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Workshops OfferedJoAnn Hackos Workshop Series Advanced DITA Training including DITA 1.2 This workshop will provide attendees with a hands-on walk-through of the essential DITA fundamentals, programming skills, and DITA Open Toolkit configurations required to assemble, style, and publish DITA XML source. After a brief overview of the DITA framework, course lectures and exercises will focus on the key pieces of a DITA publishing architecture, how to set it up, and how to optimize its publishing capabilities using customizations and plug-ins. You will learn to set up a publishing architecture using the DITA-OT pipeline and learn how to configure and debug the DITA-OT. You will learn also about key features of the new specification as they relate to publishing, including keyref, conref push, constraints, and subject scheme maps. Developing a Content-Management Strategy In this workshop, we'll examine the issues involved in creating documentation databases. We'll discuss the impact of single sourcing on department organization, project management, training, writing style, document control, editing, and translation. We'll review some of the tools available and look at both their strengths and their shortcomings. Developing Quality Documentation in an Agile Environment This workshop focuses on the Scrum Agile methodology and how documentation departments can adjust to this high-speed development environment. You will come away with a firm understanding of the Scrum process and how documentation can effectively engage in the process for both engineering and documentation-centric projects. This workshop is exercise-intensive using complex but easy-to-understand examples to map out documentation planning and implementation within the Scrum process. If you have a documentation team transitioning to Scrum, we recommend coming to the workshop as a group. Want to know why structured, topic-based authoring is the technical communication solution of the future? Been asking what DITA is really all about? Want to know if it's the right direction for your organization? Confused about how to get started? The JoAnn Hackos Workshop Series invites you to a weekwlong intensive DITA Boot Camp. In this workshop, you learn that DITA is a standard for authoring topic-based technical information, that using DITA provides significant business advantages, and that you can get started immediately with the DITA Open Toolkit. Information Modeling for Topic-based Authoring in XML Developing a sound, comprehensive Information Model is critical to your move to structured authoring, XML, and content management. The Information Model defines the structures your writers use to develop content that is consistent and reusable. Your Information Model provides the foundation for your authoring guidelines and the implementation of content management in your organization. In this workshop, learn how to build an information model for your organization. You learn to define your information types, the content units they contain, your standard document structures, as well as your metadata schema, naming conventions, and file and folder structure. Managing Your Documentation Projects If you can keep your projects under control in the midst of chaos, everyone will think you're a miracle worker. If you can bring a semblance of order into the chaos, you'll at least be a hero. This workshop gives you the tools to succeed. Minimalism: Creating Manuals that People Really Need Minimalism isn't only for simple products or targeted at beginners. A minimalist approach makes complex products easier to understand and gets critical information more directly into the hands of experts. People attending this workshop report they've reduced their documentation by 50 to 75 percent. To implement a single-sourcing strategy for information development and publishing, we strongly recommend that organizations structure the content they produce. Well-structured content leads to more opportunities for reuse across products, user communities, delivery media, and other dimensions. More reuse leads to a greater return on investment, as well as the ability to serve dynamic content to your information customers. User and Task Analysis for Information Design This workshop focuses on practical techniques to learn about your users, their goals, and their work, and create a model that will serve as a decision-making tool throughout the life-cycle of your project or product. You'll learn how to make the most of your user information resources, whether based on site visits and contacts, in-house subject matter experts, or even, when you must, on your own guesstimates. A guided sequence of exercises will step you through the process of modeling users and their tasks and deciding on the methods that are most appropriate to your situation. You'll also receive a workbook amply illustrated with good and bad examples. For more information on workshops offered by Comtech Services, please visit the web site at www.comtech-serv.com. |
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