More than 8500 businesses worldwide use the LP Chat solution. SDL GlobalConnect for LivePerson Chat integrates automatic real-time translation and enables customer service teams to interact with customers and prospects via the LP Chat interface in any of 35 languages, extending the ability of team members who may speak only one language to provide support to customers.

“It is increasingly important for businesses of all kinds to be able to effectively and efficiently support their customers globally, across multiple languages and communication channels,” explained Jeremy Sokolic, senior vice president of marketing, LivePerson. “Communicating with a customer in real-time in their native language creates a more personal and meaningful brand experience. With the new integration of LP Chat and SDL automatic translation, businesses can more efficiently engage their customers in multiple regions worldwide.”

“SDL is committed to bringing solutions to market that allow customers to consume information in the language, the media and at the moment they choose it,” said Swamy Viswanathan, senior vice president of products and marketing for the SDL Language Technologies division. “Through our partnership with LivePerson, not only are we bringing innovative translation options to a new communication channel, but we are improving the global customer experience for consumers worldwide.”

Read the complete release, or visit the SDL website.  Visit the LivePerson website.

From the Desk of the Editor

Happy Spring!  Or, at least happy that it’s a little warmer somewhere on the map that you look at each day (like us folks in Dallas and Charlotte enjoying 75 degrees yesterday).  The springtime brings giant parties (Mardi Gras) and sacrifices (for some Lent), and the chance not only to finally be caught up from our holiday time off, but also to get out and meet a few people.  The birds, the bees, the sound of clicking of mobile phones with Twitterific quotes – from wherever you technical communications world travelers happen to be.

We can only be referring to Conference Season – Part Spring [insert appropriate movie sequel references here].

For many it is quickly approaching while for others it’s already here—like those attending the Intelligent Content Conference 2012 or Technical Communications World India 2012.  We’re already prepping for our coverage of WritersUA, lining up an ace team of SWU members, and figuring out the most hopping places to hang before and after those amazing sessions of technical communications goodness in Memphis. There’s a whole swath of regional STC events, vendor roadshows, and focused workshops and conferences on all aspects of technical communications all over the world (even where it’s not Spring)… you can post any and all of them on the TechWhirl Events Calendar, totally free of charge.

We always have some interesting news to pass along to you (check the list below), and this week also includes a feature that is a good introduction to using storyboards in technical communications by Greg Larsen. You have plenty of time to drop by and take our weekly technical communications poll on what you would be willing to sacrifice, and post a comment about why.  And, you can look forward to some really interesting articles next week to finish out our month on visual technical communications.

So as you’re following the happenings at conferences, completing a short work week, or doing your usual 40+ hours, take a break and cruise around TechWhirl for timely tidbits and longer-lasting features and how-to’s. Let us know what you think, and what the season is bringing into your corner of the technical communications universe.  On the list or on the magazine, we love hearing from you.

Have a great weekend!

- The gang at TechWhirl

In Case You Missed it: This Week  @ TechWhirl

New on TechWhirl.com:

• The Storyboard: An Outline for Visual Technical Communications, by Greg Larson
• TechWhirl Poll:  What Would You Give Up?

Tech Comm News:

• Tech Writer This Week: February 23, 2012 
• NewsGator Brings Kontiki Enterprise Video Delivery to Microsoft SharePoint
• Tech Comm U to Serve Technical Communications Industry 
• Liquid Technologies Liquid Data Mapper for XML Data Now in Beta
• MeetingKing Web-Based Meeting Workflow and Documentation Tool 

Technical Communications: What You’re Talking About

A quick shout out to our Technical Writers and their discussions in our email discussion group:

• Daniel Feiglen wants recommendations on “Tools for Producing Datasheets,” and provided some specifications and requirements, such as XML roundtripping, format preservation, and affordability.  Whirlers responded with ways to better utilize his existing tool (Microsoft Word) and going to an open source alternative.
• Carla Martinek’s “Question for writers in New Zealand and Australia” prompted a lengthy discussion, both about cultural sensitivities in combining countries for purposes of configuring settings, and about the necessity of determining a recommendation absent complete information from the client.  Once clarified, Australian and New Zealander Whirlers were able to offer an appropriate context.
• Doughty Tech Writer is in the somewhat enviable position of first full-time tech writer with management support for an effort with “Bloated Docs: Identifying What’s Useful.” Surveys OK, local client visits OK, travel to countries where 14 language versions in use not OK. List members made excellent suggestions about whether and how to develop a survey, using web analytics to get hard data, and taking a mind-mapping approach to analyzing the existing documentation.

Social Media and the Chance to Follow TechWhirl:

• Our Google Plus Page – what’s happening behind the scenes | http://goo.gl/SO0R4
• Will you be our Friend? Please, you know you want to click | http://goo.gl/tDrW7
• Want all this TechWhirl goodness a few characters @ a time | http://goo.gl/itjDg
• Updates from TechWhirl delivered to your email in box | http://bit.ly/tjshxU
• Or, try our RSS feed (great on Flipboard) | http://goo.gl/msLzu

SPONSOR-Luv

We want to send a very special “thank you” to our sponsors for their support.

