Who should attend
Experiencing problems getting the right content in the right format out the door in a way that engages your customer? Tired of slogging away with mountains of content? Does the proliferation of channels seem overwhelming? Need to find ways of doing more with the same? Then Intelligent Content is for you. Intelligent Content 2010 is designed for:

• CIOs
• Content managers
• Content strategists
• Information architects
• Marketing managers

If content is your focus, intelligent content makes sense for you. Check out our speakers or the conference website for more information.

Join Ann for a one hour webinar as she explains how DITA brings structure to content and how it can have a positive impact on content and translation management efforts. Too often content globalization is isolated from content creation and the relationship between content contributors and localization is adversarial. But effective content globalization begins at the source!

The webinar will cover the following topics:

• What DITA is
• The Business Value of using DITA
• How it’s applicable to multiple ECM applications
• Impacts on translation work and processes of business content
• The role technology can play in the global content lifecycle

To register for the webinar, click here.

Presented in conjunction with Across Systems.

As an early science fiction fan, I read my first SF at 6. The space program and in particular the moon landing captured my attention. I watched every second of the moon landing. That was it, I was going to be an astronaut. I clipped newspaper articles, read books, collected space stamps and watched everything I could on the subject.

But I soon learned that being an astronaut was out of the question, not because I was a girl, (the thought that that was a problem never occurred to me), but because I had asthmatic lungs. Not to be deterred, I decided I was going to be an astronomer. At the young age of 12 I joined the Royal Astronomical Society and went to monthly meetings. I saved up my babysitting money and bought my first telescope, a refractor, at 15 then later bought another scope, a reflector this time, when I was 16.

I had my career all planned out! I went into the pure and applied science stream in high school and took every math and physics course I could. I was ecstatic when I got accepted into Astronomy at the University of Toronto. Things didn’t quite turn out the way I had expected, though, I hated theoretical physics. I kept on plugging for three years because I loved the subject so much but when I learned I couldn’t participate in the 4th year work term at the Hawaii-France-Canada telescope (again because of my asthma), and I discovered that you practically had to wait for someone to die before you got a job as an astronomer, I decided to reconsider my goals. I started looking for another program to finish my degree.

My second love was writing. I thought I would be a science journalist, but there were no courses in that, so I settled on creative writing to hone my writing skills and thought maybe I could be a textbook editor/writer. I ended up with a degree in Creative Writing and a minor in Science and fell into my first job as a technical writer, not having a clue what it was. And the rest (as they say) is history.

I still love science fiction, reading 100’s of books a year, watch many of the science fiction shows, and get my telescopes out periodically. If it hadn’t been for the moon landing, I don’t think I would be where I am today.

Component Content Management has a proven track record in cost savings. However, in a tough economy it is hard to make the case for content management. This session looks at how you can move forward with content management even when money is tight. We will look at identifying ROI, the case for hosted content management systems, and what you can do with your content even when you don’t have a content management system in place. You will take away solid suggestions that will improve your content no matter what your budget and put you on the path towards content management!

Click for more information, or to register.

At first glance this seems like a very odd match. Really Strategies has largely been focused on publishing and media and DocZone.com has been focused on DITA and technical publishing. However, they are both publishing and both XML-based. These worlds are beginning to blend with publishers looking to XML to help them become more agile and move into “Publishing 2.0″.

The major reason that this acquisition makes sense is because DocZone.com offers a low-cost SaaS-based solution to complement Really Strategies higher-end client/server solution. This makes it possible for Really Strategies to serve a broader range of publishing and media companies.

DocZone.com has become known for its innovation:

• First SaaS-based XML technical publishing solution
• Rapid move to open-source Alfresco after EMC purchased XHive Docato
• Low-cost publishing and media version earlier this year

So it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt to this new home for the product. However, we do anticipate some adjustment as the DocZone.com product has to become more user friendly to support the technology adverse world of the traditional publishing editorial process.

That being said, Really Strategies has gained a low-cost SaaS-based publishing solution to round out its offering, global European clients and support, and a highly innovative development team and DocZone.com has gained a more secure home.

Really Strategies has pledged to maintain DocZone.com’s product and customer base. The combined companies will be headquartered in Audobon, PA.

The acquisition of XyEnterprise was not a surprise, with this economy this is one of the products we had identified as ripe for acquisition, but it was a bit of a surprise to hear that it was SDL. SDL Trisoft and XyEnterprise Contenta compete head to head in the market place.

While these products do compete there are pieces of XyEnterprise that will augment SDL Trisoft. The first and most obvious being the publishing products XML Professional Publisher (XPP) and LiveContent (a dynamic delivery engine). XyEnterprise also brings an S1000D version to the table, an obvious gap in SDL Trisoft. However, there is a lot of overlap in the main product Contenta and we anticipate that a large portion of it will be discarded. The new product will be branded XySoft.

XyEnterprise also brings a large sales and support staff to SDL Trisoft. While SDL Trisoft has projected a large presence under the SDL name, it was really very tiny. SDL Trisoft could not have continued to grow without a large influx of resources. And grow they must to compete with the ECM vendors like EMC and IBM that have entered the CCM space.

While SDL has a good track record of maintaining the integrity of the products it purchases (e.g., Idiom, Tridion, Trisoft) I can’t help but feel that we are losing a venerable old product (surviving on its own for almost 20 years) in the acquisition of XyEnterprise Contenta. It will probably continue to live on in the S1000D version, but will be subsumed in SDL Trisoft.

More and more companies are either adopting DITA or thinking about adopting it, yet surprisingly, there are very few resources written in plain English for those who want to learn about it. Many of the existing resources are very technical in nature. No matter how simple an article or book started out they always ended up talking about DITA in the context of XML code. Like any XML standard there is structure in DITA, but authoring tools can now illustrate structure in an intuitive manner.

We’ve designed DITA 101 for writers and managers. We’ve taken our years of experience helping organizations to move to DITA and distilled it into an easy-to-read and understandable format. And since the move to DITA often goes hand-in-hand with an organization’s adoption of content management, we’ve made sure that our expertise in developing effective content, reuse and content management, and their appropriate strategies are integrated throughout to give you everything you need to know to understand DITA.

DITA 101 is written for authors who need to understand the concepts but don’t need to know how to set up DITA nor how to modify the code. This book is about understanding structure, structured writing and reuse all in the context of DITA. In addition, we’ve also written DITA 101 for managers to help them understand the basics of DITA, the changes in roles, and the things to think about when planning a DITA project.

DITA 101 includes the following sections:

• What is DITA provides a definition of DITA and explains its key features.
• The value of structure in content explains how to analyze content for structure and uses recipes to illustrate the concepts of structure and structured writing.
• Reuse: Today’s best practice presents the benefits of reuse and provides an understanding of all the types of reuse that DITA supports.
• Topics and maps takes you through the building blocks of DITA.
• A day in the life of a DITA author helps to illustrate how an author would develop a content outline, create topics and write structured content.
• Planning for DITA provides insights into how to most effectively plan for DITA and the changes in roles and responsibilities.
• Metadata introduces the concepts of metadata, an often overlooked and misunderstood topic, and gives insight into the metadata that DITA supports.
• DITA and technology introduces some of the key DITA features that authoring, content management and publishing systems should support.
• The advanced stuff contains our insight on such topics as domains, conrefs, selection attributes, relationship tables and specialization.

Examples are used throughout to illustrate the concepts.

DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers is available from Lulu for $9.95 immediate download, and approximately $25 for a paperback version.

If you would like to see more before you buy you can download Reuse: Today’s best practice.