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WebinarsUpcoming Webinars DITA for the Common Man The DITA Content Collaboration project aims to create a walk-up-and-use, wiki-like DITA experience for literally anyone who needs to share their knowledge with others, with the intention of encouraging the widest possible deployment of basic DITA writing capability. Don will discuss the motivations for the project, demonstrate some common scenarios in both corporate and non-business settings, and describe how the project's goals fit into the spectrum of other DITA tools and collaboration methods currently available. Speaker: Don Day–Chair of OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee DITA Webinar: Where DITA is Going: DITA 1.2 and Component Content Management Ugly DITA Webinar If used properly, DITA is a powerful, comprehensive, and flexible standard that allows organizations to better use and reuse their structured content—and reduce costs in the process. But the comprehensiveness and flexibility of DITA can easily result in ugly DITA and a frustrated experience. In this presentation, Sheila and Marc share their recommendations from a DITA pilot project undertaken at STMicroelectronics. Sheila and Marc provide valuable insight in how to avoid and overcome problems resulting from the DITA content model, stumbling blocks in content reuse, unexpected print quality issues, adoption resistance, and implementation difficulties. Speakers: Sheila D'Annunzio, STMicroelectronics & Marc Speyer, Independent ****************************************************** On-Demand Webinars Never Waste a Good Crisis Layoffs. Unplanned employee turnover. Hiring freezes. Missed deadlines. Looming workloads. Impossible schedules. As painful as crises are, it's often easier to make needed changes in response to crises than at other times. Learn how one manager got approval to add personnel in the middle of a reduction in force. Speaker: Daphne Walmer, Medtronic DITA vs. Non-Technical Authors: Why and how? This session will show approaches to have non-technical authors directly write DITA content including improving discovery of available tags, preventing abuse of tags for styling, and promotion of inline tagging. Speaker: Laurens van den Oever, Xopus The DITA 1.2 Keyref Mechanism: How to Implement the Keyref Mechanism to Increase Content Reuse In this webinar, Hal Trent of Comtech Services introduces the new DITA 1.2 keyref mechanism and provides possible implementation strategies. The keyref mechanism, along with the conkeyref mechanism, will allow users to easily interchange variable content, build context/content-specific hyperlinks, and solve many of the issues that conref could not solve. Speaker: Hal Trent, Comtech Services, Inc. Building a Bulletproof Business Case View this webinar to get a sneak peek at the results of Comtech's recent research on companies that have developed outstanding metrics to evaluate the success of their CMS projects. JoAnn Hackos will review the survey results and discuss the four levels of changes that can help you achieve significant cost savings. Speaker: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services & Cindy Elliot, PTC WinANT—Simplifying and Automating DITA Publishing In this session, WinANT's developer demonstrates this open source tool, and describes the ways it can be "fine-tuned" to streamline DITA publishing. Speaker: Tony Self, HyperWrite Pty. Ltd. 3D Without the Glasses: Adding Dynamic 3D Images to your Technical Publications Abstract: In this webinar, we'll explore the benefits you can achieve and the costs you can save by working directly with engineering design content. You learn how you can easily create dynamically generated graphics, 2D illustrations, and additional views. The more and better graphics that result help you reduce word-count and the cost of writing, updating, and translation. Speakers: Robert Merlo–Right Hemisphere & JoAnn Hackos—Comtech Services, Inc. Collaborating with Your Customers Using Your Product Documentation Abstract: DITA and other CMS management and authoring tools are valuable for the preparation, management and reuse of reference content, but what about the end user? Learn how eComPress Publisher can efficiently process and automatically index your reference publications into powerful secure, compressed, encrypted and annotatable productivity tools, that will enable your end users in the field to quickly and securely find what they need, and use this information to seamlessly collaborate with others online, with full access to that knowledge base offline. Speakers: Alfred Papallo & Robert Minard, Eurofield Information Solutions XML Webinar Series—Session 4 Abstract: In the 4th session of the XML Webinar Series, Hal Trent and Frank Miller of Comtech Services will look to the future of XML/DITA publishing by incorporating technologies like CSS 3 which allows for a single style sheet to deliver print and web documents. Prior to the release of the CSS 3 specification, publishing groups needing both print and web delivery were required to have two separate style sheets, one for PDF and the other for web delivery. In general, technical publication groups used XSL-FO, Frame Maker, or Arbortext Styler to publish XML content to PDF, but with rendering engines supporting the CSS 3 specification, publishing to PDF is about to change. In this webinar Hal and Frank will review the CSS 3 specification, and demonstrate how documentation groups can design a CSS 3 style sheet to accommodate both print and web requirements using publishing engines like Antenna House. In addition, Hal and Frank will review upcoming technologies that will improve consistent PDF and web output. Speakers: Hal Trent & Frank Miller, Comtech Services, Inc. Content for Tomorrow: Social Media and the Dilemma for Content Teams This webinar is free for CIDM Members. Please send an email to info@infomanagementcenter.com to register for this webinar. Abstract: Social networking, social media, and other Web 2.0 technologies have changed the way that companies communicate to and exchange information with their customers. What experiments and big bets are content teams making to embrace these changes? Are we falling behind, leaping ahead, or just trying to keep stride with the complex possibilities we offer? This session provides