As the Worldwide Evangelist for Technical Communication at Adobe, Stefan Gentz’s mission is to inspire enterprises and technical writers around the world and show how to create compelling technical communication content with the Adobe Technical Communication Suite tools. Stefan is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001/EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert, and Six Sigma Champion. Stefan is a popular keynote speaker and moderator at conferences such as tekom, tcworld, Information Energy, Intelligent Content Conference, Congility, LocWorld, TCUK, STC, GALA, ELIA, TTT, Translation Forum Russia, and many others. He is a member of the Conference Advisory Board of the world’s biggest TechComm event, the tekom/tcworld Conferences, and member of the iiRDS working group for Intelligent Information. He is also an active social networker on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Let’s Discuss Content Reuse Again!

So, another talk about content reuse? No. This presentation asks: Do we get the maximum value out of expensively created technical content? And how can we use technical content in a more value-adding way in the future? Creating this content costs a lot of time and effort—and therefore money—and the content is of the highest quality and information value. Reasons enough to ask ourselves the question: Why does all this effort only end up in a PDF, which then ekes out its existence on a support page somewhere, as hard to find as possible? In this session, Stefan Gentz discusses why we need to rethink technical content and presents ideas on how to increase the value of information both within the company and for the customer.

Stop the Coding Madness and Start Delivering!

When organizations start adopting structured content, the first step is usually to migrate legacy content. But quickly, the question of publishing the content also arises. Unsurprisingly, the requirement to create engaging PDFs is a top priority: In the Adobe Technical Communication Industry Survey 2022, 82 % of respondents said that PDF is the most important output channel.

But creating high-quality PDFs from XML-based content is no easy task. Typically, documentation teams hire a consultant to develop custom PDF plug-ins for the DITA Open Toolkit or contract with another vendor for a dedicated PDF formatter. None of this is cheap, fast, or easy, and it quickly becomes a permanent fixture. Rebranding initiatives, slow turnaround times for new documents, and other challenges become perennial problems.

With the latest version of Adobe’s CCMS, all these problems are a thing of the past. In this session, Stefan Gentz, Senior Worldwide Evangelist at Adobe, will show you how the new cloud-based PDF publishing engine in Adobe Experience Manager Guides makes it easy to create high-quality PDF—all without XSLT, XSL-FO, or other programming skills.

Be faster than the Competition:  Seamless Collaboration and Efficient Coordination Processes are Success Factors

So, another talk about content reuse? No. This presentation asks: Do we get the maximum value out of expensively created technical content? And how can we use technical content in a more value-adding way in the future? Creating this content costs a lot of time and effort—and therefore money—and the content is of the highest quality and information value. Reasons enough to ask ourselves the question: Why does all this effort only end up in a PDF, which then ekes out its existence on a support page somewhere, as hard to find as possible?

In this session, Stefan Gentz discusses why we need to rethink technical content and presents ideas on how to increase the value of information both within the company and for the customer.