Then I realized; he is in the cloud already!

My 11-year old son was preparing a PowerPoint presentation for school when I reminded him to save the presentation on a flash drive. He looked at me as if I was saying something surreal, and then I told him what a flash drive was and he said:

“I know what a flash drive is, but why would I want to do that?”

To take to school, I said (saying “duh” in my head). Then he gave that condescending look and explained:

“Mom, I will send it to my Google account and I’ll be able to access from anywhere, even from Australia.”

Then I realized; he is in the cloud already! How naïve I was, thinking that because I was not fully there yet, he could not be there. He never created the roots that attached us to our personal computers and personal digital assistants. He started in the cloud, where he’s now looking at me, wondering why I’m not there already.

We are all in the cloud in our personal lives, using social media like Facebook, MySpace, Gmail accounts, and picture management sites like Flickr. Now is the time to move to the cloud at work, and I see Translation Workspace taking translators to Cloud 9.

What do you think? Is it time for cloud computing where you work?

Aaron Schliem

What’s wrong with this sentence:

Some people prefer their coffee with cream and sugar, while others are straight, black coffee drinkers.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of a translator who is not a native speaker of English but needs to transform this into a sentence that is accurate and stylistically correct in the target language. Unfortunately, to describe coffee that has no added sugar, milk, cream, etc. as “straight, black coffee” is not a universally understood noun phrase.

If you were to provide this English sentence to a translator there is a chance you could end up with a reference to “heterosexual, African-American coffee drinkers”.

There is a better way to write source content that will save you time, money and…embarrassment.

Write it right the first time

Often companies focus tremendous energy on the technical aspects of localization while ignoring the most important ingredient in any localization initiative—the quality of the source content. After all, a translated version of your content can only ever be as good as the original source.

Very commonly content developers are disconnected from the localization process, rendering them unable to contribute to the effectiveness of the process in terms of cost, efficiency and overall quality.

That’s where content internationalization training comes in. Glyph teaches best practices for global content development so that a consciousness of the entire content lifecycle, from composition to translation, becomes engrained in the organization’s culture.

The goal of “Writing for Translation” is to create an internationalized text, one that is easily localized and translated into other languages with minimal loss of style and meaning. Your core focuses in this endeavor should be:

• Unambiguous vocabulary
• Simple sentence structure
• Neutral, culturally sensitive language
• Consistent use of terminology

A full discourse on the features of our training is beyond the scope of this article. So, in order to create a bridge between content development and localization, I’d like to offer you a few tips for writing content that will eventually be translated.

Glyph’s Top Five Tips – Writing for Translation

1. Avoid culturally specific reference – 
Use plain English to make your point. Don’t use baseball metaphors. Why don’t you use “make an outstanding contribution” rather than “hitting a homerun.” And, please, let a “match made in heaven” simply be an “perfect combination.”

2. Use 3-letter ISO currency codes – 
Many countries use “$” to mean their currency. The best way to keep things straight and ensure that the translation is not going to change the price of your product is to use ISO 4217 codes, like USD for United States dollars, HKD for Hong Kong dollars or EUR for the Euros.

3. Don’t use hard returns….please!
 – Most translation vendors and individual translators use translation tools that allow them to parse your document into sentences or phrases. These segments are then matched to translation memories or used to create new translation memory. In order to allow your translation teams to make use of this standard technology in a way that limits errors and gives you the biggest discount for reusing previously translated content, it is critical that you never use hard returns to force a line break in the middle of a sentence. Similarly, if you are using a layout program like InDesign make use of the built in text flow functionality for splitting sentences and paragraphs into movable units in the layout. Do not create a new text box and move half of a sentence into it. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this kind of thing happens. 

4. Place your modifier in the right place – 
This is best explained via an example.
   

   

Wrong: “Our goal is to offer multiple fragrance options to our customers that smell great.”



   Right: “Our goal is to offer our customers multiple fragrance options that smell great”



   The modifier “that smell great” needs to follow its referent, “fragrances,” or you risk a translation that pays tribute to your customer’s pleasant aroma rather than the quality of your products.


5. Avoid mnemonic devices – 
They simply won’t work in other languages (unless you have a brilliantly creative team of linguists like Glyph to create a new mnemonic device in the target language). Seriously, mnemonic devices are virtually impossible to translate effectively while retaining the power of the device. In the end you just create confusion and make your organization look like it is imposing American-style learning on people from other cultures.