ideas, guidance, and insights into how Microsoft and other web properties, user assistance, and information and publishing efforts are being designed to connect with customers in this new world. Speaker: Alex Blanton, Microsoft Corporation How Effective Use of Metadata and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Can Be an Answer to Your DITA Nightmares Abstract: Many challenges face authors and organizations moving to DITA. Some of those challenges may not jump out at you at first. Soon you will be faced with problems that may stop you from sleeping peacefully at night. For example, breaking your content into small modular topics is great for reuse, but could easily multiply by 10 or even 100 the numbers of files yo have to manage. Finding information in this "sea of content" can be a grueling task! Another example is links. In your DITA content, you will have links everywhere. Maps contain links to topics. Topics may have links to images, cross references to other topics, related links, and conrefs. Soon, you may not know what content is being used where, you may not even know what content is being used at all! These are just two examples of the many practical challenges you will be faced with as an author and as an organization. During the presentation, we will see how the effective use of metadata along with existing standards such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) can be an answer to those challenges. With metadata and RDF, those nasty nightmares will go away, indeed they may well be the answer to all of your DITA dreams! Speaker: Frank Shipley, Componize Software Structured Publishing with an Open Source CMS Abstract: Thinking about DITA but concerned about the complexity? If you're looking for a topic-based single-source publishing strategy but don't need all the features of DITA, you might consider a Wiki-style open source Content Management System. Benefits can include low cost of ownership, ease of use for authors and editors, short lead times to get up and running, and state-of-the-art integrated CMS/publishing frameworks that can be extended as needed. The right open source CMS can offer powerful feature sets previously only available in proprietary systems, including the ability to set up topic-based publishing environments with support for single sourcing, multiple publishing channels, content re-use, and translation management. But not all systems are equal, or equally suited to technical publishing. In this Webinar, Peter Dykstra reviews why to use a Content Management System for technical publishing, why to consider open source, and how to use the open source Daisy CMS to support a topic-based information architecture for html and pdf book publishing. Specific topics:
Speaker: Peter Dykstra, MetaphorX LLC Planning Collaborative Work so that Teams Remain Efficient Abstract: Is the refrain, "Who has time to plan?" familiar in your organization? Do authors maintain that working on their own is the only surefire way to be efficient? Do they claim that working in XML takes more time? Struggling with writers over project planning and coordinating activities is not a new problem. Nor is it unusual to hear protests about authoring tools. Documentation managers are all too familiar with authors skipping the planning process, owning complete documents, and detecting flaws in the tools. But single sourcing complexities only invigorate these struggles. From information modeling and metadata to figuring out how to map, share, and optimize content, single sourcing fundamentals—both planning and collaborating—can add overhead to projects. Despite apparent inefficiencies, effective planning and collaborating can optimize reuse and impact ROI. This session provides various approaches to effective planning and collaborating to ensure reuse efficiency; you will learn:
Speakers: Bobbi Gibson & Charlotte Robidoux, Hewlett-Packard Company (This webinar is FREE for CIDM Members, please send an email to info@infomanagementcenter.com for registration details.) XML Webinar Series Recorded Date: Thursday October 15, 2009, 1pm Eastern Abstract: In the third installation of the XML series, you are shown the importance of XML tagging in creating audience specific documentation in a cost effective environment. We will discuss a series of use cases where XML tagging has played an important role in meeting timely deadlines by just having your information structured in XML. In this session you will learn how using XML tagging to semantically structure your information will allow you to leverage your XSLT to create specific document output. You will also gain the technical knowledge necessary to understand the difference between filtering your documentation using conditional processing versus filtering your documentation at the transform. This session will use the DITA framework for demonstrations, but will also explain the value of audience specific documentation and how it applies to XML. The Oxygen 10.3 editor will be used for demonstrations throughout the webinar. Each participant will receive the XSL-FO style sheet for PDF output and XHTML style sheet for web out used in the demonstration. The style sheets can be used by the participants in the Oxygen 10.3 DITA-OT or in the DITA OT downloaded from source forge. Speakers: Hal Trent & Frank Miller, Comtech Services, Inc. XML Webinar Series Session 1: XML Basics and Benefits: Understanding the structure and flexibility of XML Recorded Date: Thursday July 9, 2009 Abstract: In the first of two webinars in this XML series, you get a high-level overview of the different pieces that comprise an XML document. You will be introduced to the building blocks of XML: elements, attributes, DTDs, and schemas. This webinar will prepare you for the second webinar in the series, Publishing XML (Understanding what happens when you produce a final document). Session 2: Publishing XML: Understanding what happens when you produce a final document Recorded Date: Thursday July 23, 2009 Abstract: In the second of two webinars in this XML series, you are introduced to the transforms and stylesheets necessary to publish XML documents. You will gain the technical knowledge necessary to structure and style XML content for delivery to HTML and PDF . The Oxygen 10.2 editor will be used for demonstrations throughout the