Upcoming Webinars
Crossing the Chasm with DITA Part 2: Now Go
February 23, 2012, 1pm EST
Follow the story of organizations that have successfully moved through the early phases to Pilot Project that prove their business case. Understand the requirements for component content management systems and the challenges of legacy conversion. Know how organizations have proved their return on investment.
Presented by Comtech Services and Data Conversion Laboratory
Crossing the Chasm with DITA Part 3: Next Grow
March 22, 2012, 1pm EDT
Learn what the innovators and early adopters have done to change the focus to customer delivery and enterprise adoption. Follow the course of key companies that are using the XML DITA standard to take DITA across the chasm to optimized delivery of information using social media and new technology to deliver information at the point of need. Follow enterprise dissemination the shows the original skeptics that everyone benefits.
Presented by Comtech Services and Data Conversion Laboratory
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On-Demand Webinars
Crossing the Chasm with DITA Part 1: Get Ready ... Get Set
Recorded: January 19, 2012
In this webinar, we trace the progress of many organizations from the early phases of Exploration, Preparation, and Education through genuine progress with Pilot projects and implementing a Component Content Management System to keep everything in line, through the Conversion of legacy content to a new way of structuring and managing information for the Enterprise.
Presented by Comtech Services and Data Conversion Laboratory
DITA Emerging Trends and Best Practices: Practical Solutions for 2012 and Beyond
Recorded: December 15, 2011
JoAnn Hackos from Comtech Services joins us to take a look at the top trends that are driving DITA adoption in technical publications, as well as expansion into departments such as Marketing and Engineering. We'll discuss what lies ahead for DITA in 2012 and provide some practical solutions that you can implement in your organization.
Presenters: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc. & Chip Gettinger, SDL
Determining a Successful Roadmap for Dynamic Publishing
Recorded: December 14, 2011
In this eSeminar, JoAnn Hackos and PG Bartlett, will look at best practices in adopting dynamic publishing with an overview of what you need to consider when determining your dynamic publishing roadmap.
Presenters: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc. & PG Bartlett, Quark
DITA 1.2 Learning and Training: Building reusable learning objects
Recorded: September 22, 2011
Fee: $75.00
Join Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services Senior Consultant, as she introduces the Learning and Training specialization of OASIS DITA 1.2.
Presenter: Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services, Inc.
Handling Warnings in User-Friendly Documentation
Recorded: September 8, 2011
Fee: $75.00 (Free for CIDM Department Members)
Join Marie-Louise Flacke in this CIDM webinar to understand the problems associated with the current practices in writing warnings, cautions, and other safety hazard statements in customer documentation. Writers, and their legal advisors, tend to add dozens of safety messages and heavily formatted risk warnings in procedures.
Presenter: Marie-Louise Flacke
DITA and XLIFF: The perfect marriage gets stronger
Recorded: August 25, 2011
Fee: $75.00 (Free for CIDM Department Members)
The addition of DITA into the mainstream for documentation is causing exciting advances in the way information is authored, organized, accessed, shared, and published. For the first time, a system for topic-based publishing exists that is supported by tools, best practices, and user communities. One of the exciting ROI factors people consider is the savings in translation. But often, that savings is difficult to find due to the paradox. The paradox is that DITA is very strong because it lets authors create, manage, reuse, and publish 10s, 100s, 1000s of topics. However managing the translation of 10s, 100s, 1000s of topics adds unexpected overhead to the translators. Enter XLIFF. XLIFF is also an OASIS open standard. It is the open standard for Localization and Translation interchange. Attend this presentation and demonstration to see how XLIFF solves the paradox.
Presenters: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc., Bryan Schnabel, Tektronix, Inc. & Rodolfo M. Raya, Maxprograms
DITA 1.2 Constraint Mechanism: Improving your DITA Authoring experience
Recorded: August 17, 2011
Fee: $75.00
In this next session in the DITA 1.2 webinar series, Hal Trent of Comtech Services will discuss how the Constraints Mechanism has been implemented in the DITA 1.2 specification and how it can be leveraged to add greater authoring controls without specializing the DITA DTDs.
Speaker: Hal Trent, Comtech Services, Inc.
Are You Ready for the New Information Revolution? New Frontiers for Multilingual Web Analytics, SEO and Community Sentiment Analysis
Recorded: July 21, 2011
Fee: $75.00 (Free for CIDM Department members)
This talk will present some new ideas which are going to revolutionize information development in the 21st Century. Companies are moving quickly away from traditional documentation strategies towards an approach based on three main principles: customer focus, customer engagement and customer involvement.
