MadCap Software’s MadWorld Conference

In addition to techcomm professionals, we’ve also invited a few of our best corporate partners to provide their product evangelists as guest bloggers. Today we introduce a guest blog post from MadCap Software and Jennifer White.

For the first time ever in the history of MadCap Software, we’re throwing a giant party (OK, officially it’s a conference) called MadWorld. Over the past couple of years we’ve done the MadCap Roadshow, where we travel the world preaching the Gospel of Flare and teaching people all kinds of cool stuff. This year, it finally occurred to us that we live and work in paradise (La Jolla, CA) and people might want to visit us instead. So we rented out the Hard Rock Hotel San Diego for 7-10 April, got in touch with a bunch of brilliant industry leaders, and put MadWorld together.

We are super-excited because this is going to be the ultimate gathering of Flare users, tech comm geniuses, and MadCap devotees. As far as networking goes, this event will be huge. People from all over the planet will be convening at MadWorld, so it will be a great place to make connections. From a learning perspective, we’ll have something for everyone.

Allow me to point out some highlights from our schedule of sessions:

Neil Perlin | Mobilizing Online Help—Challenges and Mechanics

• Are your clients asking for mobile versions of the online documentation or help that you’re creating with Flare? Not sure how to proceed? What tools to buy? Mobile formats to use? How much money you’ll spend? Disruption to anticipate? Depending on your needs, the answer may be surprisingly simple—use Flare itself to convert your project to mobile. Flare has powerful features for creating mobile output and the answer, at least on the mechanical side, may be simpler than you’re expecting. In this presentation, we’ll take a look at what’s involved—the mobile output options, design challenges in converting help to mobile form, and the mechanical issues in the conversion.

Ellis Pratt | What do Tablets Mean for Technical Authors

• With approximately 70m iPads being shipped in 2012 alone, what does this device mean for technical authors? In this presentation, we’ll ask, can the Tablet deliver better User Assistance than other computer platforms? Are there any situations where it offers a worse solution? We’ll look at what’s possible and its limitations, when it comes to designing user assistance and documents for the Tablet.

Paul Pehrson | Customizing HTML5 & WebHelp: Modern Output Matching Your Company Style

• Join veteran MadCap user and Certified Flare Instructor Paul Pehrson for a hands-on demonstration of how you can modify the standard HTML5 output to match your company’s look and feel. Dive deep into the HTML 5 skin file to find out how you can customize the smallest details of how your output looks. We will discuss how the skin file works, with tips you can implement today that will improve your output. Then we’ll discuss the use of modern webfonts to get advanced typography in your output, cover how you can create responsive layouts for mobile devices, and dramatically change the way HTML5 looks in the browser.

Tom Johnson | Make Your Content Findable Through Search

• Users tend to search help material when they have a specific question they’re looking to answer. How can you make your content more findable when users search for information? What exactly is Flare’s algorithm for searching for material? How does the meta description factor into search results? Which Flare skin (HTML5, WebHelp, or another) is the most search friendly, and why? Do you have to sacrifice your writing style to become more SEO friendly? In addition to discussing these technical questions, there are more strategic questions as well, such as how much information you should include in your help material. Some technical writers try to include answers for almost every conceivable scenario, while others write for mainstream situations only. Both strategies have repercussions with “findability.” In this session, we will discuss and explore these questions.

Sharon Burton | Walk on the Wild Side—Lessons learned from a giant FrameMaker to Flare conversion

• A recent project needed over 30 FrameMaker manuals converted to Flare. One set of six books reused at least 50% of the content from book to book and chapter to chapter, using conditionalized text to create up to six PDF versions. And then there was the general rewrite to get it all present tense, active voice, and well structured. Did I mention we also needed Flare templates for PDF, online help, HTML release notes, and possibly eBooks? We delivered on time, with the content converted, restructured, common content in place, and all templates done. And in the process, we learned a lot. Come see this presentation to learn tricks that made life easier, mistakes we made, and how we made this all work.

Scott DeLoach | How to Not Let Team Authoring Drive You Crazy

• Managing a team, especially under tight deadlines and budgets, can be extremely difficult and challenging. In this session, I will share best practices for working as a team. We will discuss using source control, SharePoint, snippets, variables, and project linking. I will also provide tips for organizing, naming, and managing files and projects.

 You can find the full MadWorld schedule here, and we hope to see you at our first Flare user conference ever! Did I mention that we’re excited???