The Content Wrangler

In 2018, the pace of life and business is quick. Attention spans are short. Technical communicators need to catch up. Long text passages, with occasional graphics, don't always reach a large part of our audiences.

How can we create snappy visuals that enable people to learn what they need to learn quickly and painlessly?

How do we simplify complex concepts, with far less words, and content that is truly engaging?

Motion infographics combine the best elements of minimalism, instructional design, and information architecture to produce content that people love.

Join The Content Wrangler and Saiff Solutions for a discussion about infographics and their usefulness. We'll examine some examples of effective motion infographics, and hear from the creator of one of them.

By attending this webinar, you'll learn:

• What is so great about motion infographics?
• What does it take to produce effective, engaging visual content?
• What are the challenges?
• How do I get started?

Technical communication professionals revolutionized the publishing world with the introduction of structured writing and intelligent content. By adopting innovative methods, approaches, and content standards, we were able to craft and deliver content to multiple channels quickly, often with reduced effort and cost. And, we’re not done yet.

When technical content is required for global audiences, intelligent content alone is not enough to tackle the obstacles multilingual content introduces. Combining structured intelligent technical content, terminology management, and translation memory together can solve these challenges. We call this the Holy Trifecta of Intelligent Technical Content. When all three of these are leveraged together, we can produce consistent content that is on-brand, on-message, and easy to read in every language.

In this session, attendees will learn:

* A clear description of intelligent content, terminology management, and translation memory

* An understanding of how they are interrelated and why they are important to technical communication projects

* A game plan for coordinating all three in order to create intelligent content that works, all the time, on any device, in any language

Being a patient in need of life-saving medical treatment can be cripplingly frightening—even the bravest humans often find their nerves of steel are no match for fear of invasive surgery or therapy for serious illnesses like heart disease or cancer. Many patients find themselves trapped on an anxiety-ridden ride made worse by the presence of poorly designed, ambiguous, frustrating and confusing healthcare content. Confusing jargon, misplaced focus, and a lack of empathy are common problems with information provided to patients during their journey toward healthfulness. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Join Paul Perrotta for a lively discussion with Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, about his recent battle with brain cancer. Scott will discuss the content challenges he discovered while attempting to navigate the disorganized, inconsistent, and often less-than-useful healthcare content provided to him by hospitals, doctors, laboratories, transporters, specialists, nurses, medical device companies, technicians, pharmacies, and insurance providers.

We’ll hear Scott’s first-hand account of his experiences navigating brain surgery and cancer treatments and learn how adopting a patient-focused content strategy may help professional communicators improve healthcare information provided to those who need it. Come prepared to ask questions of Scott.

One lucky attendee will win a free pass to Information Development World conference, November 27-29, 2018, in Menlo Park, CA. The theme of the conference is “Creating a Modern Online Technical Resource Center.”

Intelligent content is the foundation of the new age of digital customer experiences in any language. As a consequence, the worlds of marketing communication, technical communication, and localization are converging as companies need to take a more holistic view of how customers interact with their global brands. This presentation will discuss this convergence and how companies can best position themselves and their content to power their digital transformation.

Join The Content Wrangler and our special guest presenter, Alan J. Porter, Head of Strategic Services at [A], for this free one-hour webinar. Porter will demystify how to start the discussion of content convergence in your own organization and he’ll provide samples of metadata you should consider adding when attempting to manage global content. Attendees will also gain insight into a content engineering approach to holistic content use.

Moving from legacy systems to modern technology can be a daunting task. Depending on the number of documents you currently have, just deciding what to move can be difficult.

Join The Content Wrangler and Stephani Clark of Jorsek LLC to learn how to perform a content audit, develop a conversion plan, and learn about other considerations when transferring content.

About Stephani Clark

Stephani Clark is a Customer Success Manager for easyDITA, a DITA Component Content Management System based in Rochester. She works to train and assist users of easyDITA’s software. Stephani also works on easyDITA’s information development team and spends about half her time creating technical documentation for the software.

Before she worked for easyDITA, Stephani spent over ten years working for her family’s energy efficiency company. During that time, she worked in sales management, operations, and project management. Stephani also developed the company’s training program and served as their National Training Administrator, which brought her to Rochester in 2010 when the company opened an office there.

