Live Web Seminars

Topic-based authoring offers significant process improvements if properly executed. It also represents significant change for all users touching the content development life-cycle. This webinar is intended to highlight the benefits of moving to topic-based authoring and discuss the many challenges you will face.

You should attend this webinar if you are a:

–Documentation Manager/Director

• seeking measurable process improvement strategies
• considering content management technologies
• investigating new content standards such as DITA or S1000D

–Senior Technical Communicator/Lead Writer

• facing challenges with managing documentation projects
• seeking innovation to improve how you manage writers and content
• trying to make content management work for you

About the presenter: Rob Hanna

Rob Hanna a content management consultant and taxonomy specialist with CCH Canadian Limited. He has worked with large companies such as Sun Microsystems, Northrop Grumman, Fujitsu, and Xerox, to help design and deploy content management solutions that work. He is heavily involved in the technical communication community having served as an STC board member and president of the Toronto STC chapter. He has presented topics on content management at the STC annual conference for the past five years and is offering a workshop on Information Mapping at this year's conference in Dallas.

Attaining the success you want in life—in every area of life—requires more than mere daydreaming and vague desire. Goal-setting is essential to success—and a self-motivated person is always working toward a program of personal goals. To become self-motivated, use the five success essentials taught in this workshop to change your thinking, your attitude, and your behavior. Tapping into your unlimited potential allows you to progress, grow, and change.

Suzanna Laurent is a Fellow of STC who recently served seven years on the Society’s Board of Directors, culminating with International President in 2005-2006. Suzanna was also selected as one of the Top Ten Business Women in the nation by the American Business Women’s Association for her outstanding career achievements. She has presented over 140 chapter programs, leadership workshops, keynotes, and sessions at more than 44 STC conferences from Toronto to Hawaii. She also received the first-ever STC Volunteer of the Year award at the annual conference in 2006.

Suzanna has been a technical communicator since earning her degree in 1986. She spent more than half of those years developing various types of online help for software applications. She has also developed course materials for three different government agencies. Suzanna is president of the Communications Design Group in Mustang, OK. Her consultant firm specializes in a wide variety of writing services.

More technical communication jobs are becoming project-based or on contracts through placement agencies that can range from one month to a year or more. In this session, Cheryl Landes, an experienced contractor, will provide tips on how to work with agencies that place technical communicators on contract assignments. She will also describe the current climate at the agencies and how job seekers can navigate this intricate maze so that their resumes will be noticed and presented to the hiring clients.

Cheryl Landes an award-winning technical writer and STC Associate Fellow, is the owner of Tabby Cat Communications in Seattle. She has more than 19 years of experience as a regular, full-time employee and contract technical communicator in several industries: computer software, marine transportation, manufacturing, HVAC, energy metering systems, and the trade press. Her experience as a technical writing and indexing contractor through agencies spans 15 years for clients in the Northwest and Northeast.

Cheryl is a member of the board of directors for the American Society for Indexing (ASI). She is active in two STC chapters, Boston and Puget Sound, and three international SIGs. She speaks frequently at ASI and STC meetings throughout the United States and Canada.

How many times have you written something and known that you wrote something similar, but can’t remember where it was or how it was written? So you write a new sentence. If you could only find that text and replicate it, you would save money and time for your translation team by reusing already-translated text strings and would produce more consistent documentation. This webinar describes a pilot project that tested a potential solution to this issue using translation memory to optimize the source documentation.

Joseph Campo is the manager of technical documentation at Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corp. in Concord, MA. He has 12 years experience working in the technical writing field. He is very interested in languages, translation issues, and ways to reduce localization costs by improving the source documentation. You can reach him at joseph.campo@3ds.com.

Use your technical communication skills to transition into an expanded role in public relations. Find out how to write a news release to help build awareness of your organization or share news of new research or products. This role may become reality as budgets and staffs shrink. During this webinar, attendees will learn how to determine what is news and how to write a basic news release. Discussion will include current news release best practices and use of multimedia news releases.

Joyce Lofstrom is senior manager, corporate communications, for the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, the largest US healthcare association focused on information technology. Her career has focused on health, food, and nutrition communications and public relations. She was also food editor and features writer for the Daily Herald newspaper in suburban Chicago. Joyce has been an adjunct instructor in public relations at DePaul University and Loyola University in Chicago. She has a BS degree in home economics–journalism and a MS degree in human environmental sciences–communications from the University of Missouri. She is a member of STC and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She is a member of the board of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Health Academy and is co-chair for the 2010 PRSA Health Academy Conference.

Embedding Help into your software application is the ideal way to give users relevant information exactly when they need it, making them successful and increasing the usability of your application. Among other advantages, embedded Help is task specific, context-specific, and doesn't require users to abandon their workflow. However, until now implementations have been hindered by the need for custom development and multiple Help files.

In this session, I will discuss the many benefits of embedded Help and strategies for implementing it—specifically how to integrate and deploy a dynamic, embedded Help pane that displays relevant information as the user navigates the interface. This type of Help pane can be replicated by many without a custom implementation.

I will also explain how to structure a single online Help file to work within the interface as both dynamic Help and as stand-alone Help, and how information developers can map the Help to the interface. "Layering" other types of user assistance (such as videos, podcasts, quick reference guides, tutorials, etc.) to address different types of users and their learning styles will also be discussed.

What we will discuss:

• The case for embedded user assistance
• Demonstration of embedded, dynamic Help
• Designing your user assistance for multiple uses
• Implementation and mapping Help to the interface
• Integrating other deliverables

Nicky Bleiel is the lead information developer for Doc-To-Help and a Doc-To-Help trainer. She has 15 years of experience in technical communication, writing and designing information for software products in the documentation, media, industrial automation, simulation, and pharmaceutical industries. She is a Director At Large of STC and has presented talks at STC's annual meeting as well as many regional conferences and chapter meetings. She has also presented at WritersUA, tcworld, LavaCon, and DocTrain on many topics, including embedded help, tools and technologies, user assistance design, single sourcing, wikis, Web 2.0, and convergence technical communication.

Using any web browser, you can search for the term “agile software development” and receive a list of hits a mile long. Most of this information is very relevant if you are a member of management or a software developer. However, the bulk of that information is not relevant if you are looking at agile software development from a documentation perspective.

During this webinar we will address the following topics:

• the key concepts of agile software development
• the differences between waterfall software development and agile software development methodologies
• the composition of agile teams
• the meeting dilemma
• a look at CSG’s agile software development implementation
• the technical communicator’s role on CSG’s agile software development teams
• tips for working on agile software development teams
• a list of other resources

Deb Lockwood is an STC Associate Fellow and a volunteer with the STC Rocky Mountain chapter, currently serving as the chapter’s treasurer and mentoring manager. She is a lead content developer for CSG Systems, Inc., in Westminster, CO, where she writes software documentation. Deb holds a master’s degree in Applied Communication (Technical Writing) from the University of Denver and a bachelor’s degree in Management from Regis University.

During Deb’s 13-year career at CSG she has written guides, online help, and training materials directed toward varying audiences, and has worked with software developers using both waterfall software development and agile software development methodologies. In her spare time, Deb runs a job search networking group and performs with a vocal quartet.