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Recorded on November 3, 2022For over fifteen years, teams have tried to justify their need for a move to structured content with the same old arguments. In today’s ever-changing landscape, these old arguments are no longer sufficient and, in many cases, not even relevant. In this webinar, we will be looking at other drivers for the move to structure with real-world examples of what can be achieved. Presented by Rik Page, Bluestream Rik has worked with component content and document management solutions for over 20 years. He has worked with custom DTDs and Schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200, and DITA, together with various document and content management systems, including Documentum, SharePoint, XDocs, Ixiasoft, easyDITA, Astoria, and Vasont. His practical experience ranges from high-volume data capture and content creation to dynamic multichannel delivery in various industries, including banking and finance, manufacturing, central government, and education. In addition, Rik has participated in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate innovative solutions throughout Europe and North America. Rik is also an advocate of Documentation 4.0, a new concept reflecting the demands on content/documentation that results from moving to Industry 4.0 and ‘smart’ manufacturing.
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Recorded on October 11, 2022
In the past, we have produced documents with a focus on how they look when published. Page layout, font face, font size, bolding and italics have been useful not just to make the documents attractive, but more importantly, to make them easier to read and understand. Nowadays we are told that semantic markup is preferable. Why is that, and how do we add it to our docs?
Presented by: Helen St. Denis
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 millions 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. Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-st-denis-b1b60214/ -
Recorded on October 5, 2022
CPQ systems are just one of several business systems that can be enhanced with the content stored within your CCMS. Thomas and Rik will drill down into this with real-world examples of multiple deployments, including QAD’s own experience. They will discuss the pros and potential pitfalls of these combined systems and explore the best approach to take to maximize their success. Presented by: Thomas Blumer, QADDr. Thomas Blumer is the Director of Knowledge Management at QAD. He has a Doctorate in Business Administration with a focus on Knowledge Transfer in M&A Integrations. In his current role, Thomas is delivering enterprise-wide Knowledge Management initiatives focused on collaborating, accelerating best practices, and leveraging internal organizational knowledge. Thomas' main focus is to provide customers, partners, and QAD employees with the right product knowledge, at the right time and at the right place.
Over the last 30 years, Thomas has worked for several Fortune 500 companies such as HP, UBS, and Sharp and implemented or enhanced knowledge base systems, subject matter expert yellow page systems, and communities of practice.
Rik Page, Bluestream. Rik has worked with component content and document management solutions for over 20 years. He has worked with custom DTDs and Schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200, and DITA, together with various document and content management systems, including Documentum, SharePoint, XDocs, Ixiasoft, easyDITA, Astoria, and Vasont. His practical experience ranges from high volume data capture and content creation to dynamic multichannel delivery in various industries, including banking and finance, manufacturing, central government, and education. In addition, Rik has participated in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate innovative solutions throughout Europe and North America. Rik is also an advocate of Documentation 4.0, a new concept reflecting the demands on content/documentation that results from moving to Industry 4.0 and ‘smart’ manufacturing. -
Recorded on September 28, 2022
Most tech doc websites are barely usable.Why is that? For most people, moving from paper-based documentation to delivering technical content on the web is nothing but generating HTML pages that will turn into a website. But this simplistic view overlooks the difficulties stemming from the specificities of technical documentation and misses the usability and interactivity gains offered by a true digital transformation of tech doc.This webinar will uncover the intricacies of transitioning to a web-based documentation and the cultural and technological clashes it represents. We will carve out the different options you need to consider and the technical choices you need to make, how they vary according to your strategic goals, your corpus of content, and your audience, giving you some key insights for successfully achieving your content digital transformation.Presented by Fabrice Lacroix
Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation. -
Recorded on September 15, 2022
3D has become indispensable in engineering departments. But 3D models rarely find their way into technical documentation. In spare parts catalogs, 3D catalogs have become standard thanks to automatic processing. There, people appreciate that 3D views are intuitively understandable and offer additional interactivity in online documentation. What can technical authors learn from the 3D experiences of the spare parts catalog world?
What steps are necessary in a CCMS to not only visually enhance online documentation with interactive 3D data, but also to enable new access to information? Which formats and tools can be used?