The key to providing a great customer experience is having great content. Content optimization is about making sure your content performs at its best. Content sells, describes, and evangelizes your product or service. In many cases, it is your product or service.

Val will help you identify which content optimization stage you are in and how to take your content to the next level.

In this webinar, you will learn to:

• Improve customer experience
* Increase quality and consistency
* Improve your brand
* Decrease creation and translation costs
* Improve time to market

Get your questions ready and we hope to see you there!

Technical communicators around the globe use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) to help them create structured, semantically rich, topic-based technical documentation designed for reuse. The benefits of DITA, including content reuse, are limited to content teams who use XML editing tools. Content creators working with Microsoft Office tools cannot reuse DITA content easily, so content silos coalesce around the tools that content teams use.

It’s one thing to understand the value of content reuse. It’s another to find a solution that defeats tool-driven content silos so that teams who don’t have access to—or knowledge of—XML editing tools are able to effectively reuse and repurpose DITA content. Attend this free, one-hour Content Wrangler webinar, brought to you by the content management gurus at Astoria Software, to learn how technical content teams are sharing and repurposing DITA content with team members who create content using Microsoft Office software.

Chatbots have a long way to go to be self-sufficient, but if you build them on a base of structured content, they can be a helpful content delivery tool today. Join The Content Wrangler, and Patrick Bosek of Jorsek LLC to learn how you can publish your DITA content to your chatbot.

As a part of this process, Patrick will talk about how chatbots fit into your total content delivery strategy, how to transform DITA content for chatbots, and how to update and maintain chatbots as a delivery system.

About Patrick Bosek

Patrick is a co-founder and Director of Customer Success at Jorsek LLC, the makers easyDITA. Since beginning with Jorsek LLC in 2005 Patrick has worked on a wide range of projects all focused on improving authoring, production, and distribution of content. Most recently, his primary focus has been empowering the users of easyDITA and generally advancing the product documentation industry.

Patrick is a software industry professional specializing in developing, productizing, and solving problems with product content software. He is a highly skilled developer, thoughtful manager, passionate customer advocate.

Do you have Office 365 in your organization? You may not realize it, but you already have the perfect solution for delivering the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right format and language–and on the device of their choosing.

Most content services hubs are expensive and complicated. Office 365 is an affordable, cloud-based, scalable platform that allows you to build content for a future of AI, machine-learning, chatbots, and machine-to-machine communication. It enables everyone, whether experienced in content architectures like DITA and XML or not, to use Microsoft Word and other familiar tools to create and share content in real time. Gartner recognized Microsoft as a leader in the Content Management Platform Magic Quadrant in 2017. Find out why!

Join our special guest host, Paul Perrotta, and our special guest, Steffen Frederiksen, for this free, one-hour webinar, and learn exactly why and how Office 365 is a great platform for authoring, managing, and delivering the content of the future. Attendees will also learn the benefits that come with using it, as well as be taken through a specific use case in financial services.

ABOUT STEFFEN FREDERIKSEN

Since 1989, Steffen Frederiksen has been working with the creation, management, and distribution of structured, reusable business content. This work includes methods, software tools, training workshops and CMS solutions. He has managed the training of more than 200,000 writers around the globe, primarily in the financial services, pharma, and other regulated industries.

While working for Information Mapping, Steffen developed the concept of “object-oriented information” as well as the MOM (Mapping Object Model) XML DTDs – some of the foundation of the DITA standard. With the objective of bringing the power of structured content to everyone, he founded DitaExchange in 2001 and developed its Dx4 software, which combines the DITA standard, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office.

On December 12, 2017, Steve Manning presented a discussion on how new technology will change the way we approach content. The addition of Bots, voice-enabled interfaces, and Artificial Intelligence means we must change the way we structure content. We are moving from a broadcast style of communication – publish and hope for the best – to a more conversational style of communication. More question and answer.

This imposes requirements on the content models you need to create if you want to talk to the Bots. We must be more granular in our models. We need to implement Microcontent.

Join our special guest host, Val Swisher, and Steve Manning In Part II of this series, where Steve will go a little deeper. He will discuss the language of bots/AI: intents, attributes, and assets. Then he’ll relate that to how the granularity you design into your models, the semantic labels you apply to elements, and the taxonomy you capture in creation can make or break your ability to publish DITA content to the new technologies. The session will include real-world scenarios that rely on a microcontent strategy.