Speakers: Andrew Bredenkamp & Jennifer Beaupre, acrolinx
Customized DITA Documents Delivered Using SharePoint
Recorded: June 29, 2011
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
In this webinar, Hal Trent of Comtech Services will demonstrate how you can leverage your company's SharePoint CMS to deliver content, web pages, and customized PDFs from your DITA content without having to change your source content or compromise the efforts you have already put into your document's semantic structure, reuse strategy, or metadata organization.
Speaker: Hal Trent, Comtech Services, Inc.
DITA Metrics in Production: How, when, where and why (and how much?)
Recorded: June 16, 2011
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00 (Free for CIDM Department members)
Using metrics for DITA is a common topic when it comes to figuring out the Return on Investment numbers to justify buying a Content Management System, but what about when you already have the CMS and want to measure how productive your writing team is? AMD's Documentation & Localization Manager, Keith Schengili-Roberts has been using a DITA CMS for four years and will go over the types of metrics he uses to measure the productivity of his team. He will also look at how to measure re-use rates, the relative benefits of using segmentation numbers vs. topic counts, and looking at how to improve quality through metrics. This talk is aimed particularly at managers who are seeking additional tools for making effective decisions in deploying their DITA writing staff.
Speaker: Keith Schengili-Roberts, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Taking Control of Your Translations: Designing an in-house process to optimally manage your translations
Recorded: Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Fee: $75.00
In their upcoming webinar, Frank Miller and Hal Trent of Comtech Services discuss a more effective process for managing the DITA translation process, showing how and where you can tighten your process to ensure better matches and higher quality translations before delivering a translation package to a translator.
Speakers: Frank Miller & Hal Trent, Comtech Services, Inc.
Ensuring Consistency with Map and Topic Templates
Recorded: April 28, 2011
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75 (Free for CIDM Department members)
In this session, Helen & Julia share their process for developing templates and their internal DITA procedures guide. They show how they rolled them out across the entire team.
Speakers: Helen Michaud & Julia Malkin, Endeca
Are You Ready for Conversion?
Recorded: March 10, 2011
Learn how to evaluate your legacy content and assess how close you are to the DITA standard. Understand the decision-making process you need to follow to prepare for the conversion process. Consider if your team should first restructure your content in your current tool environment or wait to restructure and rewrite following conversion.
Learn about DCL's specification process and how to prepare for the best possible conversion experience. Learn about the kinds of things that you should consider in advance, and the kinds of preparations you can make in order to make the changeover process easier with no surprises.
Speakers: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services & Mark Gross, Data Conversion Laboratory
Solving the Problems of Release Management
Recorded: January 20, 2011
Username: CIDM
Password: 12011relcidm
Join CIDM members in an open discussion of the problems of release management in a content management environment.
Speakers: JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, Inc., Tracey Atkinson & Wanda Applegate, Siemens PLM Software
DITA 1.2 Improvements to Conref: Extending the Conref with Conref Push, Conref Range, and Delayed Conref Resolution
Recorded: October 28, 2010
Fee: $75
Frank Miller presents each of the conref enhancements, discussing use cases, benefits, examples, and restrictions for each of the new features.
Speaker: Frank Miller
Ugly DITA Webinar
Recorded: September 30, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 45 min presentation time and 45 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75
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
Never Waste a Good Crisis
Recorded: August 25, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 45 min presentation time and 45 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00 (Free for CIDM Department members)
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?
Recorded: August 11, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 45 min presentation time and 45 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00 (Free for CIDM Department members and CMS 2010 conference attendees.)
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
Recorded: July 28, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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.
WinANT—Simplifying and Automating DITA Publishing
Recorded: June 16, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 45 min presentation time and 45 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00 (Free for CIDM Department members and CMS 2010 conference attendees.)
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
Recorded: May 18, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: FREE
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
Recorded: April 13, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: FREE
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
Publishing XML to PDF and the Web Using the Same Style Sheet
Recorded: March 11, 2010
Time: 8:00am PST(GMT -8:00) and 11:00am EST(GMT -5:00)
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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
Recorded: February 25, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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
Recorded: February 2, 2010
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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
Recorded: December 16, 2009
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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
Recorded Date: October 22, 2009, 11:00am EDT/ 8:00am PDT
Length: 1.5 hours; 45 min presentation time and 45 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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 Department members, please send an email to info@infomanagementcenter.com for registration details.)
XML Webinar Series
Session 3: Transforming XML - Understanding the mechanisms used to Conditionally process and Transform your documents
Recorded Date: Thursday October 15, 2009, 1pm Eastern
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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
Listen to both recorded webinars for only $125
Session 1: XML Basics and Benefits: Understanding the structure and flexibility of XML
Recorded Date: Thursday July 9, 2009
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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
Length: 1.5 hours; 60 min presentation time and 30 min Q&A time.
Fee: $75.00
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
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
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.
Information Development in a Flat World
Sponsored by CPTSC
Featuring JoAnn Hackos
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.
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