Past Webinars

September 16, 2020 Tools and techniques used in software development can also be applied for documentation management:

• Storage and issue management using GitHub
• Automated quality checks and continuous publishing using Netlify
• Editing and collaboration support
• Release strategies

We will analyze a working Docs as Code setup that will be freely available on GitHub afterward so attendees will be able to fork it, work with it, gain a deeper understanding and apply these concepts into their own documentation projects. Although any text-based document format works, we will use a mixed DITA and Markdown project in the demo setup. Presented by: Alex Jitianu has been working for more than 10 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 the development of technical documentation tools and DITA specific support.

July 21, 2021 With this webinar, we are pleased to announce the release of the first-ever e-learning course to train technical writers and subject matter experts on the use of Simplified Technical English (STE), the global standard for writing clear and concise content. Most of the world’s leading companies have accelerated their digital transformation efforts during the pandemic—efforts that are not slowing down. Content plays a key role in digitalization, as it has an important impact on the customer experience, where good quality content will help grow and create new business and service models and ensure safe product use. Because of this key role, it is important that global writing teams learn how to write content that is accurate, clear, aligned, and easy to find by their customers. Through STE companies can maximize the value of their enterprise content, whether this is for technical documentation, marketing, or support. Technical writers will be able to further improve their skills and show industry credibility through an e-learning course, which one could do at any time and from any location. During this webinar, participants will learn more about STE, the values it brings, and how this e-learning course will help you create the best possible content. Presented by: 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.

May 12, 2020 In its eighth year of collecting data, the Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM) and Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) asked managers, information architects, writers, training developers, and more how they are addressing the challenges of meeting customer information needs. During the webinar we walk through the results of the 2020 Trends Survey, a study we have been conducting since 2012. We trace the changes in how we think about developing and delivering content. Learn how others in the information-development community are planning to respond to new customer demands for innovative approaches to development and delivery. Presented by: Dawn Stevens, President, Comtech Services and Director of CIDM has 28 years of practical experience in virtually every role within a documentation and training department, including project management, instructional design, writing, editing, and multimedia programming. Dawn is the perfect advisor to identify and remove the challenges you face in producing usable, technical information and training content. With both engineering and technical communication degrees, Dawn combines her solid technical foundation with strong writing and design skills to lead our team of consultants and specialists in providing the expertise you need. Mark Gross, President, Data Conversion Laboratory, is a recognized authority on XML implementation and document conversion. Mark also serves as Project Executive, with overall responsibility for resource management and planning. Prior to joining DCL in 1981, Mark was with the consulting practice of Arthur Young & Co. Mark has a BS in Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University. He has also taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of automated conversions to XML and SGML.

March 9, 2021 Ironically, the terms utilized to describe a vocabulary of words used to organize and catalog information within a content corpus often are used inconsistently or interchangeably. However, each term represents a point, on an increasing scale of complexity and resulting data richness and applicability. In this two-part webinar, Dawn Stevens of Comtech Services defines key points along this scale, comparing and contrasting the scope and domain to which each term applies, suggesting when each might be used, and recommending the processes for creating it. Dawn is joined by Rik Page of Bluestream, who will demonstrate real-life examples of each in use. Participants will gain clarity about the approach required to make content more accessible for their users. View part 2 of this webinar here. Presented by: 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 20 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. 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.

August 10, 2020 Content developers and managers worldwide are coming together to share ideas and inspire each other at ConVEx in September. When first announced, we said ConVEx is not an online simulation of an in-person conference, but an immersive experience designed from the ground up to use our e-resources in the best possible way to bring you a wealth of ideas and information to support your efforts in defining and executing a comprehensive content strategy. During this Webinar, Dawn Stevens explains what we mean by this statement and what you can expect and gain from this new event format. We'll discuss the event format, the technology we'll use, and highlight the many networking activities provided. By the end of the Webinar, you'll know why you should attend ConVEx — it's an opportunity to have a positive experience, converge with others in the industry, focus your attention on industry issues, and magnify your value to your organization. Presented by: Dawn Stevens, President, Comtech Services and Director of CIDM has 28 years of practical experience in virtually every role within a documentation and training department, including project management, instructional design, writing, editing, and multimedia programming. Dawn is the perfect advisor to identify and remove the challenges you face in producing usable, technical information and training content. With both engineering and technical communication degrees, Dawn combines her solid technical foundation with strong writing and design skills to lead our team of consultants and specialists in providing the expertise you need.

