speakers

B. Noz Urbina

Noz Urbina is an established content strategy thought leader, consultant and trainer specialising in cutting edge, multi-channel, business-driven projects. Since 2000, he has provided services to Fortune 500 organisations and small-to-medium enterprises. For six years, Noz has been Events Chair and Content Director for Congility.com and has won a leading global reputation in the structured content community.

Blog: http://lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com
Twitter: @nozurbina
Linkedin: http://es.linkedin.com/in/bnozurbina

Noz's talk

The Freedom to Grow: How Standards in Communication Facilitate Our Industry (link)

Standards – either in the XML sense or simply communication best practices – help grow, accelerate and “professionalise” an industry.  Would construction be without material standards for width and strengths, or certification for specific skills?  How could we have transportation without standards for traffic and processes?  Standards are what help ad-hoc processes become enterprise-class, and scale beyond our expectations.

Technical communication is in an era of rapid, disruptive and revolutionary change. The true nature of the challenge is understood by a few, and pros and cons of potential solutions by even fewer.  The future therefore will require that we work together to exchange knowledge as best we can to help each other hit the many moving targets.  We must do this because our old techniques and processes just can’t keep up, and no one organisation has the time or funds to re-invent every solution on their own.  Standards help an organisation with little funds tackle larger challenges, and larger organisations implement profound change with reduced risk.  The alternative is potentially getting left behind as the industry and community rush forward.

Eliot Kimber

Eliot Kimber has been working with structured markup and large-scale hyperdocuments for longer than he cares to admit. He has been involved in SGML and XML standards for more than 20 years, including as co-editor of HyTime 2nd Edition, a founding member of the XML Working Group, and a founding member of the DITA Technical Committee. Eliot's career focus has been on the management and processing of complex hyperdocuments through complex development and delivery life cycles. For the last 10 years Eliot has focused on the business challenges of Publishers and the application of the DITA standard to text books, trade books, and periodicals. Eliot is founder and principal developer of the DITA for Publishers open-source project. Eliot is an independent consultant. When not implementing new DITA specializations Eliot enjoys skateboarding, Aikido, and playing Minecraft with his young daughter. Eliot lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Eliot's Talk

Using DITA to Generate Powerpoint Slides from Learning Content (link)

PowerPoint slide decks are often required for training content authored in XML. Until recently, this was difficult for many users. With the development of the Apache POI library, it is now possible to reliably generate PowerPoint documents with a minimum of implementation effort. The new Slidinator open-source project provides a general architecture for generating Powerpoint slides (and, potentially, other slide presentation formats). The DITA for Publishers project integrates the Slidinator with slide-specific map and topic specializations based on the Learning and Training vocabulary in order to produce Powerpoint slides from DITA source.

This presentation demonstrates the PPTX generation process and discusses the information and markup design challenges in authoring content to be presented as slides. It discusses various reuse options and strategies for adapting existing content to slide presentation. It also shows how the same source can be used to generate student handouts with notes, instructor handouts with instructor notes, and so on, in addition to the Powerpoint itself.

Andrzej Nedoma

Co-owner and managing director of LIDO-LANG Technical Translations of Krakow, Poland. One of the inspirers and authors of the translation company management system (XTRFTM Translation Management Systems – www.xtrf.eu.)

In 2006, he was awarded the title "Micro-Entrepreneur of the Year” in the "services” category in the second edition of the competition organised by Citibank Handlowy and the Leopold Kronenberg Foundation in Poland.

Andrzej's Talk

How technology influences translation project management (link)

Corporations present on the global market have their marketing materials, product descriptions, catalogues, user manuals etc. translated with the aim of maximising sales in foreign countries. With the international markets becoming more and more important for corporations, the need of translation into even more languages is growing, bringing in consequence new challenges for translation agencies. Not only do the localization departments need to translate more content into more languages within a budget that does not grow proportionally to the effort required, but they also need to focus much more on the project-specific turnaround times as the “time-to-market“ factor for the products is often a priority.


Andrzej – the Managing Director of one the biggest translation companies in Central and Eastern Europe (LIDO-LANG Technical Translations), as well as the President of XTRF Management Systems, will present an overview of technologies used to create new content, manage translation requests within the corporation and work with translation services suppliers more efficiently. After that Andrzej will show how technology can help streamline translation project management within a translation company in order to deliver fast turnaround times of translation projects and high quality translations.

Piotr Peszko

I am an instructional designer and Lead Training Content Developer as well as co-founder of EduCamp conference that loves to blog. I help people leverage e-learning to foster engaged learners and support business training endeavors. My goal is to help businesses through e-learning that just works.

To learn my approach to learning solutions please go to http://blog.2edu.pl

Piotr's Talk

How the Tin Can API will Revolutionize the Learning World (link)

If you would like to:
- Bring big data and learning together in ways that were never before possible.
- Get a clearer picture of training roi than ever before by tracking more than ever before
- Unchain the power of mobile devices
- Move learning games from fun trend to a practical necessity.
- Let employees justify their value by directly tuing learning they complete to job performance.


