Pushpinder Toor, a Product Manager at PTC, is responsible for the design and development of PTC University’s new Arbortext Training Solution. This solution is a melding of PTC technologies, best practices and industry standards. The resulting solution helps PTC customers build, manage and deliver their own training quickly and efficiently. Pushpinder has been a part of PTC (and previously Arbortext Inc.) for 11 years, in that time she’s worked in a number of roles such as a Course Trainer, Curriculum Developer and Project Manager.

Join us as Pushpinder describes how they leverage their content to provide world-class training materials. Discover how the implementation of a Reusable Content Strategy. Arbortext and Windchill technology can help you build training content that allows for:

• Innovative learning methodology — Role based, tailored to the individual needs, and measurable.
• Global Coverage — When you want it, where you need it, in the language you prefer
• Flexibility — Continuous blended material

Join Single-Sourcing Solutions and PTC for this one hour FREE websession.

We will show you how to develop a solution that can deliver faster, high-quality, standards-compliant training and eLearning.

His presentation last month was well attended and appreciated by the attendees. He has enormous amounts of advice for handy macros to have on hand and tips for smooth operations that improves adoption by authors and deployment (and subsequent support) by staff.

Today, he sent some macro code for us to post (while he’s getting all set up). Here’s what he sent:

• Resize to Frame: Resizes a selection to fit the frame
• Update Preferences: Cleans up a .iso file to fit your preferences (handy when getting files from outside vendors)

Thanks, Trevor and we’re looking forward to benefiting from your experience on Adepters!

Top Sessions from PTC/User 2010: Arbortext Ask the Experts and Arbortext Strategy

Every year, the Ask the Experts panel always has the most attendees. This year, the new Arbortext Strategy session rivaled attendance levels, and for good reason.

Although both sessions are hosted by the Arbortext Business Unit, the strategy session provides a lot of information for attendees about where the business is going, as well as what their plans are as a company and as a business unit. The business unit is a new concept for both PTC and for their customers this year, as well. This session really helps us all plan our futures together.

The new General Manager, Bill Berutti, did an excellent job laying out the strategy of the Arbortext Business Unit going forward. Arbortext is focused on helping customers get the right information out to the field. To date, this has been easier said than done. First, it’s hard to be an expert at all things. Second, access to the right information — finding the right page number when you need it — is essential to happy customers and critical to success.

PTC has spent $300M on Arbortext since the acquisition in 2005. There are 170 people in Arbortext R&D and over 1000 support personnel. Greater than 1/2 of the employees in the Arbortext Business Unit are R&D. They are all people with very specialized domain skills.

PTC has been focused on, let’s call it plastic surgery. Smoothing the wrinkles. Reshaping the products so they fit together better and require less work by their customers to implement, use, or otherwise interact with. Different products are no longer simply stitched together: they’re blended. They resonate with each other rather than act as sources of discord or cause friction for customers.

The result, and the resulting strategy, is to provide what is truly an out-of-the-box full solution and not simply a set of tools. They are crossing the lines in the sand that traditional vendors have drawn. They’re coming at this like well-trained, board certified surgeons rather than Dr Frankenstein.  They’re blending the separate products into one smooth, integrated, single-vendor solution.

Caterpillar

Caterpillar from Alameda County Fair 2010

The other highlight of the strategy session was getting to hear from Caterpillar for the first time in a very long time. Caterpillar is on the bleeding edge of enterprise content strategy. They have a wide array of products and customers and an extremely complex product. They support a dealer network in, literally, every country in the world. Their products have a long lifecycle, often exceeding 50 years.

Dealers sell parts, perform service, and are the primary customer for Caterpillar’s service manuals. Caterpillar cannot require anything of their dealers because each dealer is it’s own business. (One dealer is older than Caterpillar!)

