This year’s Challenge will contain a twist—sudden death karaoke! Teams of two will go head-to-head against other localization professionals…all in the name of fun, professional recognition and a chance to win a paid trip to Santa Clara for the finals in March 2013.

Last year’s Globalization Challenge featured teams from Adobe, Apple, Dell, ExactTarget, Google, HP, Intel, KCI, Mincom, National Instruments and Research in Motion, among others, with KCI as the winning team.

Pair up with a teammate and register today at www.sdl.com/g11nchallenge.

Building a business case for resources can be challenging, especially if you have few (if any) credible industry metrics to quote. This session includes case studies, metrics, and hard-won lessons learned about how to build a business case to fund content initiatives.

On the one hand, many companies are realizing the benefits of structured, topic-based authoring as migrating to topic-based structured/XML content can result in significant cost savings and return on investment (ROI). However, there are several factors managers should consider that, depending on the decisions made, can significantly dilute or further enhance the ROI of the move to structured authoring.

On the other hand, mobile is posing important questions to content managers around the consumer need to access content from anywhere on any device. Lastly, in today’s challenging economic environment, there is increasing pressure on today’s technical communicators to do more with fewer resources!

In this session, Kapil Verma, Sr. Product Manager (FrameMaker line of products) will discuss how you can deal with these challenges arming yourself with FrameMaker 11 and related line of products. In this session, you will have an opportunity to learn about the recently launched FrameMaker 11 version and what’s new in this release, with several hands on product demos.

You will also see how you can leverage the product’s new capabilities to create and manage content faster, better; distribute it to a wide variety of devices; and be more productive in your daily activities.

Have you ever tried to “thumb” your way through a 9-item bulleted list on a smart phone? If so, you have a sense of the changes needed for sensible display of technical content for multiple screens. We’re all aware of the critical need to deliver content to an increasing variety of smaller screens, from shrinking tablets to smartphones. At the same time, we often need to deliver a “fuller” version of the same content to desktop HTML or, yes, even PDF and paper.

Although there are a number of solutions to achieve this goal, most of us have to shift to a new mind set while writing or authoring content destined for display that is a fraction of the real estate provided by a traditional sheet of paper. “Learn the rules, then choose the tools.” We must also satisfy consumers’ shrinking attention span, as well as the need for mission-critical information to be swiftly found by “readers in motion” and “readers at rest” in cubicles who have much shorter attention spans due to the ever-increasing Niagara or information they must navigate through. The advent of HTML5 has moved our possibilities beyond traditional tri-paned HELP layout. Discover how new workflows and tools can help you achieve your goals.

In order to meet increasing demands for new products, new releases, and customizations, AMD takes a modular and collaborative approach to product development. To be equally flexible in developing the information content that supports and documents their engineering products, AMD chose to implement DITA XML.

However positive engineers are about innovation overall, we all, nonetheless, tend to resist any changes that accompany innovation. And changes in documentation development can be difficult to sell in any case, particularly when the benefits of such changes can seem abstract. Benefits such as consistency, reuse, and even cost-savings aside, acceptance—or rejection—by the individual content authors is a critical factor for a successful implementation of new processes, tools, and technologies.

In the initiative to move to DITA XML, AMD has identified not only the big-picture benefits, but also some concrete advantages for content authors. Documents are changing from being created to being engineered, from being written by an author to being authored by collaboration. This presentation highlights some of the innovations—in both technology and approach—that AMD is implementing as part of the move to a sustainable, collaborative DITA XML model for engineering content.

If we only had a dollar for every time we heard…

• “Why can’t we do this in Word?”
• “This would be so much easier for my team if we could use Word.”
• “Word can handle XML, can’t it?”

The number of requests inspired us to devote some R&D time to the issue. We quickly found that not only could we build an XML editor in Word, we could make a robust XML editor capable of doing everything that current XML editors do with several added bonus, including the most important one: It’s easy.

In this session, Don Smith from Crowell Solutions will show you just how easy it is to create DITA documents and templates in RocketSled, an XML editor in Word, and produce true WYSIWYG output, another XML first.