
PTC Arbortext
PTC Arbortext Solutions Tips & Tricks
End-to-end, Arbortext offers the seamless integration that enables you to create, edit, publish and manage XML content. A content enablement system capable of facilitating the deployment of a huge range of media, translated and delivered in real time.
With Arbortext, you’ll have the confident assurance of data intelligence of one smart system.
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.
Stilo International
Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right: Learn The Value Of Proper Deduplication
Content reuse is a fundamental benefit of DITA adoption, providing huge efficiency gains to authoring teams and helping to ensure the consistency of published information across an enterprise. However, identifying potential reuse opportunities and implementing reuse strategies can be a painstaking and laborious process. As an increasing volume of content is authored in DITA across authoring teams, then invariably more content is replicated over a period of time. So wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to automatically identify reuse potential across your DITA content collections, deduplicate topics and update conref libraries and ditamap? Introducing DITA OptimizeR, Stilo’s content optimization service.
Attend our Technology Test Kitchen at ConVEx for a demonstration of OptimizeR and learn how you can significantly reduce the amount of content that needs to be maintained on an ongoing basis and publish more accurate, normalized content, faster.
This presentation will benefit audience members whom are looking for more efficient ways to identify potential reuse opportunities and implement reuse strategies. They will learn how they can significantly reduce the amount of content that needs to be maintained on an ongoing basis and publish more accurate, normalized content, faster.
Meet the presenter
Helen joined Stilo as a technical editor. She now works closely with Stilo Migrate customers, helping them to analyze their legacy content and configure appropriate mapping rules. She also provides Migrate customer training and support. Helen has helped Migrate customers to convert tens of thousands of pages of content to DITA and custom XML. Helen holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and has pursued graduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Antenna House
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Alex Critchfield is the Technical Support Manager at Antenna House and has been specializing in XML and XSL-FO technology for over 15 years.
Celina Huang is a Sales & Marketing Specialist at Antenna House, Inc., a leader in the field of document formatting and conversion. She has 9 years of experience managing several next generation software products and specializes in XML related technologies..Fluid Topics
Make Your Metadata Great Again
Metadata are probably the most critical elements of documentation publishing: they enable contextual information retrieval and faceted search with content filtering.
Get inconsistent metadata on your docs and nobody will find anything in the documentation! Most of the times, this metadata chaos stems from data source diversity, unclear or changing writing/tagging strategies.
Post-editing of metadata without the burden of modifying content is actually possible. Fluid Topics’ new Enrich & Clean capability lets you define metadata alignment rules that get applied automatically at content publishing time.
In this Test Kitchen, we will teach you how to align metadata through the intuitive creation of a custom taxonomy, and therefore make your content consistent and consumable. We’ll also show how to create dynamic reading suggestions and links between pieces of content, leveraging newly-aligned tags.
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.
Publishing Made Easy – Automating DITA Content from Adobe Experience Manager with Typefi and InDesign
Technical documents and marketing content are more frequently intersecting. When more than two-thirds of people who are making purchasing decisions are reviewing technical documentation before buying, it is crucial to provide a rich experience for prospects with every piece of content being delivered. Brand voice and governance are critical to organizations and can only be achieved by collaboration between technical documentation creators and marketing.
This presentation will demonstrate how Typefi enables users to manage their XML content and assets in Adobe Experience Manager and easily publish that content with Typefi to produce richly-formatted documents. This enables customers to write once and publish to multiple media, including print.
Typefi is an automated publishing platform built on InDesign and InDesign Server. It empowers users to create impactful user documentation, specification sheets and other marketing collateral with the click of a button leveraging the creative tools of marketing and the structure of DITA.
Technical documentation teams and marketing organizations need to work together to provide an experience for customers and prospects that move them along a customer journey. This means providing the exact content customers need when they need it in the format that meets their needs. Typefi enables organizations to create visually-compelling content with the click of a button.
Meet the presenter
Chris has over 20 years’ experience in improving organizational processes through technology, including a decade working with publishers to define and deliver solutions that dramatically improve the way they publish content. He is always excited about the opportunities offered by new technologies.
Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts (Economics) from the University of Richmond, and a Masters of Business Administration from Widener University.
The Schematron Method: Eliminating fat from your content
Do you wish your content was slim and fit? Do you go back to unhealthy writing habits when under pressure? Are your time commitments keeping you from exercising more rigor in your editorial passes? Could you use a personal trainer to coach and encourage you during your day-to-day efforts? Look no further! Schematron could be your answer. In this test kitchen, Comtech’s Brianna Stevens will share base recipes for implementing a personalized Schematron plan to keep your content in tip-top shape. Let her show you how the Schematron method has helped hundreds of your peers in catching and purging common mistakes before they have a chance to take hold in published content.
Meet the presenter
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 CIDM and Comtech websites, advertisements, and publications.