Prior to joining MadCap Software, Michael Hamilton served as the Product Manager for the award-winning RoboHelp product line through its development by Blue Sky Software/eHelp Corporation and then its ownership by Macromedia. When Macromedia terminated the RoboHelp program (prior to the sale to Adobe) Mr. Hamilton became one of the founding members of MadCap Software.

Mr. Hamilton has over thirty years of experience in training, technical communication, multimedia development, and software development at several organizations including MadCap Software, Macromedia, eHelp, Blue Sky Software, Cymer, a leading supplier of laser illumination sources to the semiconductor industry, National Steel & Shipbuilding, and the US Navy.

How to Re-engineer Your Localization Workflow to Reduce Errors and Significantly Cut Costs

Co-presented with Ian Henderson and Daniel Foster.

Have you ever suffered from a localization workflow for content that involved multiple, tedious, and potentially risky manual steps? Did lack of communication result in localization being treated as an afterthought? And the more languages you would add, the deeper the challenges and headaches? Through a real-life case study for TechSmith, this panel session will show how redesigning the localization workflow, removing the effect of silos, and using well connected tools can turn a situation like this around. You’ll learn how a TechSmith developer of the popular SnagIt and Camtasia products redesigned the content workflow for its localized documentation. The original localization workflow involved multiple human copy and paste processes that were time-consuming, costly, prone to errors, and could delay release schedules if last-minute source content changes occurred. It was clear that adding extra languages would only make this situation worse.

Shattering Multimedia Reuse Limitations in Content Management

Are you tired of maintaining multiple versions of screenshots or images, some with callouts, some without callouts, some with focus/blur effects, etc.? Then if there is an engineering change you must update the various versions of the same graphic! Or worse, do you need to recompile a video file over and over with minor “tweaks” so that it matches a customer’s branding, or lists a local locations details? Why not use the same techniques that we use in text, conditions and variables, inside of our media files? YOU CAN!!!!

In this session, Mike will demonstrate the cutting edge of media use techniques in content management including the use of variables and conditional markers inside of image and movie files and then controlling that metadata during transformation/publishing.