Program Schedule

For 16 years, the Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals/Publications (IETM/Ps) concept has existed in the United States. This concept has led to specification development, tools designed, as well as data developed and fielded to the Warfighter.

In the 10 years of fielding IETPs, experience and lessons learned have been gathered to assist in the building of better and more efficient enhancements to the IETP specifications. With the incorporation of the IETP concept into the international standard S1000D, it is now the time to share those lessons and experiences with others in the technical data industry.

Join Denny Raitz as he marches down the path of personal lessons learned in the history of Boeing’s IETP projects.

XyEnterprise delivers out-of-the-box XML content management and publishing solutions designed to maximize content reusability and repurposing. We take a standards-based approach to creating, managing and delivering content — and streamline the way organizations capture, share and maintain dynamic information.  During the course of this session Wez Dowell will introduce XyEnterprise and their CMS and publishing solutions with a focus demonstration from Carroll Walters on the XyEnterprise Vertical Solution for managing S1000D data and producing Integrated Electronic Technical Manuals directly from the CMS. XyEnterprise CMS supports any data type and in addition to S1000D provides a Vertical Solution for managing DITA content.

In this presentation Miel describes what customer centric technical documentation is. It is much more than delivering information in the customer's language. It is about delivering only that information he requires, when he requires it, with the right level of detail. However companies and technical documentation departments also have to deal with shorter product life cycles, quicker product and documentation updates, more output formats that need to be foreseen, more translations that have to be made and so on making it difficult to still create personalized, customer centric documantation.

Miel will present techniques that can be used to produce customer centric documentation, even in complex environments. He explains the requirements for the tools that support the documentation process like authoring tools, planning tools, translation tools, workflow tools, etc. Miel will show that an important key to a succesfull solution which helps you in delivering customer centric documentation with a maximum efficiency and effectiveness is a tight integration between the different components of a Global Technical Communication System.

Hear Dr. JoAnn Hackos, Comtech Services, present the ITT Fluid Technology story.  Getting people from diverse parts of a global organization requires more and more effective communication. In this presentation, I detail the course of action we took to introduce the concept of XML Content Management to a global manufacturing company. The effort began with key contacts who were encouraged by the single publications manager to investigate content management. The next step was an introductory meeting to explain the value and benefits of XML Content Management to key managers from throughout the organization. Their support led to the development of a comprehensive business case that achieved support from the C-level management and the establishment of a Global Enterprise Content Management (GECM) Project begun by a Six-Sigma BlackBelt. The rest, we can say, is history – the track of a successful multi-organization implementation that is attracting attention even more widely in the corporation than we had originally imagined.

XML content platforms make publishers more agile with content and applications, enabling them to experiment with new products and services.

In this session you’ll learn how MarkLogic Server - the leading XML content platform - enables agility and innovation among the world's top publishers.

Stephen Buxton will review the benefits of end-to-end XML and how it enables multi-grained re-use, personalized content delivery, and agile Web 2.0 application delivery. Then he will show real-life case studies of how publishers apply these ideas to achieve innovative, successful product offerings. Stephen will end with a look at emerging trends around XML and publishing.

Selecting, Implementing and Working with Ovidius' TCToolbox 

CSR is the leading global provider of personal wireless technology and its product portfolio covers Bluetooth, GPS, FM and Wi-Fi (IEEE802.11). CSR offers developed hardware/software solutions, based around its silicon platforms, that incorporate fully integrated radio, baseband and microcontroller elements.

» Introducing CSR
» How Technical Communications group works
» Systems we used to work with
» Reasons to change
» Plan for change
» Why Ovidius' TCToolbox?
» How we work now
» Live example

With over ten years of independently developed XML-based authoring processes to manage, and thousands of pages of help content needing to go to multiple output formats for various related products, the Micro Focus User Information team recognised the need to refresh an ageing and complex system to keep up with corporate growth and acquisitions. With sustainability and transferability of the new system as top priorities, Micro Focus defined an aggressive timescale to:

» Finalise a business case for management
» Evaluate migrating content to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML DTD from their custom Micro Focus DTD
» Evaluate a move to 3rd-party-supported Component Content Management System (CCMS)
» Shortlist and evaluate suppliers
» Implement the decided changes
» Keep up with the day jobs!

Chris Hadley, Micro Focus User Information Manager, and Noz Urbina, consultant on the project from Mekon Ltd.,will jointly tell the story. Come learn what we learned, what decisions were made and why, and where we struggled along the way.

Business Objects, an SAP company, is currently authoring product documentation and customer training materials in DITA 1.0.
This presentation will provide an overview of Business Objects, our authoring and translation team structures, and our business reasons for moving to a structured documentation approach and adopting DITA as a solution.
This presentation will describe our phased implementation of DITA, including details about writer adoption of the methodology and the incremental roll-out of DITA features.
This presentation will explain our migration process, including our methodology, training and tools, pains and lessons learned, and the outcome of the migration in terms of content quality. I will talk about our challenges in defining quality and measuring improvements, and about our goal to implement additional metrics (reduced writing and translation time, improved customer satisfaction) to better illustrate the benefits of DITA in our organization.
This presentation will also touch on our strategy for moving our current DITA implementation to the next phase.