Caterpillar has:

• 4M machines
• Average product life-span: 19.8 years
• No product is ever end of lifed, support is guaranteed always
• 3M machines are out there in the wild
• 270K Engineering Change Notices annually, affecting 1-100 part numbers
• 30K illustrations
• 53 languages
• 230K unique customers
• 20M hits on their service information website every day
• 5000 published service information/content pieces

Some of their dealers do not have internet, so their solution must be complete, it must be robust, and it must support a disconnected service model. In addition, they’ve found that technician competency is down and they need their information to change with the times.
They want every customer to be able to:

• Find the information
• Understand it
• Trust it

Caterpillar’s technical information impacts every transaction at every dealer every day. They want their customer to have the right part, the right service, every time, any place.  Originally, they were a DIY project that has, over the years, become a spaghetti system. They’re ready to change with the times and there are a lot more options today than there were 15 years ago. Today, they want a true solution. They want to get out of the IT business. They built it themselves when there was no other option. Today, they see a better way and they’re ready to move forward with a true enterprise solution. It’s simpler for everyone.  They see the new Arbortext Service Information System (SIS) as the key to making that move. They’re looking at PTC as a partner, who will help them implement this truly integration solution. A partner that will deliver a strong strategic solution.  And this is how they’re doing it.

SIS is the same strategic picture that Bill Berutti painted–come to life. It’s also the end result of the same lessons-learned that everyone was talking about at CMS/DITA NA. More than ever before, content has enterprise-level impact. It’s a strategic initiative that impacts the entire business. The companies that take the discussion out of the techpubs groups are the ones who will be successful in the long run. They’ll be the ones beating their competitors to market and winning again and again once they’re there. Their content will be consistent across all parts of the enterprise. Content already drives business and has the potential to make customers wildly successful (or not).

Where do you want to be?

Every year, PTC/User improves for Arbortext users. This was the first year we had to turn presenters away. It was also the first year we didn’t have to extend the submission deadline because there were so many great presentation submitted. For me, PTC/User is like Summer Camp. The same folks come frequently enough (every year or every other year) that you start to recognize them and look forward to finding what they’ve done personally and professionally in the last year. You grow your expertise through collaboration and personal relationships. You give back.  This year was no exception. Despite the recession, Arbortext attendee numbers were up overall (AGAIN).

My favorite two sessions were the User-to-User panel and the Formatter Shootout. Each was well attended. The Shootout grew much bigger than expected. Originally, the presentation had three technology representatives: FOSI, XSL-FO, and APP (3B2). At the last minute, we added Zarella Rendon, representing Styler. It’s always interesting to see how the other side approaches the same problem. (15% of Arbortext attendees were APP/3B2 users.)

At PTC/User, the PTC product managers attend each session. It gives them a good insight as well to hear what customers are really doing. The Shootout and the User-to-User panel were fertile ground for them to see how different customers have adopted the different technologies to what end results.

All Software is designed with particular usage in mind and, invariably, all software gets used in ways the original designers never expected. As a programmer who’s written lots of scripts that “were never meant for production”, I know first-hand how they always, always end up in production. User sessions are great forums for learning new tricks and new possibilities. And we all learned about situations where we might benefit by adopting one another’s technology. Luckily, as Arbortext customers, we have all FOUR technologies right at our fingertips!

Take a look at some of the pictures from this year’s event in our Flickr stream.

The release notes have this to say:

• 1967627 — Floats scoped to a table no longer appear beyond scope when the table breaks within a row.
• 1976865 — Arbortext Editor no longer fails to set table column names when the table contains a completely spanned row.
• 1980156 — The Arbortext Adapter to Documentum/WDK is now compatible with Internet Explorer 8. (Arbortext Editor support for Internet Explorer 8 does not extend beyond the Arbortext Adapter to Documentum/WDK.)
• 1982017 — Addressed an issue causing a specific italic font to not appear italic in PDF output.
• 1988168 — Publishing processes involving the composition pipeline are now responsive to the settings of the allowcharactersubstitution .dcf file option and the composedcharactersubstitution set option and Advanced Preference.
• 1983265 — Rotated content is now handled correctly in PDF documents composed with the usedistiller set option set to off and crop marks turned on.
• 1991771 — Saving an SGML document as XML now adds the needed namespace declaration for change tracking if the document contains any markup used by change tracking.

In this podcast, Liz Fraley interviews Regina Roman. Liz first met Regina over 10 years ago, when Liz first brought Arbortext & XML to Juniper Networks. With XML, Regina says she feels freed from the formatting handcuffs and extra burdens required by constant manual tasks required by traditional desktop publishing tools. She can be a writer again.  After completing her first project, she asked Liz, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” — how much easier it was, how much better it was than DTP. Now, when offered her choice of positions, Regina chooses the XML projects rather than the FrameMaker ones and she encourages her other clients to choose XML as well.