October 20, 2021 Semantics add unique benefits for content, especially within organizations utilizing structured content. Whether content is for detailed product documentation, polished marketing materials, or accurate, insightful employee enablement, all audiences gain by quickly finding what they want. While improving findability is key, providing accurate information recommendations dramatically increases relevancy with minimal use of personal data. From pages to personal assistants, reuse metrics to insights, content that connects to core semantics—the real-world ideas and objects it refers to—becomes truly intelligent. But, of course, benefits like this don't come from just pushing a button—or can they? During this webinar, Joe and Chip will discuss that while machine learning is a good start, it may not give customers the full value, clarity, or futureproofing required. So we challenged ourselves to productize a semantic AI approach that drives a polished end-user experience—and also appeals to busy editorial teams who care about quality but need to beat deadlines. We'll also examine emerging best practices for the practical adoption of semantic AI within your organization. Learn how RWS built a layered solution for Tridion, combining it with the power of semantic AI. These innovations fuse a powerful partnership of Tridion for content management excellence with PoolParty for taxonomy management. The results provide content teams with the power, automation, and accuracy of modern semantics with human validation.   Presented by: Chip Gettinger is VP Global Solutions Consulting at RWS, managing a team that works with customers in maximizing global content with RWS. 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. Joe Pairman is Senior Product Manager, Tridion Docs. By looking at customers' underlying needs, and recognizing technical opportunities, he has built truly innovative solutions with strategic value. Joe designed and led the development of a personalized guidance app that helped millions of users without requiring any of their data. He also integrated a knowledge model with granular structured content to automatically give data integrators a broad overview of their available implementation options and next actions. Most recently, Joe brings the power of his first B2B product love –Tridion Docs – to a whole new market and user sector of smart specialists who don't have time to learn structured authoring. Product work is more than just building features – it's bringing people together to shape vision, plans, and priorities across the whole software lifecycle, in a way that keeps the original value when the ground situation inevitably changes. Joe has learned to get things done with solid, secure, engineering without losing track of the path to greater customer value.

April 6, 2021 Ironically, the terms used to describe a vocabulary of words that organize and catalog information within a content corpus are often used inconsistently or interchangeably. However, each term represents a point on an increasing scale of complexity and resulting data richness and applicability. Following Part 1 of this webinar in which Dawn Stevens of Comtech Services defined and compared these points along the taxonomy spectrum (view part 1 recording), Rik Page of Bluestream now demonstrates the technology and tools that enable you to define and manage your terms and relationships, as well as those that consume what you have defined. Participants will see practical, real-life applications of the taxonomical concepts previously presented. Click here to download the reading list referenced during this webinar. Presented by: 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 20 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. 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.

August 5, 2020 Abstract Business leaders around the globe are looking for ways to replicate the successes of innovative and disruptive organizations like Uber, Amazon, and Spotify that grow exponentially. Rather than adding 10%, they’re looking for 1000%. Exponential growth is deliberate and involves organizations developing capabilities that dramatically outperform the competition. Rob Hanna explores how information-enablement across the enterprise is key to this type of performance and why we need to rethink how we create content to become Exponential Organizations. What you’ll learn

• The definition of “information enablement”
• How your content is tied to your brand’s ability to grow exponentially
• How the 4th Industrial Revolution will impact global businesses, including yours

Presented by: Rob Hanna co-founded Precision Content in 2013 to change the way writers approach structured authoring. Having spent more than decades 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 these 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 Precision Content clients make the move to structured authoring as seamless as possible.

Recorded: April 13, 2022 Presented by Michael Klemme and Klaus Fleischmann

Terminology is at the core of great content. When used consistently, it helps you communicate precisely and efficiently, which is an approach to your brand communication. It also makes your content accurate.