By taking these tips into account as you write and edit content you will be saving your translation teams from a great deal of consternation and will perhaps save your organization from an embarrassing mishap.

If you are interested in more tips or a full training, please contact Glyph Language Services at training@glyphservices.com. We offer on-site or web-based training sessions at a very reasonable price. Ultimately, as a translation company your ability to write clearer, better content makes our work easier. Give us a call to see how content internationalization can improve your translation process.

About Aaron Schliem

“After completing degrees in International Relations and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin, Aaron set off for Chile, where he began his first language company with a focus on writing and editing scientific journal submissions for Chilean scientists and on developing unconventional language learning plans for motivated professionals. Upon his return to the US, all roads led to Seattle where Aaron joined two linguists and a software developer to launch Glyph Language Services in 2001. With the sweat of our collective brow, and never forgetting that language is more of an art than a science, Glyph has seen robust growth, our message resonating first with the top businesses and organizations in the US Pacific Northwest and eventually with clients worldwide. As CEO, Aaron drives Glyph’s strategic vision which oriented toward mobile application localization, games & multimedia localization and specialized terminology consulting and data development (MT-oriented dictionaries plus meta data).”

Jeff Deck, Founder, Typo Eradication Advancement League

Typos are a distraction from and a detractor to the larger picture. It’s true that many of the words we use today are corruptions of historically differently spelled words, and that in the future, some more common misspellings may become the new norm. That’s language change, and I’m not concerned with that. I’m addressing the isolated errors, the widespread misunderstandings of phonetic logic and agreed-upon standards. To say a typo in a given sentence “doesn’t matter” is to say the whole sentence doesn’t matter, and that kind of casual dismissal is a willful blindness to the potential power of English.

Typos are everywhere. This one is from social networking giant, Linkedin.

Such are the often astonishing fruits that can be shaken from the fulsome orchard of English. A note: obviously I’m referring to longer-form, more durable prose above, as opposed to the disposable text composing much of the internet, such as IMs, e-mails, Facebook rants, and this blog. There’s a difference between functional, throwaway writing and writing that’s supposed to stick around for a while.

About Jeff Deck

Jeff Deck has felt an incinerating passion for proper spelling and grammar from an early age. In sixth grade he placed third in the class spelling bee, with only a technicality hindering him from even higher rank. In both seventh and eighth grade he won the schoolwide spelling bee, only to flub the district bee each time.

Deck has written about retirement communities and reviewed books for Washingtonian magazine, and his short stories have appeared in The Furnace Review and Boston Literary Magazine. He very nearly got into an MFA program one time, and enjoys drawing comic strips. He lives in the greater Boston area but will be moving to the town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire in summer 2010. He is 5’10” without shoes.

To make content available to 80 percent of the total online population holding 90 percent of the world online wallet now requires a minimum of 15 human languages.

“To make content available to 80 percent of the total online population holding 90 percent of the world online wallet now requires a minimum of 15 human languages. Of the 250 sites examined, along with each language and country on offer, the company found only 58 that met this challenge,” said Benjamin B. Sargent, senior analyst at Common Sense Advisory, and the lead researcher for the study.

Common Sense Advisory collected data from the world’s top brands and most-visited websites, drawing on Interbrand’s “100 Best Global Brands” list of the most valuable global brands and a ranking of most-visited web properties worldwide, as tracked by alexa.com. The 42-page best practices report includes:

• A detailed analysis of site organization and metanavigation based on 250 websites of leading brands, including Budweiser, Facebook, Google, Louis Vuitton, Microsoft, New York Times, Twitter, and many others.
• Best practice recommendations on global gateways and zero-click metanavigation schemes such as geolocation and content negotiation.
• A method for evaluating unnecessary clicks and navigational “bad practices” that hamper international and multicultural visitors.
• A scored ranking of the top 40 global online brands.

“Global brand managers, designers, and web strategists can use the information in this report as they combine invisible site logic and clear navigational signposts to guide each visitor without delay to country-specific and language-appropriate content,” explains Sargent. “By understanding the best and worst navigation schemes, they can improve their own sites’ customer experience.”

“The Top 40 Global Online Brands” is available as part of a Common Sense Advisory research membership.