Presented by:Sebastian Göttel is Head of Marketing and Product Management at Quanos Content Solutions GmbH. The computer scientist has been involved with XML editing systems and content delivery since 1998. In the Tekom environment, he worked on version 1.0 of the iiRDS standard. [email protected]
Hermann Arya is a digital professional with 15+ years of experience in the aftersales project environment. In Europe he was and still is responsible for the revolution and evolution of 3D visualizations in the service information system context. As Head of Professional Service at Quanos Service Solutions GmbH and through the execution of well over 150 customer projects, he has also been able to build up extensive knowledge of the value chain around service information systems. [email protected]
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Recorded on September 8, 2022
Does this sound familiar: there is so much data in your organization, and it is not always clear which sources are up to date and really relevant to business decisions? Terminology can act as the single source of truth, breaking up data silos and providing the same information to every employee. But in order to achieve that, terminology needs to get close to the users and find its way into their systems.
We share how
- to implement the "single source of truth” in terminology work
- to connect your systems, e.g., ERP, CMS, PIM, CAT tools, etc.,
- to distribute the information
- to make this information usable for all
Join us for a tour that starts with your relevant data sources and ends with a clear and concise terminology process as a way of making sense and use of this data.
Presented by Christian Lang Christian Lang, Technical Consultant, has a wide range of experience and interests in the language field, proven by his degree in Japanese studies and translation. He first became involved with terminology management as a freelance translator for the European Patent Office. Since then, it has become one of his hobbies, as has research in the field of NLP on topics such as machine translation, automatic term extraction, and concept maps. -
Recorded: September 7, 2022
Do you know:- Which publishing format is still the most popular among technical writers globally?
- Which major content development challenges have been ranked at the top by technical writers?
- Which authoring and publishing tools are the most popular among technical writers?
- Most preferred authoring methods
- Benefits of adopting XML and DITA-based authoring (structured authoring)
- Most popular tools for authoring and publishing technical content
- Top challenges faced while creating and publishing technical content
- Key metrics that define success for technical content
- Challenges with effective content reuse
- Emerging trends in the technical communication industry
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Recorded: August 25, 2022
Digital Transformation is often defined as the process of using digital technologies to create or optimize business processes to improve company and customer experience and meet changing customer demand and market requirements. Digital transformation may involve spending thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars purchasing new tools and technologies. No matter how many new tools and systems and how much money you put toward transforming your organization, a large piece of the digital transformation puzzle comprises a content transformation. CIDM, DCL, and RWS wanted to understand what steps people are taking toward “digital transformation” and where content structure and information architecture fit into the plan. The three organizations launched a three-month long “Digital Transformation Survey” to understand how various industries address the adoption of processes, technology, tools, and information architecture. The results have been collected, analyzed, and discussed. Now it’s time to share the results and our observations with you. No matter what industry you work in, digital transformation is happening on many levels, and understanding how your peers are applying resources, budget, and strategies can contribute to your success. 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. Chip Gettinger is the VP of Global Solutions Consulting at RWS, he manages 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. -
Recorded on August 3, 2022
Harmonizer is a powerful tool created by Data Conversion Laboratory that analyzes large document collections to identify content reuse across multiple content sets and source formats. Understanding the volume and nature of duplication in content is invaluable to effectively implement a reuse-based content model like DITA or S1000D. Harmonizer dives deeper into content analysis and can evaluate, identify, and report not only on duplication at the paragraph level but also duplication within specific XML elements such as topics, tasks, concepts, etc. Flexibility in the level of comparison is particularly useful for performing periodic health checks on structured content to diagnose reuse issues or other issues that can arise after DITA or S1000D conversion.
This webinar will demonstrate Harmonizer’s role in performing a health check and speak to use cases that are important for any organization who has invested in DITA or S1000D. Christopher Hill, product manager for Harmonizer and structured content expert, will also detail new licensing models for the software that enable self-serve content health checkups that improve documentation workflows and ensure your investment in markup continues to return healthy results.
Presented by: Christopher Hill, Technical Product and Project Manager at Data Conversion Laboratory – [email protected] Christopher Hill has 18 years of experience 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 lead the user experience redesign for an enterprise CMS. He now manages the Harmonizer product for Data Conversion Laboratory. -
Recorded on June 15, 2022The Future of Documents is shaped by a fundamental change in how information is exchanged. This future sees a shift from traditional 'e-paper', formatted and optimized for reading by humans, towards semantically tagged information - exchanged in an open digital format. In this talk, we will share examples from industries that have a history in structured content - such as publishing and technical documentation - as well as from industries that are ‘newer to the game’, such as pharma and financial services.
