Monday ~ 14 November, 2022
From DITA Topics to Video in 3 Steps
Video today is the number one, two, and three medium used by people to learn and to get instructions. That’s why it is relevant to understand how you can turn your organization from publishing print and PDFs to producing videos. Maybe not instead, but at least in addition.
How to get started, organize, and adapt processes to start with video production, grow and optimize, and eventually automate its creation to make it part of your standard workflow and publication stack.
Wouter Maagdenberg, TXTOmedia International
Wouter started his first tech company during his BA studies and sold his former company to SDL Tridion (now RWS). After he left SDL he co-founded TXTOmedia – The Video Automation Company in 2018. TXTOmedia offers technology to automate the creation and localization of training, instruction, and how-to videos. Structured content is turned into videos automatically. The business benefits include speeding up time-to-market, and reducing costs & carbon while improving the customer and employee experience. Wouter is TXTOmedia’s CEO.
What I've learnt from 15 years of DITA
Since we first saw DITA on the horizon to today Rik has seen the conception, birth, death, and success of countless DITA projects. Drawing on his many years of experience this is an opportunity to look back on what has worked and what has not from both a consultancy and vendor view.
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.
Rebuilding Content Delivery from Scattered Pieces
If your company delivers documentation for over 300+ software products, you better have a consistent path from building over deploying to delivering to the end customer. But the reality check tells you that all stakeholders have their own ideas where to pull documentation artifacts from and where to put them. Learn in this case study how to overcome the chaos of arbitrary manual procedures by introducing automatic deployment for a new content delivery portal.
Frank Wegmann, Software AG
Frank Wegmann has 20+ years of experience in the markup world. At Software AG, he has been advancing custom automated build systems for technical documentation since 2001, in recent years with more focus on DITA. He is a regular speaker at international conferences and engaged in OASIS DITA committees, now also as co-chair of the Lightweight DITA subcommittee.
DITA Perspectives
DITA is not defined as a flat list of elements, but each element is either a base element or it derives as a specialized version of another element. This hierarchy should actually decrease the cognitive complexity of a vocabulary because it allows to find an element faster than working with a flat list.
In this presentation we want to show the hierarchy of elements in DITA and then explore how we may take advantage of this in understanding the DITA architecture, learning DITA, document authoring, etc.
George Bina, Syncro Soft / Oxygen XML Editor
George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML suite of XML editing, authoring, development, publishing and collaboration tools. He has more than 20 years of experience in working with XML and related technologies, bringing many innovative ideas to reality and contributing to XML-related open-source projects.
He presented at many XML, DITA, and technical communication conferences, giving passionate presentations and challenging the technological status quo, trying to get the audience to think outside the box, and re-imagine the future.
Digital Publications using DITA
During the presentation we will explain how to move from PDF output into digital content and step by step move away from product oriented into user centric content. We will talk about:
The maturity level check we do with our customers
- Where are you today
- What would you like or do you need to achieve
- Define the roadmap to get there
The used tooling
- We build a platform with our partners (like: Fluid Topics, Ixiasoft, TXTOMedia) and will show how a user centric content platform will look like. Other tooling can also be used, it’s just a way to exemplify the process.
Pim Bekker, Etteplan
Pim Bekker is a Senior Solution Architect at Etteplan since 2001, working on (DITA) XML structured content projects including Content Delivery Platforms, AR/VR, and spare part systems.
He has implemented XML-based Content Management Systems for creating technical information in over 175 projects using the best standards available, including DITA, SVG, and iiRDS to create future-ready content.
This is the Way
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Name, Company
Brianna Stevens joined Comtech as a Consultant in 2015 and immediately became an expert in creating and implementing DITA constraints. Brianna’s design education gives her unique insight into visualizing the content challenges facing our customers. Her outgoing personality puts people at ease, making her an ideal consultant to involve in user and benchmark studies and competitive analyses. In addition to consulting, Brianna does graphic design for the CIDM and Comtech websites, advertisements, and publications.
Publishing in the Cloud: Managing high-volume publishing for OCI Documentation
At OCI, we use cloud tools to publish and serve documentation about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. In this session, Robert will describe how those tools are used to publish hundreds of thousands of pages per week: where does the content come from, and how does it make it to the site? What have we managed to automate, and how much is still manual? How do we support a mix of DITA based documentation with other content formats? Most importantly, where have we run into trouble along the way? Attendees are encouraged to share their own experience with similar tools, or advice on how to deal with trouble spots when working with similar systems.
Robert Anderson, Oracle
Robert Anderson has been working with DITA and DITA-OT from the beginning. He now supports cloud-based publishing tools for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and maintains the site that hosts OCI Documentation. He is currently co-editing the DITA 2.0 specification, and excited to see what comes next.