Here’s a little bit about the gig from the company looking to fill the position:

Our Clients Say: “We need to figure out a content strategy. We have existing customers we want to stay loyal and buy more stuff. We have a segmented customer base that we think we should reach with a combination of print, email and web content, but don’t know what combinations. We have a social media outreach, but don’t know how this fits with our contact strategy. We need new customers arriving through search and we know content is driving search.”

We Say: “We’re one of the most successful custom content companies in the world. We’re working with leading organizations like Southwest Airlines, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, USAA, Verizon Wireless and this is exactly what we’re doing for them…would you please hold while we look for someone to head up our web content strategy?”

Our President says: “Show me a head of web content who ‘gets it and gets the opportunity’. Oh…and show me someone who wants to earn a good living, working for one of the best companies in one of the most beautiful states in the Union: North Carolina.”

Want me to refer you? Drop me a line and let me know why you think you’d make a good fit.

Scott Abel
The Content Wrangler, Inc.

One of the most common eBook formats is PDF, which provides much more functionality than many people realize. Today, PDF supports 3D graphics, audio, video and much more. When you combine this functionality with the popularity of video content (think YouTube) and support for the most common eBook specification — .epub — it’s easy to see why many organizations will provide how-to instructional video content in a PDF eBook format. After all, some types of content are just more useful when they are presented in video and are available on any device type that supports PDF and/or .epub.

[Note: Related information: Learn more about PDF/A - PDF for archiving (an ISO standard).]

While video is certainly a useful addition to the eBook arena, there’s a humorous side to video support in eBooks. Watch this short, humorous Amazon Kindle 3 parody video from the folks at CollegeHumor.com for a chuckle.

Previously published in ClientSide News

Mike Dillinger, PhD

Dear Translator: Please remember that most writers never had any training at all about translation and usually know one lonely language. Many of them can only rely on the limited writing advice that they got in school. They’re never aware of how they can make life hellish for translators and for international readers. So, don’t blame them; help them out. Pass this list on to them and discuss it until they understand.

Dear Writer: Become a hero among your company’s translators. Every improvement you make is multiplied by the number of grateful translators you help. This list is for you.

Pothole #1: Thinking that your original source text is the final product

Translation takes a long time, so it is very important to budget enough time for converting files, translation itself, desktop publishing, re-doing screenshots, interface localization, etc. “Express” translations are done with shorter-than-usual deadlines and cost two or three times more than regularly scheduled translation jobs. We’ve come across translation vendors who very happily report that the majority of their work is from writers who couldn’t get their schedules organized. Writers who are pressed for time also hit many more of the potholes listed below and that makes translation even bumpier than usual.

Similar problems show up when we use machine translation (MT) to speed up translation. Shorter deadlines mean that there’s less time available to tweak the MT engine for a given job. So, in this case MT makes more mistakes and requires more time for editing.

Remember that your final product is the full set of documents, in the source language and in all of the target languages.

Pothole #2: Assuming that your files will work everywhere

Translators are generally well-organized folks and focus on optimizing their efforts. So, the first thing they do is take your original files and run them through translation memory (TM) software to see if any of your sentences were translated before. That’s easier said than done. If your files are in some Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, or other proprietary format (i.e., not an open standard like HTML or XML) then translators will have to convert them. According to Murphy’s Law, your specific version of the authoring software will not be completely compatible with the specific version of the translators’ TM software. So, translators have to check and fix your converted files by hand, one by one. Remember those extra line breaks that you added to improve the formatting? Well, they really interfere with converting your files. The translators will charge you for all that unpleasant work by the hour, often for each language – on top of the price for translation itself.

Using the wrong file formats will make translation slower, more expensive, and more error-prone. And this is work that the translators will have to do all over, again and again, for the next versions of your documents.

Pothole #3: Using screenshots for eye candy

Many translators specialize in translating manuals for software products, which often contain lots of screenshots. And the screenshots look really nice. But screenshots are very difficult to translate! For one thing, it’s hard for translators to figure out exactly how to see the same exact screen so they can take a new screenshot in the target language. This is doubly true for error messages, which are hard to produce on-demand in any language. Often, localization of the software itself hasn’t even been finished yet (usually, a different team is working on that) so the translators working on the manuals don’t have the target-language product in front of them. Sometimes they have to edit the image by hand to cut-and-paste and draw in the translated words – even if the words have nothing to do with what the screenshot is supposed to illustrate. So, the translators have to painstakingly re-create your screenshots by hand, one by one. They’ll charge you for that by the hour, for each language – on top of the price for translation itself.