Platinum: Adobe Systems Incorporated

Gold: ComponentOne Software, Madcap Software

Silver: Society for Technical Communication (STC), Vancouver Island University

Kontiki’s EVP  allows organizations deliver live video webcasting, video on-demand and community video portals over existing networking infrastructure.  NewsGator Social Sites 2010 social computing suite delivers a wide range of social and mobile computing capabilities for Microsoft SharePoint. According to NewsGator, the deep integration with Kontiki’s EVP, “enhances productivity and business performance by significantly streamlining employee information access. Organizations no longer need to spend time and effort navigating to a separate environment to find, share and manage videos.”

“Microsoft SharePoint offers opportunities for organizations to increase productivity, and those opportunities are magnified by Microsoft partners, such as NewsGator, that create solutions to further collaboration,” said Richard Riley, SharePoint product management director at Microsoft Corp.

NewsGator, a Microsoft Gold Certified and Depth Managed Partner, implements Social Sites with social functionality, including, posting, commenting, and sharing Kontiki-delivered video via activity streams, communities, video repositories and internal TV channels.

“Many global organizations are demanding high-quality enterprise video for a growing number of use cases and need to include this important content within their SharePoint environments,” said Kevin Crayton, Kontiki’s Vice President of Products. “NewsGator Social Sites is their fastest path to social video integration with SharePoint and lets companies leverage all the power, efficiency, security, manageability and analytics of our proven video platform. It’s a winning combination which our customers have been looking forward to with huge interest.”

“High-quality enterprise video that can be delivered to every employee across a global company is one of the most personal, engaging and effective ways for a workforce to communicate,” said NewsGator Brian Kellner, VP of Development and Product Management. “To obtain the most value, great content should be easily accessible and in the mainstream of the social business flow. That’s what we’re doing with this integration, and the business results will speak for themselves.”

Kontiki support is part of the Social Sites Video Stream module for Microsoft SharePoint 2010.  Read the full release here, or visit  the NewsGator website and the Kontiki website.

Here at TechWhirl, we’re wondering what tech writers would sacrifice in our weekly poll, and watching some fascinating discussions on the list about the cultural implications of lumping countries together for selection in UI (do users in those lumped countries resent the lumping? Inquiring minds want to know). We’ve included recent technical communications news to give you a nice, well-rounded chunk of technical communications goodness this week.  Enjoy!

The launch announcement notes,  ”Though this career requires advanced information and training to get into the field, it is worth the effort. There is consistent growth for technical communicators because technology is always developing, changing and growing.” In the US alone the growth rate for technical writing is expected to continue at 18 percent through at least 2018. Emmanuel Sullivan founder of Tech Comm U noted, “As technology evolves the need for skilled technical communicators also increases. …the goal [is] to stay relevant to the industry’s current trends and requirements.”

Technical communications has expanded well beyond writing manuals, and Tech Comm U aims to provide continuing education resources that allow professionals to build or sharpen their skills in these expanding areas, such as instructional design.  Tech Comm U notes that educational opportunities most often focus on costly higher education degrees or certificate programs. Instead, Tech Comm U’s “Courses are interactive, affordable, and easy to get through. They provide basic and advanced insight into the technical communications career.”  The company also provides community forum, social media, and blogging to further engage participants and garner feedback.

Tech Comm U offers introductory pricing and promotions. Read the entire announcement, or visit the Tech Comm U website.

Which brings us to this week’s poll. Folks in technical communications have lots of “vices,”  like imbibing copious amounts of caffeine, scheduling SME interviews that never seem to happen, freaking out when the IT department upgrades the system and requires you to reboot… Giving up some vices is virtuous, and is supposed to lead to permanently discarding the bad habit for something healthier or more productive. After all, how hard is it to give up something you can’t stand?  Habits are hard to break, even if we complain about them all the time. But if we break bad technical communications habits, can we replace them with good stuff?

You only get one choice on this week’s poll, but we would love to learn why you would give up your selected vice, and if you see any benefits to doing so.  Take the poll, and please take a little time to comment on what technical communications “thing” you’d give up, for Lent, any other holiday, or just for good.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Liquid Technologies positions Liquid Data Mapper as a highly effective data mapping and XML data mapping program that provides graphical mapping of XML data fields from source to destination, with extensive control through manual transforms. Features of Liquid Data Mapper include capabilities to set source and destination goals, switch between design and source view, generate filter rules, write logical expressions, and output generated code in a range of formats, such as XSLT and XQuery. Users can specify an XML instance file to build a mapping component or use any XML schema or namespace aware DTDs to transform XML data from one structure to any other XML structure.

The company is seeking beta testers to work with Liquid Data Mapper and provide feedback on enhancements and improvements prior to first release, currently scheduled for March 2012. Interested parties can participate in the beta program by downloading a trial version of Liquid XML Studio and registering on the Liquid Technologies forum website, where feedback should be provided.

In addition to Liquid Data Mapper, the Liquid XML Studio toolkit and IDE, contains XML Editor, XML Schema Editor, WSDL Editor, XSLT Editor/Debugger, XQuery Editor/Debugger, XPath Expression Builder, HTML Documentation Generator, XML Diff-Compare, and Web Service Tools. Liquid Technologies Ltd, supplies productivity tools for XML software developers conforming to the W3C standards.

Visit the Liquid Technologies website, or view details on Liquid Data Mapper.