If you develop training material and depend on just a printed PDF to teach participants, you’re missing a major component: Online and interactive video.

Learn how a new online course is developed for a community college training program. When Humber College decided to put its FrameMaker training courses online they needed course outlines, weekly session breakdowns, sample materials, and much more. While these are standard parts of any training course, the new course also had to be delivered online.

Using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2.5 we created all the course material, including online video and PDF. Learn what the workflow was, and see samples of the finished training material. Learn key utilities of FrameMaker, Captivate, Acrobat, and the rest of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite – and see how your courses can become interactive, dynamic, engaging and an online success!

You can help your mobile team improve your apps by understanding the basics of mobile application creation. This workshop will cover iPhone/iPad and Android but can be generalized to other mobile platforms. This session is technical in nature but does not require any experience with programming.

The first area of exploration is with user interface text. The reduced screen real estate of mobile devices put a great weight on the words and phrases appearing in the apps. The first word to mind is rarely the best word. Usability techniques can help you choose the perfect word for every situation and make your app that much easier to use. By understanding how application creation is done you can do much of the design work on your own without the need for programming resources.

The second area to explore is the delivery of your content. For training and user assistance content, providing your content as a web-based deliverable inside of an application has several advantages over embedding it in code. One is that there is no need for your content to go through the Apple app review process. Two, you can update the content at any time without affecting installed apps. And three, you can do all of your work without the need for programming resources. We will look at some of the differences in web content delivery for different mobile platforms.

You will learn:

• How micro-concise instructions regarding difficult concepts can significantly improve a users initial experience with the mobile app
• How to best integrate content displayed on a desktop or laptop with that of the mobile app
• The vocabulary used by mobile app developers
• How to prototype with the iPhone SDK and simulator

Joe Welinske is currently working on the design of Help for a range of iPhone applications, where his focus is on features that are not easily discovered. He’ll share his experiences in this session.

Despite our best efforts at developing user assistance, it is increasingly likely that your users will turn to Google for answers to question about your software. The success Google has in providing quick answers to difficult questions has made it a natural resource for help with software – even if the software provides tutorials, online help, FAQs, forums, and e-mail support. Since this trend will probably continue, we need to learn how to “embrace the beast”.

There are a number of things you can do to improve your Googleability without too much time and money. This session describes how Google indexes information and what you need to do to be visible, how to use search engine optimization techniques (including the use of sitemaps and metadata), how writing styles affect indexing, and what other search engines you may want to support.
Search engine optimization is not just the realm of consumer web sites and marketing folks. The importance of visibility on the web means that all of us need to have a working understanding of how search engine work. More importantly, we need to understand how to make that work for us and our content.

You will learn

• The importance of getting your content on a public-facing server and the challenges in doing so
• How Google indexes information and delivers it to search queries
• How to add a variety of search engine optimization techniques to your content production
• About the importance of supporting social networks and mobile devices

This session is designed for content developers of all experience levels. A basic understanding is required of web markup and the client/server process. No specific understanding of tools is required.

Turn your product, service or process documentation into a strategic resource, with MindTouch!

Organizations on the cutting edge of innovation and customer service have realized that documentation is much more than a static reference to their products and services. They know, that when properly executed, it can drive revenue and decrease support costs. Is your company one of those organizations?

Your customers (and potential customers) are viewing your online documentation as a reason for (or against) doing business with you. If your organization does not see documentation in this way, how could your customers and prospects possibly do so?

This workshop will look at how organizations can take advantage of a broad set of talents (both internal and external to their organization) to tackle the strategic content lifecycle: Authoring strategic content, making that content conducive to Discovery, and probably most important, how to properly Curate their online information.

Who should attend?

• Technical communicators
• Content strategists
• eLearning and Training managers
• Anyone responsible for knowledge bases or information portals

Foursquare is a hot new marketing tool that uses cell phones to let your customers tell their friends where they are and help them find out where their friends are hanging out. It also allows them to post reviews, collect points, win prize “badges,” and includes little pop-up coupons that will be the future of how retail business will be found by Gen-Y mobile users.

This marketing workshop is being taught by CJ Lucke, Social Media Consultant and Richie Edquid, Events Marketer. They will explain Foursquare in easy to understand terms and will have you sending out coupons and building client relationships by the end of the workshop!

Here is what Paul Somerset, owner of Ono Sushi in San Diego, has to say about Foursquare:

We promoted Foursquare by giving a small sake if you checked in at Ono Sushi. The best example of Foursquare in action was when a reservation for 12 came and all checked in. It was my night off. I was at home with my computer on when I saw all the @mentions and I followed the event. I counted 30 posts for us that night and 7 more the next day (saying they had an awesome time @onosushi etc).

I was able to respond to and interact directly with my customers from the comfort of my own home-adding six followers on Twitter and three on Facebook. Total cost. $4.00.

There is no better way to assure a positive dialogue about your business than Twitter and Foursquare together.

With pressure to offer content in many languages, many companies are considering machine translation for faster delivery and lower translation costs, yet MT is notorious for poor quality translation. How can you write content to make MT work for you?

High quality source content eliminates many of the common roadblocks for using machine translation effectively. In this presentation, Jennifer Beaupre, Marketing Director for acrolinx, will review what best practices have taught us about these topics:

• Why is source content important when using machine translation?
• How does source content affect translation costs?
• How can source content improve the quality of MT output?