DITA-XML: A Foundation for Innovation
Like most organisations, Arm has hundreds, if not thousands, of employees contributing content from its architecture and engineering teams. With so many content creators, the organisation faced challenges to achieve consistency, and to efficiently transfer their knowledge into documentation deliverables. In this session, you’ll learn how standardising on DITA XML as their conversion format allowed Arm to build a set of collaboration tools to create and publish documentation.
We’ll also discuss our plans to upgrade to the IXIASOFT CCMS web client (our primary source archive) bringing the CCMS back into the heart of our content operations and closing the loop on our innovation journey to streamline our content operations seamlessly.
Steve Gaskin, Arm
Steve worked as a technical writer for fifteen years, becoming a specialist in solving content problems: both technical and process-based. Moving into content strategy, he joined Arm as Content Architect in 2017, establishing new standards in content models and developing lightweight authoring and collaboration approaches. He is now Director of Infrastructure Engineering within the Partner Enablement group, designing, delivering, and supporting the latest in content authoring and publication tools.
Automated Page Composition: Form follows structure?
Moving to XML-based structured authoring means that you may need to think about new ways to present your technical documentation to your customers. You may discover new deliverables and output formats, such as markdown, JSON, progressive web applications or responsive webhelp, but what about your PDF files? Are you still going to use the same formatting and stylesheets as before? Or are you willing to let go, simplify things a bit and optimize the PDF publication process?
Yves Barbion & Pieterjan Vandenweghe, Flow bv
Yves Barbion is a managing partner at Flow bv, a Belgian technical communication consulting company. He is an award-winning technical writer, information architect and instructor with 30+ years of experience in the techcomm field. Yves teaches structured authoring and DITA classes and coaches aspiring technical writers.
Pieterjan Vandenweghe is content strategist at Flow, a Belgian technical communication consulting company. He helps companies with the implementation of the DITA standard in their documentation processes and guides internal documentation teams with the change management of this process.
His job includes analyzing the existing content, helping customers with vendor selection of a CCMS or version management tool, converting/restructuring content to the DITA standard, creating DITA specializations, frameworks for guided authoring and DITA-OT output plug-ins.
Content Strategy for Technical Documentation
Content strategy is a complex concept that has different meanings in different contexts, for example content strategy for marketing vs. content strategy for technical documentation.
What is content strategy and why is it important? How is different from other disciplines such as Information Architecture and where are the overlaps, if any? This presentation aims to answer these questions and provide tips for implementing content strategy in the specific context of hardware and software documentation in product development organizations.
Geetha Haridas & Satu Sevon-Nielsen, Qualcomm
Geetha has a Masters degree in Technical Communication with over 20 years of experience in working for software and hardware product development organizations globally, with a keen interest in problem-solving issues surrounding content development processes. She currently works as a Senior Staff Technical Writer at Qualcomm, Cambridge.
Outside of work, she loves watching movies, cooking, baking, and spending time with my family (and cats). She also works as a volunteer for STEM projects to encourage children, especially girls to develop their interest in STEM careers.
Satu has a Masters degree in Translation with over 20 years of experience in authoring and translation. Satu is also an entrepreneur and has run her own translation agency in the past. She currently works as a Staff Technical Writer at Qualcomm, Finland.
In her spare time, Satu loves watching movies, reading and writing. She also cares very much about animal rights and actively helps with rehoming rescue cats.
Should We Build PDF3?
This presentation raises the question whether it would be a good idea to develop a PDF3 plugin. Many interesting features were added in the last years, but they are distributed over various organizations and repositories. Especially for new users it is an obstacle and a lot of effort to identify these repositories and to built a new company-specific plugin based on this fragmented code. Is this good style or should we merge this functionality to a PDF3 plugin?
Stefan Jung, Dometic
Stefan Jung is Head of Technical Documentation at Dometic and leading a global team of internal and external technical writers. He is developing DITA-OT plugins since 2014 and offers DITA consulting in part-time.
Intent-based IA: A methodical approach to designing information
The Intent-based IA strategy introduces a new design methodology that walks the audience through primary and secondary affordances – powerful ideas that helps demystify contemporary IA paradigms and helps them leverage their existing documentation libraries to better hand-hold customers into a seamless Intent-based Information Architecture.
Vishal Palliyathu , Cisco
Vishal George Palliyathu is a seasoned professional at Cisco, and has led several transformation and migration efforts with a strong focus on better information design and UX during his sixteen year experience at Cisco and IBM. He has experience across various facets of Technical Literature Publishing – as a DITA Strategist, Information Architect, Editor, Author, Build Smith and an Inventor with five patents and a paper published on the DITA framework. He has also presented at DITA Europe, tcworld, STC Summit, and various other conferences. He is currently exploring various threads on creating Ontologies from semantically enriched information sets and using affordances to improve the Information Architecture.
Vishal is also an avid philatelist, and has thematic collections on birds and Christmas.