Think again: Do you really need all those screenshots? Using too many screenshots will make translation slower, more expensive, and more error-prone.

[Editor's note: No, you really don't need all those screen shots. In fact, you may better serve your users by providing video snippets of how the feature actually works; that too, will involve translation and localization effort. But, if you're going to pay to translate and localize, why not pay for something the end-users actually find valuable?]

Layouts change when text is translated

Pothole #4: Thinking that your page layout will look the same in every language

Translations in many European languages take up about 20% more space on the page and some Asian languages take up less space than English. If writers don’t leave a lot of white space in the original, then the translators have problems. If translated content spills over to another page, then either the layout has to be re-done by hand for each language, or the pages have to be re-numbered (everywhere!), or both. Once again, translators will charge you for that by the hour, for each language – on top of the price for translation itself. And this is work that they’ll have to do all over, again and again, for the next versions of your documents.

Pothole #5: Trying to make your writing “interesting”

In high school, our English teachers wanted us to produce more “interesting” writing. They wanted us to use different kinds of sentences, phrase things in different ways, and even play with words. And this is how we’ve seen writing taught in other languages, too. This is a fine approach for producing literature that native speakers will read.

Image: http://blifaloo.com

Similar things happen with machine translation. MT can translate many kinds of sentences very well. However, Murphy’s Law strikes when writers use varied phrasing: It’s much more likely that they’ll produce sentence types that machine translation simply can’t handle. That in turn means more editing effort and longer delays in translation.

Pothole #6: Not being picky enough with words

Picky is good. Picky writers choose their words very carefully, with the reader in mind. Translators are readers, too, and they have to understand what you wrote to translate it correctly. But many writers spend too much time talking to engineers and to each other, so in-house jargon, invented words, and unusual (for the rest of us) technical terms often show up in client-facing documents. You may be used to “noun stacks” like strategic application development productivity or KX Manager Device System Information Configuration Backup, but your translators and end users won’t be able to digest them easily (see more discussion here).

Be selective about the words you use; consider using a controlled vocabulary

Pothole #7: Going soft on verbs

Things get tense for translators with English verbs. Professional writers are often comfortable with compound verb forms like may have been being installed, but this is enough to tie anyone else’s head in knots. Words ending in –ing are also a big problem. These –ing words can be nouns or verbs, and readers can understand them in multiple ways. One favorite example is a book title by Rachael Ray: Cooking Rocks. It might be about: how to cook rocks (like cooking potatoes), rocks that you can cook with (like cooking utensils), the kind of rocks that you can cook (like cooking potatoes, not planting potatoes), or it may be something else entirely (like cooking is cool). If your translators or readers aren’t very familiar with your product, they can easily get misled by this kind of writing. Machine translation systems are forced to guess the right translation. Going soft on verbs can lead to lots of errors.

Pothole #8: Speaking to the wrong audience

Know your audience

People only understand and translate easily when there’s enough information in a sentence that they don’t have to use detailed topic knowledge to fill in the details.

Pothole #9: Talking over their heads

Pothole #8 was about what readers know about the product. Pothole #9 is about what readers know about English. Most people don’t read as well as professional writers do. In fact, the average reading level for native English speakers in the US is about 7th grade. On top of that, translators generally work from their weaker language (English) into their native language. Long, complex sentences not only take much longer for mere mortals to understand, but lead to more comprehension and translation errors. One added benefit of shorter sentences is that they are easier for writers to reuse in different contexts and are easier to match in translation memory. Translating short sentences is faster, cheaper, and more consistent. Clients prefer them in English, too.

Pothole #10: Being too hip for the audience

As mentioned in Pothole #5, paraphrases, word play, slang, and metaphors work great for literature. Marketing copywriters often think of their job as coming up with quirky, catchy phrasing everywhere. All too often, though, the information that’s most relevant for the reader is hidden or missing. A simple, direct statement of how the client benefits from a product is a refreshing change that’s easy to translate. Most manuals focus on the geeky details of a product that the majority of readers couldn’t care less about. Simple, direct information about how to actually get something useful done (open file doesn’t count) is surprisingly rare. This is the issue of relevance.

It may seem obvious, but your communication must be relevant to the audience you're hoping to engage

Translation speed, quality, and cost depend to an enormous extent on the quality of the original documents. Every single choice of wording, sentence structure, style, and content influences how easy or hard a document is to translate. Writers, help your readers and become a hero among your company’s translators. Every improvement that you make is multiplied by the number of grateful readers whose lives you touch.