But it’s important to have a sound process in place to manage your terminology. Join us and learn how to:

• Make sure all stakeholders have input into your terminology set

• Set a process for consent and approval of your terms

• Make sure you have a consistent and failsafe process to

  • Have all your terms for checking in Acrolinx, as the content quality solution of choice

  • Make sure all terminology action is concentrated in quickTerm, as the leading terminology system

Presented by:

Michael Klemme is a Senior Solutions Architect at Acrolinx. He advises new and existing customers on how they can efficiently integrate Acrolinx into their processes and helps partners to develop integrations.

March 3, 2021 This webinar is free. Agile development makes specific demands on documentation teams, whose content creators need to be nimble, describe features in a piece-meal fashion, and find ways to report on their content development progress. Structured content is ideally suited to these needs. But experience has shown that some teams find it hard to move fully to an Agile methodology, often using an uneasy mix of waterfall and Agile processes. Precision Content’s Keith Schengili-Roberts will talk about the current state of Agile and structured content, and also give an introduction to the Iterative and Incremental Development (IID) methodology, a recent Agile offshoot that works well for technical writing teams. If you are wondering about what the impacts are of working with Agile or are simply looking to optimize your DITA-based documentation processes, this presentation is for you! Presented by: 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 the Chair of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee. He is also the writer behind the “DITAWriter.com” website, which has long been a useful resource for those working with the DITA XML standard. He lives in the north end of Toronto with his long-time girlfriend Dhan and her two noisy green-cheeked conures.

June 3, 2020 In these difficult times, it’s absolutely critical to demonstrate your value to your organization. As a technical communicator, your mission is to make sure you’re getting the right information to the right people. Part of the solution is to find the right tools – but they will only take you so far. Good content is crucial. You must write content in a way that best suits your audience and best matches their search patterns, so they can organically surface the information they need. Join Lawrence Orin, Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert at Zoomin, as he takes an intriguing look at content strategy, and reveals a down-to-earth, practical approach that will ensure your writing is making a visible impact on your company. In it this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Practical steps to improving your writing skills
• Best practices for structuring content
• How to tailor your writing to your audience

Presented by: Lawrence Orin is Product Evangelist and Customer Implementation Expert at Zoomin, where he leverages his experience as a past customer to help new customers with their implementation and content strategy. He previously led documentation teams at Radvision and Riverbed, as well as other teams in technical support and customer services. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from University College London.

November 11, 2021 Content authors need to consider many factors while converting their existing content to structured content, including analyzing the content at its source. This exercise is interesting yet challenging, vexing, but rewarding. But what are those factors you need to think about for this conversion? For starters, you need to consider:

• Character styles and how they are assigned (Use the style named Emphasis? Press Ctrl+I? Use a toolbar icon? Is there a difference?)
• Paragraph styles and how they are assigned (Did you skip bullet 1 and go right to bullet 2 because it looks better and, if you did, what does it mean?)
• Images and how to import them (Did you copy/paste or use the import setting? If so, how did you import it? As a link to the source?)
• Links between files or the web (Did it just get typed in, or was this inserted using a linking tool? How will it convert?)
• Page layout, tables, design, variables, equations, and so on

What do you actually need to do to start analyzing the content? How do you deconstruct your source documents? What can you do with just the features available in your authoring tool to make it easier to comprehend what you are dealing with? In this webinar, we will identify the most common “gotcha” issues, share a few useful tips and tricks to reduce the volume of these glitches, and offer you a sneak peek into the workflow to take legacy content and plan your conversion to structured content. Although this is not a ‘one and done’ approach, this session should give you a fair idea about the early steps you need to consider while thinking about DITA, content strategy, content management systems, and automating of the conversion process from ‘been there’ to ‘done that.’ Presented by: Bernard Aschwanden is an Adobe Consultant and the CEO of Publishing Smarter.  A service provider specialized in content creation, management, and distribution, headquartered in Barrie, Canada. 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 and provide a maximum return on investments.  Bernard Aschwanden on LinkedIn | @aschwanden4stc on Twitter | @publishsmarter on Twitter | www.publishingsmarter.com