Finding the Proverbial Needle in a Haystack
With the plethora of content available to users today, it’s often a wonder that they are able to find any relevant information to their queries. In fact, it’s the most common complaint Comtech hears when conducting user studies for our clients: “I can’t find what I’m looking for in a reasonable amount of time.” What can we as technical writers do to address that complaint? We hear a lot about taxonomies and metadata and their potential influence in making our content more findable. However, Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its search algorithm that go well beyond this basic categorization. Surprisingly, a significant number of these ranking factors fall clearly within the realm of a technical writer’s responsibilities. In this rapid fire webinar, Dawn presents dozens of proven and speculative factors that you as a technical writer can address to optimize your content for findability.
Dawn Stevens, Comtech Services
Dawn Stevens is the President, and owner of Comtech Services and the Director of the Center for Information-Development Management. With over 32 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.
The Current Content Software Landscape: Navigating the muddle
Following the global explosion in the expectations around content has come a burst of new software tools. Content teams are inundated with overlapping options across the content lifecycle. Getting the wrong platform can set a team back years and sometimes millions of dollars. Just in the management systems, there’s now headless CMS, CCMS, web CMS, DAMs with more sophisticated text support, and younger generation of “content operations” tools or extensions that connect to and extend these systems. There’s a similarly overlapping and confusing array of approaches when it comes to the authoring and delivery of content as well, not to mention the growing field of metadata management.
In this session, Noz Urbina uses 2 decades of content systems experience in a variety of applications and industries to clarify the current landscape. Although there’s no simple answer to the question “So what should I get?” this session will leave you empowered with a clearer understanding of the current options, how they can be used in combination, and how sometimes interdepartmental politics and IT’s goals can heavily influence your tool strategy.
Noz Urbina, Urbina Consulting
Noz Urbina is a globally recognised leader in the field of content strategy and customer experience consultancy. He’s well known as a pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modelling for delivering personalised, contextually relevant content experiences in an omnichannel environment. He is also co-author of the book “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” and lecturer in the Masters Programme in content strategy at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz.
In 2013 he founded his own consultancy Urbina Consulting and in 2018, co-founded the omnichannel events organisation OmnichannelX. Clients include Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals, Sanofi Vaccines, Mastercard, Barclays Bank, Abbott Laboratories, and many more.
What's New in Oxygen XML Editor version 25 for DITA Editing
We will start with an overview of Oxygen XML tools for technical publishing and then focus on some of the new features Oxygen XML Author version 25 brings for DITA editing:
- Dynamically convert OpenAPI content to DITA at edit or publishing time
- Support for Q/A topics and for producing Google Structured Data from DITA tasks and Q/A topics
- Expand topic references and content references on demand
- Easy Access to the DITA Metrics Report
- Improvements made to the DITA Reusable Components View
- Speed improvements when opening large DITA Maps
- Publishing speed improvements
- Support for publishing new codeblock syntax highlight colors (YAML, Powershell, DTD, or CMD)
- Create archivable PDF documents.
- and more.
Radu Coravu & George Bina, Syncro Soft / Oxygen XML Editor
Radu Coravu is a technical guru working on oXygen XML Editor. During the last years, his main focus has been in the development of the visual XML Author editing environment and the specific-DITA support provided by oXygen. He provides support for complex integrations and helps steer the product in the right direction, all this with some development on the side.
George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML suite of XML editing, authoring, development, publishing and collaboration tools. He has more than 20 years of experience in working with XML and related technologies, bringing many innovative ideas to reality and contributing to XML-related open-source projects.
He presented at many XML, DITA, and technical communication conferences, giving passionate presentations and challenging the technological status quo, trying to get the audience to think outside the box, and re-imagine the future.
Multilanguage Source Content with Context Out of Maps
4D CONCEPT will show how it handles multi-language content management and publication built using Maps without context within. Benefits go from quickness of publication build to the reuse rate of Maps and content.
Vincent Mas & Francois Leger, 4D Concept
Vincent Mas is the Product Owner of Heysquid and the architect of its extension DITA branded DITA FACTORY, the DITA CCMS by 4D CONCEPT.
Francois Leger is one of the 4D CONCEPT’s publication specialist and architect.
Why Taxonomies are the Secret Sauce
Even if you don’t realize it, you’ve seen taxonomies in action. If you’ve searched for a product on an e-commerce site, you’ve likely encountered at least one taxonomy. Taxonomies help sell products and they assist people in finding answers. We’ll look at the unique role taxonomies play in content strategy.
Lief Erickson, Intuitive Stack
Photo by Simon Bate
Lief is a co-founder and principal consultant at Intuitive Stack. His career began as a technical writer, and he has held positions as an information architect and content strategist. His focus is to reduce or remove friction wherever it is in your tool stack or processes.
He holds a master’s degree in Content Strategy from FH Joanneum (Graz, Austria), where he teaches information architecture. He is a contributor to the DITA-OT open source project and presents at conferences on topics ranging from ContentOps to taxonomies and search.
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