About the Author

Mike Dillinger has built and deployed language technologies for over a dozen years. He has an especially broad perspective on industrial best practices and their role in building an integrated multilingual content supply chain. This comes from his extensive international experience as a management consultant, researcher, technical writer, editor, translator, and developer of translation software. Mike has special expertise in strategic planning of global content.

He has worked with content and translation groups at Apple, eBay, HP, Motorola, Cisco, MRO Software (now a part of IBM), Borland, Raritan, the Marshall Center for Security Studies, and others.

You can reach Mike via email at mike@translationOptimization.com.

I asked others to test this form for me, but they were unable to replicate my experience. I don’t have this user’s information on my laptop. I have no idea where it could be coming from.

Anyone have ideas how this might happen?

Form pre-populates with someone else's information

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Intelligent content is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done, often automatically. It’s content that is limited only by our imaginations.

With intelligent content you can:

• Automatically deliver to multiple channels
• Personalize content and deliver it dynamically
• Enable customers to easily find the information they need no matter how complex their requirements
• Let your customers build their own unique information products
• Deepen your customer relationships
• Share content across organizational silos
• Manage content throughout its lifecycle
• Rapidly adapt information to changing needs

To enable intelligent content you:

• Develop customer personas
• Design the content with those customers in mind
• Structure the information before you create the content
• Create metadata that supports search, for both authors and customers
• Apply metadata to content at a level of granularity that supports its final use
• Manage the information so that it remains up-to-date and relevant.

Want an example?

If you’re managing a website, you can ensure that your customers can find the information they are looking for. Because the information has been tagged with metadata during the content creation cycle, it’s easily discoverable by search engines. And because you’ve thought about your customer and structured the information in a logical way, you’ve already given them a helping hand when finding information in your content by organizing it in a logical manner — now that’s smart on your part. More importantly, because it’s tagged, you can personalize the content for returning customers, so they see only what they want or need to see.

Another one?

If you publish material on a website and on paper (a journal, magazine or newsletter for example) you can create content specifically for each of those outputs. Depending on your needs, the content could be the same, with differences in visual style, format, and language. The content could be different; more detailed in the print version perhaps, or extra supporting information, such as animations, videos, or geographic information (maps, directions) in the online and/or mobile device versions. Translated versions of the content could be made available to readers with alternative language preferences. For the visually impaired, you could provide an accessible version that could be read aloud by the display device. The content could also be formatted using much larger fonts to make it easier for the visually challenged to see. And, when you change the source information, the updated content would be available immediately for publishing via all media, according to your requirements, formatting rules and schedule and in alignment with the personal preferences of the end-user content consumer. Automatically.

By adding intelligence to the content, you can have it do the formatting work for you, on-demand, only when it’s needed. That’s the smart way of providing the right content, to the right people, in the right format, at the right time, in the right language.

But it doesn’t stop here. When content is presented to a consumer, the content itself can trigger computers to perform automated tasks. Perhaps after you find the answer to a problem using an online help system, the content itself alerts the company customer satisfaction department. A few days later, you receive a customer satisfaction survey via email designed to find out how the company is doing and how they can continue to provide excellent service. You click on a personalized URL that records the answers to the survey and automatically triggers the company email system to send you a thank you letter and a gift certificate to the company online store. When you buy an item in the store using your gift certificate, the e-Commerce site records this information in your personal profile. While you’re checking out, the system asks you if you’d like to join the company’s product-specific online service, where you can find useful tips and tricks, meet and network with other product owners like yourself, upload and watch videos, write and read blog posts, leave comments, provide feedback and more.

This is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. And, it all started with — and is driven by — intelligent content. The types of automation that intelligent content makes possible are nearly limitless. Governments, educational institutions, and organizations of all types are starting to see the value of using intelligent content to perform business tasks that were traditionally handled manually. Automating these processes makes them more consistent, less error-prone, and much more affordable, freeing up scarce financial and human resources for value-added tasks that many organizations today claim they don’t have time to accomplish. By admitting that humans aren’t always the better choice for performing tasks, and creating and managing content in intelligent ways, we can improve our content offerings, provide better service, and enjoy fewer errors. And, did I mention save money? Tons of it.

Smart. You betcha!

Want to learn more?

