Recently in Technical Documentation Category

 In case you missed it this week, I chatted with Ian this week regarding his latest beacon, Looking Outside the CMS Box for Enterprise Website Governance. It got broken down into 4 videos and promoted across our various video channels (Facebook, Youtube, and our main channel Gilbane.blip.tv). Also make sure you aren't missing out on the popular posts over on the XML blog

I've embedded the videos below if you missed them:

The call for speakers has been issued, with June 14, 2010 being the deadline to submit a proposal for presenting at Gilbane Boston this year.

Guidelines can be found here: http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html

Feel free to ask us any issues you have that aren't covered above!

On Wednesday, June 13 at 1:00 EST, Senior Analyst Bill Trippe will be doing a Webinar with Medtronic and the XMetal folks at JustSystems.

While documentation is a necessary deliverable for all companies, its value and contribution to bottom-line business results is often underestimated and overlooked. For Medtronic, one of the world's most innovative medical device manufacturers, documentation is much more than a checkbox on a product release timeline - it is a direct link to customer satisfaction and patient well-being. Medtronic's Rob Kimm will discuss Medtronic's approach to delivering a better customer experience while also ensuring compliance with regulations that impact technical documentation.

Prior to using DITA, Medtronic had a decentralized, heterogeneous environment that slowed production and resulted in redundant workflows. Seven project deliverables were developed in 5 different tools, and the mutually-exclusive tools allowed for little to no ability to achieve true reuse of common content. They now can reuse common content across deliverable types, which has led to great efficiency, accuracy, and consistency.

To register for the Webinar, please visit here.

As our readers know, we are long-time advocates of open-document formats. Over the past couple of years, we have written a great deal about DITA and formats like ODF, but we also have a lot of experience and interest in DocBook and vertical DTDs such as J2008 for the automotive industry and the various DOD standards. We are clearly reaching a point where interoperability among these standards has become an issue. Organizations are more diverse, more likely to be sharing content between operating groups and with other organizations, and more likely to be sourcing content from a variety of partners, customers, and suppliers. Needless to say, not all of these sources of content will be using the same XML vocabulary; indeed, even two organizations using DITA, for example, will likely have specialized DITA differently.

With this need for interoperability in mind, OASIS has announced a new discussion list, regarding a possible new OASIS Document Standards Interoperability Technical Committee (TC). Details on the list, including how to subscribe, can be found here.

Bob Doyle alerts us to the next meeting of the Boston Area DITA Users Group. On Tuesday February 13 at 6:30 pm, Judy Kessler will present, "How Sybase Made the Business Case for DITA."

The meeting starts with light snacks and networking at 6:30 and the presentation starts at 7:00. The meeting will be at the Information Mapping headquarters in Waltham. For directions, click here. Bob asks that if you are planning to attend, please RSVP to Judy Kessler.

For more information on this and future Boston meetings, check the User Group homepage.

Although I have been out of the technical writing trenches for some time now, I enjoy staying in touch with my techdoc buddies and keeping up with the hot issues. One I remember well is the challenges in the early 90's of single-sourcing documentation for print, electronic, and context-sensitive online help delivery.

Apparently it's still hot, despite the release of RoboHelp6 from Adobe, a tool I remember quite well. This is the first product update Adobe has released since the company bought Macromedia over a year ago. Product reviewers generally agree that Adobe beat the estimated delivery date by months, although there is some confusion over dueling version numbers according to my friend Char James-Tanny over at helpstuff.com. Still, an early release is a good sign in terms of a company's current and future commitment to a product.

On the other hand, product reviewers also seem to agree that "XML does not seem to be a priority." Hmmm. That certainly does not bode well for champions of single-sourcing for multi-channel publishing (although the new version automates hyperlinked PDF creation.) Even more interesting are the passionate responses to an unfavorable monkeyPi product review, including an extremely detailed rebuttal from Rick Stone, Adobe's Community Expert for the product (although he's not an employee...)

Without claiming to have reviewed the product, what I find most interesting is Adobe's focus on source and version control, team collaboration and workflow, and the usage tracking capabilities of RoboHelp Server6. Adobe describes this latter feature as the ability to identify frequently-viewed content, view usage statistics, and uncover search trends.