Come and join me at the Soap Conference where I will change the way you think about elearning and learning as a whole.

Claudia Blaschke

Claudia Blaschke studied politics and roman literature at the University of Stuttgart. After completing her university courses, Claudia then went on to work for a translation memory management company and was responsible for the consultation and implementation of translation processes and terminology management. Between 2005 and 2007 Claudia was responsible for advising SCHEMA clients on the installation of (CMS) Content Management Systems. In 2007 Claudia took the role of senior manager and is now directly responsible for customers and clients of the SCHEMA GmbH internationally.

Claudia's Talk

How German Manufacturers Create Technical Documentation with ST4 DocuManager (link)

To succeed on a global market, manufacturers have to be flexible, offer different variants, be present in many markets, etc. All these challenges have an impact on the way technical documentation needs to be provided.

Whether it is about localization to three dozen languages, handling variants on different granularity levels, publishing efficiently to different output channels, not getting lost in XML details, etc. ST4 DocuManager offers such features as a ready-to-use solution for technical documentation.

See in a live presentation how more than 100 German and Swiss manufacturers use ST4 DocuManager on a daily basis for

• Modularizing documents in a simple and effective way
• Handling variants with different degrees of granularity
• Localizing into multiple languages
• Publishing efficiently without scripting in/(into) different formats
• Integrating MS Word as authoring tool in a 100% XML environment

SCHEMA has gained expertise by having worked for more than 15 years with over 300 industrial customers around the world such as Siemens, Bosch, Philips, Daimler, General Electric, Toyota, MAN, ABB, Lufthansa, Bombardier, Agilent, Sagem, Ericsson, Carl Zeiss, Voith, SEW Eurodrive, Nero, INA Schaeffler, Doppelmayr, etc.

Mike Hamilton

VP of Product Evangelism | MadCap Software

Prior to joining MadCap Software, Michael Hamilton served as the Product Manager for Macromedia's award-winning RoboHelp product line. As product manager of RoboHelp for most of its life, Mr. Hamilton gathered input and feedback from the customer community and guided ongoing development of the various RoboHelp products. Mr. Hamilton joined the RoboHelp family in 1999 as a founding member of the Training Solutions Program team, where he co-authored the certified training materials supporting the RoboHelp family.

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

Mr. Hamilton is often a featured speaker at industry events, including the WinWriters Online Help Conferences, STC (the Society for Technical Communication) Annual International Conference, Forum 2000 London, the Annual Australasian Online Documentation Conferences, the European Online Documentation Conferences and many more events. Mr Hamilton has also appeared at the Microsoft Campus and STC regional conferences and events.

Mr. Hamilton is also frequently quoted in technology articles in various trade publications.

Mike's Talk

Publishing to Mobile Devices: Best Practices and Strategies (link)

This session will begin with an overview of the mobile space and the challenges and opportunities unique in publishing content to mobile devices. The various kinds of mobile devices will be discussed while analyzing why a “one size fits all” approach will never be optimal. With the correct techniques and strategies your content can be optimized for multi-channel publishing including phones, tablets, and embedded devices. We will cover topic content layout techniques, CSS techniques, the importance of Skin files, and the various publishing formats and when each would be appropriate.

Agata Sliwinska

Holds an MA in English and has always been involved in teaching and the translating industry during her career. She is an XTM Cloud expert and carries out many customer presentations, while also providing first line support and advice on XTM best practices. Agata delivers the highly regarded XTM training sessions to help users maximize the potential benefits of XTM.

Agata's Talk

How Cloud-based Translation Technology Can Boost Localization Management: A Case Study (link)

Cloud-based translation tools are revolutionizing the way translators and localization teams work. They offer many advantages over traditional desktop software and greatly contribute to effective project management and delivery on time with a significant cost reduction.

During my presentation, I would like to discuss the benefits of translating in the cloud in more detail and reinforce it with a customer case study. We will be talking about how to increase efficiency and translation consistency, improve cash flow and securely maintain your translation assets.  This presentation is suitable for anyone involved in the translation and localization processes - Project Managers, translators, content owners and in-company validators included. Everyone is welcome!

Agnieszka Tkaczyk

Agnieszka is an Information Developer at IBM and a freelance translator cooperating with one of the Cracow universities. In her day-to-day work, she does her best to meet customer expectations and produce user-friendly and accurate documentation. She is also interested in user interface design.

Agnieszka's Talk

Progressive Disclosure – Giving the Right Information at the Right Place (link)

As technical writers, we go to great lengths to translate technical gibberish into readable manuals. Unfortunately, no matter how fancy and sophisticated documentation we produce, it is never the customers’ goal to read the outcome of our hard work. Software users want to complete their tasks quickly and easily, preferably without consulting any external sources of information. If they encounter a problem, they look for clues in their closest vicinity, namely the window of the program they are using. It’s our job to ensure that they can find what they are looking for. Progressive disclosure is a method that helps us do that.