If adopting intelligent content approach is something your organization could benefit from — and come on, how could you not? — consider attending our second annual Intelligent Content conference, The Magic Behind Intelligent Content, February 25-26, 2010 in beautiful Palm Springs, CA. You’ll hear presentations from practitioners who are making intelligent content work in the real world. Our two featured presenters include:

• Gabor Fari, Solutions Strategist within the Health & Life Sciences Industry Unit for Microsoft, the chief architect and driving force behind the company’s Intelligent Content Framework, with the mission to introduce an entirely new way of managing Enterprise Content in Regulated Industries, based on the latest XML technologies.
• Bob Glushko, Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the School of Information, the Director of the Center for Document Engineering, and one of the founding faculty members of the Information & Service Design program. In 2008 he co-founded and serves as a Director for Document Engineering Services, an international consortium of expert consultants in standards for electronic business.

The event will feature 2 days worth of presentations by more than a dozen industry veterans covering topics as varied as social media, marketing, technical communication, training development, publishing, mobile communications, and much, much more. It’s an intimate event. Attendance is capped at around 100 people, making it easy to network with one another and share information with your peers. Sponsorships are available, but are limited. Contact me for details.

For additional information, stop by The Rockley Group website and check out the intelligent content whitepapers.

And, of course, keep an eye on The Content Wrangler blog and The Content Wrangler Community. We’ll be publishing articles, reviews, and case studies about real-world implementations of smart content projects over the coming months.

If you’ve got an intelligent content project about which I’m unaware — or even one in the works — let me know I’d love to know about your success/horror story and/or lessons learned and best practices.

JF: I have been in the high-tech industry for 28 years. The company I work for, Millennium Consultants, Inc. is a Technology company that specializes in: Software Quality Assurance, Software Development, Staffing, IT Security and E-Learning.

TCW: You’ve got a pretty interesting mix of products, one of which is of particular interest to our readers. It’s called Linked2. Can you tell us briefly what it is and what it does?

Linked2: Seamless integration of Adobe FrameMaker and EMC Documentum

Linked2 also provides secure login, intuitive search and retrieval of modular content components, metadata support, extensible and configurable behavior and workflow functionality, as well as support for virtual document creation.

TCW: What versions of Adobe FrameMaker and Documentum was Linked2 designed to support?

JF: Adobe FrameMaker 8.0 and 9.0 and Documentum 6.5. The software works best with FrameMaker 9.0 to use all the features.

TCW: What problems does Linked2 solve for folks using Adobe FrameMaker with Documentum?

JF: It allows the user to access the millions of documents stored in Documentum, edit it in Frame Maker, reuse DITA XML chunks and check the quickly back into Documentum.

TCW: Some folks would just consider your product as a “nice to have”, but not necessary. What’s the value proposition for an organization of let’s say 100 content creators working in FrameMaker and storing their content in Documentum? Why is a lack of integration between Adobe FrameMaker and Documentum a problem?

JF: Linked2 allows the Adobe FrameMaker user to reuse XML content that has already been created thus saving time and money. The lack of integration between FrameMaker and Documentum creates unnecessary manual tasks, introduces human error, and slows down the process of content creation and delivery. We’re the first company to actually create a seamless integration between these products that actually works.

TCW: How is Linked2 different from WebDAV? What are the differentiating factors and why is each of value to users

JF: WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers. WEBDAV really only allows you to check-in and check-out documents with revision control. Linked2 not only allows you to check-in and check-out documents, but it also allows you to check-out XML chunks and graphics (content components), drill down and check-out to the Parent/child, root, and descendents level. This is very impressive content component reuse and much more useful than simply checking out an entire document.

TCW: Does Linked2 work with any other content management systems?

JF: Not yet.

TCW: If my readers are interested in learning more, can you provide a demonstration or a downloadable trial version of the software? If so, how do they sign up?

JF: Visit our website to download a trial version. We also provide an online demonstration video and a product brochure on our website. Interested readers can connect with me via email or telephone at +1.877.869.5369.

TCW: Well, we’re almost out of time. Before we end this interview, is there anything else you’d like to add?

JF: Linked2 is a plug-in that is very easy to install and use. It becomes another menu item on the Adobe FrameMaker tool bar thus making it seamless.

TCW: Jim, thanks for your time today. I appreciate you sharing information about Linked2 with our readers. I look forward to learning more about your future product enhancements. Keep us updated.

JF: Thanks Scott.