Listen to the podcast to find out more.

Are you one of the lucky ones who has an integrated platform to coordinate cross-functional teams so you can reuse content? Do you have a bunch of teams that coordinate with each other? Are you gaining visibility at the executive level or simply working overtime? Maybe you’re all on your own.

Maintaining an effective social media presence leverages customers, prospects, colleagues and contacts, and puts you in touch with fast-changing tides of industry trends, but it also steals productive hours from you and your workforce to maintain properly

Is your organization thinking about the content it produces strategically?

Go ahead and let us know in the poll below, and then vent away in the comments.

The release notes have this to say:

• Fixed issue with keep-with-previous where it wouldn’t work within a section itself was being balanced (SPR 1971370)
• Fixed rotated footnotes surround frame size issue. (SPR 1919326)
• Fixed issue that prevented frame shift (tfshift) from working when using copyfit with ‘update real values’ enabled. (SPR 1936426)
• Fixed problem with space at end of line containing leaders. (SPR 1970802)
• Fixed problem with OpenType font containing an empty index table. (SPR 1972664)
• Fixed pointer error in Line Style menu. (SPR 1993501)

From attending the recent PTC User Conference, it appears we are in the midst of a paradigm shift and it will be every bit as significant as the move from desktop publishing to structured content management.  This shift will be from book publishing to dynamic content delivery.  Think about where we have come in the last decade: we use electronic tools to create, publish and maintain our publications, but we still interact with these publications in exactly the same way as their printed counterparts: page-by-page, through an index or glossary or a rudimentary keyword search.

Also, the creative process is the same: anticipate what the customer is going to need and put it in a book.  This pattern of “predictive publishing” breaks down in the face of highly customizable products, since it is impractical to cover every option or configuration that might occur in a single manual.  Also, this publishing model breaks down for products that present a complicated set of features to the user; it is difficult and time-consuming to sift through a large amount of documentation to find help with the task at hand.

PTC’s answer to this problem is the next phase in electronic publishing: Service Information Systems.  Take for example the problem of navigation.  For years, we have hassled with paper maps or Thomas Guides, trying to flip pages and drive to our destination.  This rather haphazard and indeed hazardous process has now been supplanted by GPS-driven navigation systems.  The two key properties of such systems is that they are contextual and interactive.  That is, they are specialized to the task to be performed and they provide an interface that is appropriate to the context.

So, how do you leverage the new generation of tools that are forth-coming from PTC?  First, it almost goes without saying that you will need to be doing structured content management.  Second, if you have not done so already, adopt a Content Management System.  Service Information Systems will be driven from their content databases, so this step is vital.  Finally, be sure that your rendering tools can produce content viewable in ProductView, as this will be the first supported platform for viewing dynamic content.  Stay tuned!

While at the PTC/User World event this year, I had the opportunity to attend a few sessions. There were 4 in particular that I wanted to talk about:  Arbortext Roadmap and Strategy, Product Information Delivery System, Virtual Parts Catalog, and PTC University use of Arbortext. You can see my notes for each one and what I felt was of particular interest. The slides for all of the sessions are now available for you to download. To get them, please visit the PTC/User portal at http://portal.ptcuser.org and login. From there, go to the file library by clicking on FILES in the navigation menu, or by using this direct URL: http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/do/sc/catid=55

Session:   Arbortext Roadmap and Strategy

Featured Speaker(s):  Mike Sundquist – PTC, Leslie Paulson Caterpillar

The first half of the session was a review of PTC’s Arbortext products and where they stand today, along with a list of future enhancements.

PTC is going to focus on what they call the Product Information Delivery System to deliver modules that the customer can use as a starting point.  This is good because it will help clients implement and address their business problems quickly with (hopefully) less resistance to change.  They also intend to help the customer focus on providing templates (stylesheets) that will help the customer deliver content as needed rather than in the traditional “book format”–or “pre-publish everything”–paradigm.

To do this they will continue to rely more on DITA as the content structure model.

The initial customer with whom they are working to develop this model is Caterpillar.  Caterpillar has been an Arbortext customer for over 10 years.

In the second half of the session, Leslie Paulson, Manager of Technical communications within Caterpillar’s Technical Information Solutions group, discussed the success to date that they have attained with Arbortext and moving forward with the Product Information Delivery System.