- The Future of documents, - structured content and semantics from niche to mainstream
- Define Structured Content. What is it, and why is it so fundamentally different from formatted documents?
- What drives organizations to move from traditional authoring towards structured content authoring
- How can industries learn from each other? – Discussing benefits and features.
- Content automation
- Documents as data
- Component based authoring
- Future of documents
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Recorded: June 9, 2022Terminology only works effectively if the organization manages to agree on consistent concepts and terms. But to achieve a company-wide understanding and agreement a well thought out process and regular interaction are needed. While some organizations prefer a systematic process, others react to ad hoc requests, some are happy with a combination of both. Therefore, we
- look at the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and
- share how to set them up in practice
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Recorded: June 8, 2022Content fuels your business. It has a purpose and an expected outcome: Deeper engagement. Higher conversions. Fewer support tickets. The list goes on. But does your content live up to its expectations? And if not, what can you do about it? Join Chris Willis, Acrolinx CMO, as he explores the importance and value of content impact. You’ll learn:
- What impactful content looks like and if yours qualifies
- Why content impact outperforms basic quality to deliver better business results
- How technology can help you automate your content improvement
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Recorded: May 25, 2022Presented by Helen St. Denis Pretty easily, we can get a basic DITA structure from headings, tables and lists in the legacy content. As well, though, for each different source format there are a number of ways to extract information that can be used to refine the DITA output. Likewise, there are ways to enrich the content automatically. There are, however, some things it can’t do… yet. As more and more types of content are being moved to DITA, a greater variety of legacy formats need to be converted. We’ll look at some of them to see what can be gleaned from each, beyond the basic structure, and some of the challenges that remain. Presented by: Helen St. Denis Helen started at Stilo over twenty years ago as a technical editor. As Conversion Services manager, she’s helped customers convert millions of pages of content to DITA, and worked with organizations with many different approaches to, and reasons for, the move to structured content.
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Recorded: May 17, 2022While product cycles are getting shorter in all industries, down to daily releases for SaaS vendors, technical documentation teams have to keep up with the pace. Information needs to be written faster and delivered in sync. Join Fabrice Lacroix, CEO and founder of Fluid Topics, and Gaspard Bébié-Valérian, certified technical writer and functional consultant, as they untangle the complex process of continuous content delivery and unveil new methods and processes to embrace the new landscape of documentation. They will share their insights and experience as they explore the collaborative potential between SMEs and tech writers opened by Docs as Code, examine the tooling behind a continuous documentation flow, and showcase the example of a robot writing release notes. Presented by Fabrice Lacroix & Gaspard Bébié-Valérian: Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a technology pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation. At the crossroads of engineering and social sciences, Gaspard enjoys exploring the breadth of technologies involved in technical documentation, including structured documentation, CCMS, and collaborative paradigms like docs as code. Gaspard works as Functional Consultant at Antidot helping clients get the most out of Fluid Topics.
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Recorded: April 27, 2022Presented by Klaus Fleischmann OK, so we have all understood that terminology is important for content, AI, search engines, consistent naming, etc. But what do you need to do
- to launch a professional and scalable terminology process,
- to convince your boss and your peers that your company needs it and
- to get this off the ground quickly and efficiently with the help of modern terminology software?
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Recorded: April 20, 2022 Presented by Géraldine Boulez Your technical documentation is one of your company’s most valuable assets. The bad news is: your execs and most of the other departments in your organization don’t know about it. Even worse, some even consider tech content as an unproductive cost and try to cut it to a minimum. Still, your documentation can achieve your company’s most critical goals in all customer-facing areas, and it’s high time your organization understood and embraced the business opportunity brought by tech doc. In this webinar, you will learn:
- How to debunk the most common misconceptions about the business value of tech doc
- How to connect your tech content to your company’s business goals
- and how to demonstrate to your execs how your documentation can effectively generate gains in three main areas of business: Marketing, Customer Support, and Field Services.
