Hyperviews Online

On December 1, the Online SIG was asked for help recruiting participants for a survey. The request cam from the Product Planner for the UA team at Microsoft that produces the Windows Help System and platform.

Microsoft was looking for help in planning the next generation of tools for user assistance, and seeking feedback about what’s needed in next-generation of Help and user assistance platforms, both online and client-based.

The Online SIG announced Microsoft’s survey on the SIG email list and the SIG announcement list, and encouraged a member at Microsoft to post the link on the STC Forum. (more…)

IEEEPCS conference. Seattle, Washington. October 1-3 2007. Call for papers deadline January 24, 2007. http://www.ieeepcs.org/ipcc2007/cfp.htm

IEEEPCS conference. Seattle, Washington. October 1-3 2007. Call for papers deadline January 24, 2007. http://www.ieeepcs.org/ipcc2007/cfp.htm

Part of the charter of the Online SIG is using content management to organize and present STC information. Hyperviews Online is published using an open source content management system, WordPress. We have published and linked to articles on content management, and we continually gather resources on the subject. Web resources are listed here, including web sites and web glossaries, magazines, and resource lists. (more…)

We have renewed 342 more members than last year at this time, and we are at 12% of members renewed, whereas last year at this time we were at 10%. We have 48 more members than at this time last year. We also have four Corporate Value Program (CVP) members now.

Our next email renewal notice is scheduled to go out on January 9, and the next postal mail notice goes out on January 29.

The Corporate Value Program (CVP) offers a variety of options, tailored to meet organizations’ technical communication needs. Companies can choose between memberships for all the staff or just a few.

The benefits include: E-memberships for company employees; transferable membership, if employees leave the company; special CVP rates on select STC goods and services (not available to employees directly); special CVP rates on training and education offerings; eligibility to introduce the organization’s products/services/events to STC members; recognition on STC’s CVP web page and on STC’s homepage – and more. More information on the Corporate Value Program is available on STC’s website.

These tools are said to be able to represent, graphically, the nesting of levels of elements and sub-elements within a DTD file:

TIBCO’s TurboXML shows the structure tree and can ceate example XML files

XML Spy, but you may have to turn the DTD into a schema first.

LiveDTD provides easy navigation among the various DTD components via hyperlink. but not visualization

The founder of Wikipedia has launched a service offering free tools for community websites, it was reported in the BBC news December 12, 2006.

 April 11-13, 2007. San Francisco and November 2007 in Boston. http://www.gilbanesf.com

April 18-21, 2007. Vancouver. BC, Canada and October 2007 in Boston. http://www.doctrain.com

X-Pubs presents: CMS & Change - Love it, Hate it, Master it (Scott Abel & Emma Hamer)

Tuesday, December 12, 2006 — 10:00AM EST / 3:00 PM GMT
Reserve your FREE Webinar seat now at:
https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/952419737

In this interactive online event, you the participants, and content management strategist Scott Abel, will be interviewing Career and Performance Consultant Emma C. Hamer on one of the most critical issues of content management success: Change Management. Scott and Emma were voted two of the most valuable speakers at X-Pubs 2006 in London, and are teaming up to with X-Pubs again to present the online event: “CMS & Change - Love it, Hate it, Master it”.

Every new technology project that seeks to change the way people are used to working is put at risk by non-adoption by users, intermittent support by managers, and disparate expectations between the users, management, and the team implementing the system itself.

X-Pubs are facilitating a discussion around Change Management because although the business benefits of multi-purpose content reuse and single-source publishing of information are becoming commonly accepted, something still makes CMS and Structured Content scary.

In this session we will cover things like: How can you maintain management support and involvement in a user-driven initiative? How can department managers roll-out change to a large user group without turning them off? How does a line manager help transition people’s skills to new systems?

Attendees will also be invited to participate in the discussion by submitting questions for Scott and Emma to address for the group.

STC has posted a preview of the 2007 annual conference at http://www.stc-cdx.org/node/414. There are Institutes in content management, localization, knowledge management, information design and architecture, and Web 2.0.

The conference takes place May 13 - 16, 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

The opening speaker for the 2007 STC annual conference is Simon Singh, STC’s 2007 Honorary Fellow, and an author, journalist, and television producer.

The closing speaker is Ze Frank, a high-tech humorist.

The photo gallery at www.stc-cdx.org/gallery has photos of both speakers.

We Are Smarter than Me (http://www.wearesmarter.org/) invites authors to participate in writing the first networked book on business, to be published in the fall of 2007 by Pearson Publishing.  The group says “Together we will write the book on how the emergence of community and social networks will change the future rules of business.”

CM Professionals, the international content management community of practice, is changing its public image with the December 7 launch of its new public-facing website: http://www.cmprofessionals.org/

“The outcome of our latest website questionnaire told us that our members wanted an improved website. Having a new website and better tooling was already our ambition, so we did our best to provide one to coincide with our Fall Summit, 27 November 2006”, says STC Fellow Ann Rockley, CEO of The Rockley Group (Canada) and former CM Pros President.

The contents of the CM Pros website has been brought back to the essentials and the navigation is made much more accessible. Members already responded enthusiastic on the new graphical design, made by Studio Zipper. (more…)

Online SIG Education Lead Tom Johnson is aggregating podcasts on the STC Suncoast Chapter site: http://www.stc-suncoast.org/podcastfeed Included are many podcasts by technical communicators, and podcasts from the Four Lakes chatper of STC.