As we've discussed in numerous posts, relevant content and customer experience are intrinsically related, whether the project is Web site design, localization efforts, or yes, even online help development. (Part 2 of our series on this subject, Small Content Changes, Big Impact takes place on Thursday February 1st.) Assuming RoboHelp Server6 provides the insight into the online help user experience it claims, its value to techdoc departments striving for more "upstream impact" in their organization could be quite significant.

In preparation for our panel on Content Globalization Workflows on Thursday November 30th at our Boston conference, we have created a survey to gauge how organizations are dealing with increasing market demand for localized content.

We hope to see you at this session. But whether you join us or not, contribute to it by answering our survey questions. We'll publish the results in a blog entry after the conference, including the results from our audience survey. Give us your input and you'll be eligible to win a free conference pass for one of our future conferences!

Here is a short URL to the survey you can share with others: http://tinyurl.com/yjy694

Here's what we'd like to know:
1. Which issue is your most pressing business driver for providing localized content to your customers?
2. Who is responsible for purchasing translation software in your organization?
3. What is the most difficult challenge within your localization processes?
4. Do you have one or more content/document management systems in house?
5. Do you have one or more translation management systems in house?
6. If you do not have a translation management system in house, who do you work with to manage your translation processes?
7. If you have both a content/document and a translation management system in house, are they integrated?
8. If the systems are integrated, select the most appropriate description of the integration.

Here is a quick update on next week's event:

New Sponsors & Exhibitors
Adobe has joined us as a Gold sponsor - their Enterprise Solutions and Developer Group in particular. See announcements on some of the new products and features to be shown from our 50+ exhibitors.

New Debates
In addition to our popular analyst session, two analysts will face-off on 7 topics they disagree on in Content Technologies: A Town Hall Debate. And of course, don't forget CMS Idol.

Keynote Survey
The early results from our survey on questions to ask the keynote panel show the topics attendees are most interested in are, in order:

• (78%) What are the top 3 technologies that must be considered in any content management strategies in the next 12-24 months?
• (60%) Are there any breakthrough classification or metadata tagging technologies on the horizon that you should be watching for?
• (57%) How will content management lite offerings from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM affect the content management market?
• (55%) How is widespread adoption of RSS/Atom going to affect content delivery? And what does this mean to enterprise content management or publishing strategies?
• (55%) What new publishing technologies should we expect to see in the next 12-18 months? Will they make it easier to incorporate better design elements to improve customer facing applications?
• (55%) Is there any real breakthrough search technology search on the horizon that you should consider for your intranet or extranet applications?
• (49%) How will Blog and Wiki tools be used in enterprise content applications? How are they being used today?
• (49%) Are there authoring tools on the horizon that are both user-friendly and capable of authoring for both electronic and print output?

UPDATE: You can see partial final results of the responses to all the questions here, and contribute to the survey here.

Content Globalization
Also, the top write-in question topic so far is on globalization and content management. This is a hot topic at the event - there are multiple sessions covering it, and many vendors showing related products and services - some of them have even put together a Content Globalization Pavilion.

We have over 100 expert speakers covering these and other topics. Conference program .

And don't forget to look into the Content Management Professionals Association Spring Summit

Sarah O'Keefe from Scriptorium noted and commented on a great discussion of DITA and DocBook by Norm Walsh, the guru of DocBook. Norm was a featured speaker at last week's DITA 2006 conference. Norm's discussion is readable and lucid, and if you have been wondering about this question for a while, Norm's post is required reading.

Some of you have likely listened to the excellent technology radio show at MyTechnologyLawyer.com. Gilbane Report Senior Editor Mary Laplante and I will be talking about the upcoming Gilbane San Francisco conferences on content management and digital rights management. The interview will be at 1:00 Eastern time tomorrow, Thursday, February 9, and you can listen live here.

UPDATE: If you missed the live broadcast, you can listen to recorded versions here (Real Media) or here (Windows Media). Among the topics discussed at some length were DITA and Enterprise DRM.