Presented by:
Géraldine is passionate about new technologies and their ability to solve people and business problems. This is what has led her to product management, marketing and business development positions in fast-growing tech companies and innovative corporations for over twenty years. Geraldine is VP of Marketing at Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
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Recorded: April 13, 2022Presented 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:
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Make sure all stakeholders have input into your terminology set
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Set a process for consent and approval of your terms
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Make sure you have a consistent and failsafe process to
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Have all your terms for checking in Acrolinx, as the content quality solution of choice
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Make sure all terminology action is concentrated in quickTerm, as the leading terminology system
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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.
Klaus Fleischmann studied translation and IT in Vienna, holds an MA in Conference Interpreting from Monterey, California, and a MAS in Technical Communication from Krems, Austria. In 1996, he founded Austria-based Kaleidoscope, a company implementing content, translation, and terminology management processes for internationally active companies. Kaleidoscope develops online collaboration software for enterprise-level terminology workflow, translator query management, in-country review etc., making the translation quality process comprehensible and strategically manageable. In 2007, he became CEO of Austria´s leading LSP, Eurocom Translation Services GmbH. Always active in the industry, Klaus got voted into the Gala Board of Directors in 2015 and 2017. -
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April 6, 2022 Content reuse is one of the many advantages of moving to DITA and a structured standard. It helps us reduce the amount of overall content we have, improve consistency, and decrease redundancy. However, it is difficult to visualize this value before the conversion takes place. Estimates can be off, and it is hardly ever clear how much content we can actually reuse from our documentation. Typos and partial matches only complicate our futile estimates. Narrowing the scope of this approximation by investigating similar matches in our source content before conversion can provide valuable insight to the potential benefits of moving to a structured standard. Join TJ Dhaliwal in this session as he uses Stilo’s Analyzer and Migrate to investigate source content for similar and exact matches. Then, further use that information to plan for conrefs, keyrefs, and topicrefs before any transformation takes place. Conclude by deduplicating exact topic matches and realizing some of the potential that was uncovered in the beginning. Presented by: TJ Dhaliwal is a Technical Sales Product Specialist at Stilo, helping customers uncover solutions to their content conversion needs. With a strong technical background in engineering combined with a passion for public speaking, he’s been able to successfully bridge the gaps between project stakeholders. As a problem solver, TJ has helped several enterprise-level companies convert tens of thousands of pages of their content to DITA. He’s recently taken lead on and helped bring to market Stilo’s newest product, Analyzer.
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Recorded: February 23, 2022 Structured content provides numerous benefits for organizations with authoring, managing, and delivering information. Perhaps your organization has realized these benefits—but what’s next? A formal content classification system, or a taxonomy, provides a framework that supports search, filtering, classification, consistent terminology, and more. The combination of taxonomy and structured content opens up compelling possibilities for digital delivery. Add continuous updates and advancements in business data, and you can transform the customer experience—but you may feel a little exposed out on the leading edge of technology. Sarah and Chip will present and discuss emerging trends, techniques, and technology for your digital information initiatives. During the webinar you’ll learn:
- How do you select and manage a good taxonomy?
- Classifying content – human, machine, or a combination?