Because Caterpillar does not sell directly to the end user, their model has to support a variety of users.  In Caterpillar’s business model, they rely on external companies to sell and service their products.  Here are some of the metrics:

• 230,000 users.  These are the Caterpillar Dealers and service providers that both Caterpillar and their customers rely on to sell and service their products.
• Currently supporting 53 languages
• Current content library, 42 million words.  Each needs to be translated into the 53 languages they currently support.
• Last year they published 5,142 service information piece published to support over 8000 possible product configurations (think engine types, size, etc).
• 20+M hits per day from people looking for service information

With that kind of volume you can see the need to deliver exactly what the client needs when they need it because searching through thousands of pages of documentation just doesn’t work, especially when some clients may not have the highest speed network.

Session:  Product Information Delivery System

Presented by:  Tom Sears – PTC Product manager

Overall theme?  PTC is going to be building and delivering (at no extra charge) sample applications to help customers deliver service information.  They will build on the Service Manual application and deliver additional applications or templates for output that covers:

• Service and Repair
• Parts Catalogs
• User Guides

In addition, the focus will be on using DITA as a way to structure the content and to allow clients to produce information “on-Demand” as well as just books.  Users will receive only the content they need rather than being required to search through hundreds or even thousands of pages.  Of course when a user does request printed output, standard things like Tables of Contents and Indexes will be automatically included.

This is a great way for XML to make its way into more organizations.  Prior to this announcement an XML project for documentation always seemed to take on the “science” project approach because the user had to make a decision that was based on the paper-output paradigm versus going with a dynamic-output paradigm.  For example, we always print books, even though their customers never read the books and would prefer to get output based on their situation.  It resulted in longer implementations and often would lead to a project not attaining ROI within the original objectives.  This way, the customer can quickly attain a win and build from there.  Often times customers will learn that they don’t even need the “old” requirements and will be able to streamline their operation and deliverables while still meeting their clients’ needs.

Session:  Virtual Parts Catalog

Toro – Gary Smith

Gary presented a fairly technical overview of how Toro has integrated their existing BOM data with their documentation in order to dynamically build Virtual Parts Catalogs based on the customer selection.

They initially implemented Arbortext in 2004 and have attained the following metrics:

• 1251 manuals per year a 70% increase while reducing Technical communications staff (through retirement and reassignment) by 25%
• 35 part/assembly drawings per day per illustrator (IsoDraw)
• 227% increase in productivity
• 45% reduction in translation costs
  • Translation turnaround time reduced from at least 2 weeks to 4 days.

Toro has attained many of the benefits that the new Service Information System from PTC will provide because of a very smart team and management with a vision.

They have also implemented a reuse configuration that allows them to more efficiently reuse content for different products without having to manually insert the correct graphics file.  I have to admit I do not understand how they do this but as you can see by the reduction in translation costs the savings are significant.

Session:  PTC University use of Arbortext

In this session PTC described how their training and education department is using Arbortext to help build new training material.

PTC instruction designers now use the DITA data model with Arbortext to create DITA Topics that are dynamically assembled based on the course or customer need.  This new system has over 40 course hours of material and supports over 400 trainers.

PTC decided to use DITA as the foundation for their Reusable Content Strategy. Their objective was to make the content pieces simple, but standalone so that they can be configured based on the module and user-level knowledge (i.e., advanced, intermediate, beginner) and then delivered to outputs based on need (for example, teacher guides, student workbooks, and presentation materials).  Rather than be bound by the need to use Powerpoint as a delivery method, they now create the “slides” as PDF files.

The solution utilizes PTC’s Windchill/Arbortext Content Manager (ACM) for content management, Arbortext Editor to author content, Styler to create multiple-output stylesheets, and Publishing Engine to dynamically generate the output based on the instructors input.

Since implementation of Arbortext for the Wildfire 5.0 release, PTC has realized the following metrics:

• 30% reduction per course kit (instructor guides, student workbooks, presentation materials)
• 20% reduction in curriculum localization cost
• 20% reduction in development time
• 30% reduction in WBT production time
• 40% reduction in configured training guides

What I liked most about this solution was that it’s not traditional documentation and shows the flexibility of the Arbortext suite of products as well as the use of the content management system by a non-centralized user group.