Wednesday, 1 October
1:00 - 2:30 pm Eastern (GMT-5)
Members: $79 USD, Nonmembers: $149 USD

Printed Books and Online Help Using a Wiki
This is a case study of a successful migration from a FrameMaker-WebWorks based authoring and publishing system to a Wiki-based mechanism to produce printed books and context-sensitive help. It describes how 20,000+ pages of software documentation were moved while keeping to a quarterly update and release schedule. You will hear about how we figured out what to do, what we changed, how simple it is to implement, why we will not be going back to our old ways anytime soon, what your plans will need to include, and how you can avoid the pitfalls that came our way.

Presented by Rahul Mehrotra
Rahul Mehrotra has created manuals, online help, and multimedia tutorials for more than a dozen cross-platform software products—from graphics utilities to object-oriented databases and development environments in C and BASIC to simulation and engineering tools. His current focus is information architecture and search optimization of large documentation sites, and machine translation for multilingual authoring.

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Thursday, 23 October
1:00 - 2:30 pm Eastern (GMT-5)
Members: $79 USD, Nonmembers: $149 USD

Task Support Clusters: A Focused Architecture for Practical User Assistance
A task-support cluster is a group of help topics that meet the specific information needs of a user who is currently working within the user interface. It is designed to answer the most likely questions first and then let the user drill down to more detailed, elementary, or advanced information if needed. This presentation shows detailed architectural patterns aimed at meeting domain expertise needs of users (versus interaction-intensive procedures) within a DITA model and demonstrates how Task Modeler, an open source tool, can be used to quickly design task support clusters and convert them into DITA maps. The architectural principles, however, can be applied outside of a DITA context.

Presented by Michael Hughes
Michael Hughes has a PhD in Instructional Technology, a Masters in Technical and Professional Communication, is a Fellow with STC, and a Certified Performance Technologist through the International Society for Performance Improvement. His professional focus is supporting user experiences that accommodate the “user as learner.” Hughes works for IBM Internet Security Systems as a User Assistance Architect identifying tools, methods, and standards to integrate the content and delivery of user assistance, including documentation, help, e-learning, and training.