In this presentation Amanda will address the ʽwhyʼ of resistance and delay in implementing document management systems and in doing so will highlight some effective interventions that build value into any document management programme.

She will illustrate her presentation with numerous examples and will reveal why seemingly counter-intuitive interventions are effective. 
Including:

» Managing risks requires some serious ʽrisk takingʼ
» Taking notice of people who break the ʽrulesʼ pays dividends
» Finding the ʽwisdomʼ of the group in the most unusual places
» Teams need to include a significant proportion of ʽblockersʼ and ʽcomplainersʼ
» Understanding mental models is key to building the right kind of flexibility and effective presentation
» An amazing example of concept to ʽlive systemʼ

What's so important about Taxonomy and Information Architecture?

You wouldn't build a bridge or a house without a plan, why would you build your document set or website without one? The combination of a well thought out IA and a good Taxonomy structure forms the core of a plan that enables you to meet your users needs.  It defines how your users will find the information they’re looking for in the information you provide them and helps you to keep it up to date and accurate.  This session will show how to design information (looking at both print and online examples) to improve the usability of your information and make your customers happier.  Learn what to do when starting out (or starting over) to improve the customer experience by improving usability and ‘information findability’.

Many organisations are aware of XML and the potential benefits it can deliver but how do you go about implementing a solution that actually delivers what you need? No one solution can possibly deliver all things to all people so how do you choose which solution is best for you and your customers?

This presentation will guide you through the hurdles and pitfalls that must be navigated to ensure you implement a solution that delivers genuine business benefits. Using a simple, tried and tested methodology David will explain why it’s vitally important to plan effectively, justify and measure each phase, and implement efficiently if you are to maximise your use of your information assets.

Mekon’s methodology is designed to help identify business benefits by:

» Uncovering hidden information assets
» Finding out which pains are easiest to solve
» Identifying areas of growth or potential innovation
» Highlighting system interfaces and content deliverables
» Recommending applicable standard and tools with hands on experience
» Helping you build a business case best on industry best practice
» Guiding you through implementation using experienced resources

Come and hear how Mekon's Consultancy and Implementation Methodology can accelerate change while reducing risk.

Designing, building and maintaining a coherent content model is critical to proper planning, creation, management and delivery of documentation and training content. This is especially true when implementing a modular or topic-based XML standard such as DITA, SCORM and S1000D, and is essential for successfully facilitating content reuse, multi-purpose conditional publishing and user-driven content.

During this presentation, we will introduce an innovative, comprehensive methodology for information modeling and content development that employs recognized XML standards for representation and interchange of knowledge, such as Topic Maps and SKOS. In this way, semantic technologies designed for taxonomy and ontology development can be brought to bear for creating and managing technical documentation and training content, and ultimately impacting the usability and findability of technical information.

Modularization is a well known buzz word in technical documentation. Like reuse, it should kick your content process into high efficiency mode, right? But there is more than one modularization strategy described in the various papers books available.  Also of course, the cost of managing modules information should provide a return on investment. So, if you want to be confident in your endeavour you should not only know those theories but investigate your motivation and potential benefits.

This presentation outlines the steps taken by Qimonda's documentation team in its project to move from books to chunks presented by specification manager Gunnar Krause. One important step in this project was the assessment of all major modularization strategies currently published. The team started with reuse in mind but discovered a wide range of potential benefits large or small during the evaluation of existing documents and processes. All this led to a systematic overview that eases the strategy selection process in any content project. You will get to know how Qimonda then decided on a blend of strategies to achieve modularized information fitting to its situation, and benefit from the experience gained in subsequent system migration and maintenance.

Can your organisation adapt its approach to publishing in a way that meets expanding requirements without driving up costs?  Can you maintain the layout richness of your printed materials across the Web and electronic communications?

Yes, you can when you use Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (Quark DPS). Quark DPS solves these publishing challenges.  Quark DPS is publishing software that combines flexible layout with automated publishing to deliver accurate, relevant and attractive communications across multiple types of media, including print, the Web, and mobile and electronic.  Based in open standards, Quark DPS allows you to create and share information and lets you create information as reusable components of information that you can easily combine for different users – different types of documents and difference audiences. 

We invite you to hear how Quark DPS can:

» Improve author productivity by up to 50%-100%
» Reduce the cost of updating information by up to 20%-80%
» Reduce inefficiencies of redundant, overlapping publishing processes to reduce costs by up to 50%-80
» Reduce translation costs by up to 20-70%
» Enable the delivery of customised information through automatic publishing