- Coordinating taxonomy terms across various teams and languages
- Taking advantage of Semantic AI
- Business drivers examining tagging quality vs. quantity
- Best practices and actions for you
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February 15, 2022 Just putting your technical documentation on your webpage as a PDF for download will not make you a content hero. PDF is a given – a fundamental requirement. However, both business leaders and end customers expect more than just a documentation portal or a well-designed PDF. They want contextually relevant, personalized, consistent, conversational, and scalable content experiences. But how to deliver on this expectation? In this session, Stefan Gentz, Senior Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe, will share some insights from the recent Adobe-commissioned Forrester study. Forrester surveyed 450 decision-makers on Content Experience Management to understand how global brands deliver relevant and contextual experiences across touchpoints. He will explore the design of positive customer journeys from marketing to technical support and self-service and back to sales – experiences that provide 360° content experience for your customers and handhold them across their whole content journey. Presented by: Stefan’s mission is to inspire enterprises and technical writers around the world and show how to create compelling technical communication content with the Adobe Technical Communication tools. He is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001 / EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert, and Six Sigma Champion. As a sought-after keynote speaker and moderator at conferences around the world, he travels around the globe half of the year. Besides that, he has been the European Ambassador for the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) for many years, a member of the tekom Conference Advisory Board for several years, and is now a member of the tekom iiRDS working group for Intelligent Information and member of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee. In 2016, Stefan Gentz was awarded by MindTouch as one of the Top 25 Leading Content Strategist Influencers in the world and as one of the Top 25 Content Experience Influencers in the world in 2017. Stefan Gentz on LinkedIn Stefan Gentz on XING @stefangentz on Twitter www.adobe.com
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January 12, 2022 Moving to structured authoring and implementing a CMS are critical projects that will generate long-term efficiency gains and significant savings. But before you get there, there are great hurdles to overcome. First and foremost, there's winning budget approval from your execs, who will have a singular focus on risk and ROI. Second, you need to maintain a high level of commitment and buy-in from those executives over the years that re-engineering of content production can last. Too many content restructuring projects fail or don’t even start because they cannot demonstrate a quick and tangible return on investment - and this is where Dynamic Content Delivery changes the game. Dynamic Content Delivery provides outstanding content experiences to your users and creates immediate value for your company without requiring a big bang in your writing process. It earns you internal support, money, and time you can leverage to optimize your content restructuring process. In this webinar, you will learn:
- How Dynamic Content Delivery generates value from your existing content, no matter the writing tools and methods you are using now
- How to achieve quick wins and build a fast ROI to gain support from your Execs for your content project
- How to optimize your project to move to structured authoring and make it a success
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December 14, 2021 Attend this webinar if you’re looking to:
- Provide your audience with content that is accurate and compliant
- Align your global workforce with One Voice
- Accelerate your time to market thanks to less time for review and editing
- Reduce your source content and translations by 40%
- Show industry credibility by complying with industry standards to help open new markets
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December 8, 2021 Kaarin Gordon discusses the choices and challenges for efficient content reuse facing Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research Organizations. What they want is a set of tools and platforms for easy content reuse, automatic propagation of changes from a single source, and content governance. What they have is Microsoft Word; it’s easy to use but limited to cut-n-paste content reuse. What they must deliver is multi-lingual content for a variety of uses – faster, more cost-effectively, and at lower risk. Join Eric Kuhnen in conversation with Kaarin Gordon for an engaging discussion of how component content management systems amplify or ameliorate some of the difficult content complexities that organizations face today. Presented by: As the Vice President of Life Sciences Technology Solutions at TransPerfect, Kaarin Gordon works closely with organizations on solutions to more effectively develop, manage, translate, and deliver multilingual content. She has spent 20+ years working with pharma, CROs, and medical device companies and focused on developing and implementing solutions that address global content challenges and result in decreased cycle time, reduced risk, increased consistency, and lower costs. Kaarin has a BA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Columbia University. Eric Kuhnen is the President of GlobalLink Vasont, one of TransPerfect’s GlobalLink CCMS solutions. He has more than 30 years of experience in product research, development, and management. Prior to his current role, managed global operations, product management, pre-sales, and marketing for Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc. He has also held profit-loss responsibilities with GoRemote and Oracle Corporation. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.
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December 1, 2021 Developing robust content models can never be a once-and-done endeavor where IAs are required to incorporate all aspects into the design prior to authoring. Instead, an iterative approach is needed to allow for incremental improvements not just during setup but long into production. Join Precision Content’s President and Chief Information Architect, Rob Hanna, to explore methods the company uses to refine models and update the content corpus through scheduled refactoring activities. Presented by: Rob Hanna is an award-winning technical writer and content strategist and an industry leading expert in structured XML authoring, DITA, and content management. In 2014, Rob was awarded the rank of Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and earned the Enterprise Content Management Specialist (ECMs) designation from AIIM. In 2017, he was named one of the top 25 global leaders in content experience strategy by Mind Touch. He founded Precision Content in 2013 after nearly 20 years in the industry as a technical writer, information architect, knowledge management specialist, and taxonomy expert. In 2018, Precision Content joined Google, Adobe, and Acrolinx on the list of "Top 100 Companies that Matter Most in Digital Content Industry" by EContent Magazine. See http://www.linkedin.com/in/singlesourceror for more information.