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April 21, 2021 The Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to follow plain language guidelines for government documentation. In addition, Section 508 standards require all information and communications technology to be accessible to disabled users. Besides meeting these requirements, are there other advantages for technical writers who use plain language? Yes, there are! Brenda Inman and Deb Bissantz will explore examples of overly verbose information that can be written using plain language to convey the information more clearly. While exploring these examples, Brenda and Deb will also share benefits, guidelines, and tips for using plain language. What can the audience expect to learn? Attendees will learn to recognize opportunities for using plain language, such as when to use a $0.50 word instead of a $5.00 word. Attendees will also learn tips for writing clear, concise information using plain language. Presented by: Deb Bissantz is a Content Services manager for GlobalLink CCMS. Deb’s mission is to partner with organizations to make the most of their DITA and component content management solutions. Before joining GlobalLink CCMS, Deb worked with and authored DITA content for many years. As a writer and tools administrator, she helped several organizations migrate technical documentation to DITA and to a CCMS. Deb is a voting member of the DITA Technical Committee. Brenda Inman is the Director of Technical Publications for Robotics and Digital Solutions at Ethicon, part of the Johnson & Johnson family of companies. Brenda has worked in the medical device her entire career mostly within technical publications and localization and also has experience in clinical research and regulatory affairs. Brenda’s experience within technical publications and localization includes writing user manual content, implementation of content management systems, and setting up best practices for writing and localization.
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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.
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April 14, 2021 Unsurprisingly, when it comes to the money your company spends producing technical documentation, your management knows the cost down to the penny. And when it comes to investing in THE content delivery solution that will streamline your work process, unleash your content, and transform your user experience, one question will arise without a doubt: “How much?” Meaning: “How much will it cost?" This can be a completely different conversation if you can turn it into “how much it will save” and “how much additional revenue it will bring to the company." In this webinar, we will give you a clear picture of the cost savings and gains a content delivery platform such as Fluid Topics can generate across three areas: customer and partner service, employee productivity, and client satisfaction. We will also give you access to a tool that will help you navigate scenarios and determine how long it will take to achieve a return on your investment by customizing the calculator’s numbers to fit your situation. Presented by: Geraldine Boulez 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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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.
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March 24, 2021 Every organization has different content management needs. The needs can be pretty broad or hyper-focused. Everybody has different expectations around the user interface, but the underlying requirements are always based on rich capabilities around legacy content ingestion, authoring, metadata management, storage, delivery, and more. Developing a content strategy is crucial to the success of your CCMS project. Core components help focus your questions, create detailed use cases, and identify candidate departments and content to help assess a CCMS. When you start a CCMS assessment, you should have a comprehensive set of parameters to guide you. It is very important to make the proper discovery and choose the solution which is the right fit. Otherwise, energy is expended to force-fit a solution which usually leads to frustration and wasted resources. Join Divraj Singh, Sr. Solutions Consultant at Adobe, in a conversation with Bernard Aschwanden, CEO at Publishing Smarter, whose organization has done multiple CCMS migrations, to understand the following parameters which will make a CCMS evaluation process easy. They will be leveraging Adobe’s CCMS solution –XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager, to showcase some of these workflows.
- What difference does authoring standard make (unstructured, XML, DITA, HTML etc.)?
- How advanced are the content management capabilities (web vs offline, metadata support, advanced search)?
- How does the solution provision for storage (versioning, DAM capabilities etc.)?
- What OOTB workflows does the solution support (review, translation, task management, content ingestion, etc.)?
- What reporting capabilities does it have?
- What publishing capabilities does it provide(DITA OT, integrated tools, third-party plug-ins)?
- How extensible is the solution (APIs, DITA specializations, integration with external systems)?
Bernard Aschwanden is the Founder of Publishing Smarter. 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 on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernardaschwanden/ Bernard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aschwanden4stc https://twitter.com/publishsmarter Website -
March 31, 2021 How do you ensure that your content is consistent and follows your brand’s guidelines? How do you begin a project that’s consistent across your technical communications? Is it an achievable goal? What results should I expect? In this webinar, learn how the combination of easyDITA's CCMS and HyperSTE allows you to check your content against your specific style guide, as well as industry standard grammar and terminology rules. The result is not only scalable and single-sourced content, but clear and concise content across the board. Content that's more cost effective, brand aligned, and ready to attract new customers. Attendees will learn:
- The value of combining an XML CCMS with a Grammarly-like content checker
- A live demo of easyDITA with HyperSTE that shows how the tools work together to help content creators
- A general project plan to help you get started in achieving great results
- An example of a customer implementation and their results
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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.
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March 17, 2021 Xeditor is a professional online XML editor based on state-of-the-art web standards. With Xeditor, structured, semantically correct content in XML format can be created intuitively, efficiently and without technical knowledge. By enabling authors to work together on structured content from any location at any time, Xeditor helps companies put efficient workflows in place. This way, companies are able to take advantage of all the benefits of standardized content - such as automated further processing - without the need for costly training for authors. Presented by: Matthias Kraus is the founder and managing director of Xpublisher GmbH. Since 2001, he has been advising numerous leading international companies and organizations from the aerospace, technology, education, publishing, public administration and many other industries in the field of multi-channel publishing and accompanying them on their way to digitization.
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November 18, 2020 Learn how HubSpot Academy, the world’s leader in providing inbound sales, marketing and customer service education, adopted DITA to help solve their content creation, conversion and output needs. HubSpot’s use case is exciting and unique as it pushes the boundaries of what we typically associate with DITA. Rather than producing typical technical documentation, HubSpot is using DITA to produce:
- Complete lessons, courses, and certifications
- Learning assessments
- Powerpoint outputs
- And localizing that content in five languages
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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.
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September 9, 2020 This is a presentation that provides an intersection between content and design. It is a high-level practical guide to analyzing your content, deciding what you want to do with it, developing style naming conventions, and developing editorial style guides, design style guides, and style templates. Once you get to that stage, you can then consider how content management systems, automation, and xml might fit into your publishing processes. Presented by: Marie Gollentz is a Senior Solutions Consultant focusing on the European market. Prior to joining Typefi, she held a number of positions in the publishing industry in London, including at the publisher of Research Fortnight and the London School of Business and Finance. Marie holds a Masters degree in European Political Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Sciences from Sciences Po Strasbourg. She is trilingual in English, French and Spanish.
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Date: August 12, 2020 Squatches, yeti, and kraken: oh, my! Learn about cryptozoology, cryptids, and… oh yes: the future of content strategy and digital experiences. Chad Dybdahl, Adobe Solutions Consultant, walks you through importing content from Microsoft Word, creating intelligent, structured content that can then be used across a wide range of delivery channels and platforms. In this session, we’ll see both traditional and headless delivery strategies that will inspire you to think about content in new and exciting ways.
- Strategies to repurpose your technical content in new ways
- Headless content delivery: what is it and why you need it
- Creating structure from (MS Word) chaos