webinar. Each participant will receive the XSL-FO style sheet for PDF output and XHTML style sheet for web out used in the demonstration. The style sheets can be used by the participants in the Oxygen 10.2 DITA-OT or in the DITA OT downloaded from source forge. Speaker: Hal Trent, Comtech Services, Inc. A Case Study in Agile Adoption: Sponsored by CIDM (Members Only) Recorded date: May 14, 2009, 11:00am Eastern This presentation provides a case study of one product and documentation team's adoption of Agile. We'll discuss how they focused on customer needs, established priorities, worked only on high-priority items, and got buy-in from the entire team for mutually-assured success. We'll cover what worked well, what was problematic, and lessons learned over several releases. We'll conclude with a question and answer session to show how you can harness this powerful methodology to produce better, more usable information for your customers. Speakers: Bill Gearhart of Comtech Services and Mike Wethington of BMC Software Recorded date: February 17, 2009, 2pm Eastern The goal of better-managed content is now much easier to achieve ... even on constrained budgets. DITA (the Darwin Information Typing Architecture standard) is rapidly being adopted as a proven foundation for content. And Microsoft SharePoint has made basic content management features accessible to hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide. Whether you're in HR, legal, marketing or other departments, this webinar will teach you to leverage DITA and SharePoint for cost-effective information sharing. Speakers: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services & Su-Laine Yeo, JustSystems Surviving and Thriving in a Flat World Recorded date: February 5, 2009, 1pm Eastern JoAnn Hackos will be discussing how medical writers can meet the challenges of the current economy and concerns about the outsourcing of writing work. In her presentation, she will describe how medical writers can adapt as budgets tighten and expectations change. How can we define what we do in ways that showcase our expertise? What strategies enable us to take advantage of new developments in information technology, and how can these strategies advance our careers during uncertain times? Speaker: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services Component Content Management In Action: Delivering on the Promise of XML Recorded date: November 3, 2008 @ 1:00pm Eastern Component content management (CCM) is proving to be fundamental in scenarios for success. In this webinar, XML experts use real-world examples to show you how CCM technology helps lower costs, improve operational efficiency, and implement flexible foundations that scale as the cost and complexity of content development increases. Speakers: Mary Laplante, Bill Trippe, Kevin Duffy, Karen Moser, & Mark Tiegs Your Terminology is Your Brand: Keep it Consistent and Under Control Recorded date: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8 am Pacific / 11 pm Eastern You will learn how misusing terminology in your source content can have a dramatically negative impact on both your translations and your company's brand. JoAnn and Sophie will also discuss the importance of terminology management throughout your organization in support of potential of automated translation. Speakers: JoAnn Hackos-Comtech Services & Sophie Hurst-SDL Fulfilling the Promise of Enterprise Publishing Recorded date: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 Learn how you can turn technical content into an asset that visibly adds value across the enterprise and how dynamic enterprise publishing enables end-to-end collaboration and maximum reuse. Speakers: JoAnn Hackos-Comtech Services & Kelly Stirman-Mark Logic Corporation Getting Started with DITA - Practical Tips for Using Arbortext for DITA Getting started with DITA takes more than a little knowledge of task, concept, and reference. Learn the best practices for launching your DITA project with the support of a professional XML Editor. Know the key components of a DITA solution and connect the base model with your customers and your product requirements. Speakers: JoAnn Hackos–Comtech Services & Peter Velikin–PTC Why VPs Fear Document Production This webinar features industry experts, including Dr. JoAnn Hackos. You can register to listen to this recorded event at Astoria's website. Sponsored by Comtech Services, XMetaL and XyEnterprise Information Development in a Flat World Sponsored by CPTSC From inactive to interactive—bringing your style guide to life! Hear from The Chicago Manual of Style, Avaya and SDL on the importance of style in global communication and in achieving a globally consistent brand. Also discover how automation can improve the consistency of style and terminology in content, better prepare content for global audiences and bring your style guide to life! There are lots of tools and techniques that can be applied to solving the challenges surrounding the "findability" of information. Some people think you just put up a search box and that's it, but in reality effective search is a much more complex issue. Effective search strategies leverage metadata and taxonomies include a variety of tools integrated as search applications and search systems. Listen to 4-part conference-call series with Earley and Associates about issues and challenges surrounding enterprise search. Hear from world-class search experts and be exposed to tools from select vendors. Intro to DITA - Practical Tips for Using Arbortext for DITA Speakers: JoAnn Hackos of Comtech Services &Peter Velikin of PTC Best Practices for DITA specializations: What you need to know before specializing Tom Magliery of JustSystems reviews things to consider when evaluating the need to specialize. Tom walks through steps to design a specialization and through a live demonstration, show a practical example of how to specialize. Speaker: Tom Magliery, XML Technology Specialist, JustSystems Delivering Global Content Made Easy View this educational webinar to learn about new techniques and methodologies for authoring for audiences world-wide, and sharing, and publishing content across the global organization. Speakers: Sophie Hurst, SDL, Howard Schwartz, Trisoft, & Andrew Wilson, JustSystems |
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