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LavaCon ConferenceON CONTENT STRATEGY AND TECHCOMM MANAGEMENT

THE

A gathering place for content strategists, user experience designers, documentation managers, and other content professionals October 21–24, 2018

New Orleans, LA

Preliminary Program

LavaCon.org

LavaCon 2018Enhance Your Skills. Find Your Tribe. Make a Difference.

Program subject to change without notice Revised September 27, 2018

Schedule at a GlanceSunday, October 21, 2018

8:00– Registration, Coffee

Pre-Conference WorkshopsSeating is limited and based on availability.

9:00–noon. Are You a Content Engineer?Alan Porter, Head of Strategic Services, [A]

Technical Writing for TranslationMelinda Belcher, Senior Director, Mastercard

Context for Content? It Depends.Eeshita Grover, Senior Manager, User Content, Cisco Systems

Managing Content Development Teams: Inner MasteryBarry Saiff, Founder and CEO, Saiff Solutions

Machine Learning 101: Get Started with ChatbotsSteve Liang, Senior Solutions Architect, VMware

Design Thinking WorkshopAndrea Ames, Founder and CEO, Idyll Point Group

Building and Implementing an Experience-Focused Content OrganizationToni Mantych, Director of Information Experience, ServiceNow

Creating Unified Content Portals: The Key to Competitive AdvantageJim Edmunds, CEO, Ingeniux

Special Adobe EventOpen to all conference attendees, but separate registration is required at adobetechcomm.com/lavacon-2018.

1:00–5:00 Adobe Tech Comm Tools Certificate Workshop:Agenda:

1:00–1:30—Lunch1:30–2:30—Create and manage complex technical content (structured or unstructured) with the all-new, powerful, future-ready Adobe FrameMaker (Bernard Aschwanden)2:30–3:30—Learn to wow end users by delivering exceptional Help experiences with a reimagined Adobe RoboHelp (Amitoj Singh)3:30–3:45—Coffee break3:45–4:45—Deliver a consistent experience by bringing marketing and technical content onto the same platform (Stefan Gentz)4:45–5:00—Certificates distributed

7:00–8:00 Speaker ReceptionMag’s 940940 Elysian Fields Avenue, New OrleansSponsored by Saiff Solutions

8:30– The Welcome to LavaCon! Drag Review Starring Princess StephanieMag’s 940940 Elysian Fields Avenue, New OrleansSponsored by Saiff Solutions



Monday, October 22, 2018

7:30– Registration, Continental Breakfast

8:30-9:15 Welcome Jack Molisani, Executive Director, The LavaCon Conference

9:15–9:35 Content in a Zombie Apocalypse Karen McGrane, Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science and Author of

Content Strategy for Mobile

9:35–9:55 Managing the Politics of Content Hilary Marsh, President and Chief Strategist, Content Company, Inc.

9:55–10:15 Cowabunga! Surfing the Crest of the New Content Revolution Rob Hanna, President, Precision Content Authoring Solutions

10:30–11:30 Defining and Measuring Successful Content Experience ImplementationsDawn Stevens, President, Comtech

Planning a Content Delivery Solution that Works for You and Your CustomersMark Poston, Technical Director, CTO, Congility

Engineering the Content Conver-gence Across SilosAlan Porter, Head of Strategic Services, [A]

Content Strategy for the Conversational InterfaceElena Ontiveros, Content Strategy Manager, Airbnb

TBD

11:30–12:45 Networking Lunch

12:45–2:30 Dessert and Vendor Demos in the Exhibit Hall

2:45–3:45 Four Ways to Transform Your Organization with a Collaborative Content StrategyBonnie Chase, Product Owner, MindTouch

How to Ensure Your CMS Implementation is SuccessfulScott Youngblom, Cofounder and EVP, Oberon Technologies, Inc.

Give 'em What They Want: Delivering a Consistent Content Experience Dustin Vaughn, Head of Solutions Consulting, Adobe Systems

Your Chatbot Can Talk Back...LiterallySusan Kelley, Information Engineer, CA Technologies

Rebels with a Cause: How Marcomm andTechcomm United at Salesforce to Create TrailheadGavin Austin, Principal Technical Writer, Salesforce

4:00–5:00 Building a Rock Star Content TeamEeshita Grover, Senior Manager, User Content, Cisco Systems

Is it Time to Replace Your Legacy CCMS?Rik Page, Director, Bluestream Database Software Corp.

Planning for Content Success (Hint: It Doesn't Start with Technology) Amber Swope, DITA Specialist, DITA Strategies

Connecting a Chatbot to Your Technical Content: Myth and RealityFabrice Lacroix, CEO, Fluid Topics

UX Strategy Spanning Marketing and Technical Content at SAPIrina Pashina, Senior Director, Customer Experience and Content Strategy, SAP SE

5:15–5:35 Beyond TechPubs: Evangelizing Structured Content in the Enterprise Don Bridges, Manager—Consulting, JANA

5:35–5:55 From Products to Experiences—And Why You (Yes, You!) are Part of the Customer Experience! Stefan Gentz, Global TechComm Evangelist, Adobe Systems

6:00–7:30 Networking ReceptionSponsored by Adobe

9:00– Live Storytelling EventLocation TBD



Tuesday, October 23, 2018

8:00– Continental Breakfast

9:00–9:20 The Price and Prize of Failure: Learning from Enterprise Content Strategy Mistakes Jim Edmunds, CEO, Ingeniux Corporation

9:20–9:40 Minimum Viable Infrastructure for Enterprise Content Sarah O'Keefe, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Scriptorium Publishing

9:40–10:00 Migrating to Highly-Personalized Dynamic Content Noel McDonagh, Director Content Operations, Dell EMC

10:00–10:20 Hacking the Enterprise: The Continuing Emergence of the New Content Order Cruce Saunders, Founder, [A]

10:45–11:45 Level Up Your Content MetricsSara Feldman, MindTouch, and Neal Kaplan, Splunk

Navigating Users through Knowledge: Structured Content is Good, but not EnoughAlex Masycheff, CEO, Intuillion Ltd.

Joining Forces: Content Strategy in Design Systems Michael Haggerty-Villa, Principal Content Designer, Intuit

Content Design for the Conversational UIMelanie Seibert, Senior Content Strategist, WillowTree

A Journey to Intelligent Content DeliveryPam Goodrich, Technical Documentation Manager, Cherwell, and Joe Gelb, Zoomin Software

11:45–12:45 Lunch


1:30–2:30 How to Run a Kickass Content TeamMelinda Belcher, Senior Director, Mastercard

Creating Interactive Intelligent Style GuidesGeorge Bina, Managing Director, oXygen XML Editor

Visual Learning Ecosystems: The Future of Technical and Marketing Communication Barry Saiff, Founder and CEO, Saiff Solutions, Inc.

Getting Your Content Ready for Voice-Activated SearchAhava Leibtag, President, Aha Media Group

Smart Procedures at the US Department of DefensePradeep Jain, Ictect Inc.

2:45–3:45 Lightweight Documentation for Small TeamsAnthony Apodaca, Business Develop-ment, Xeditor

Using Tone to Make Content MeaningfulSusan Blue, Content Strategist, and Jasmine Probst, Content Strategy Manager, Facebook

The Next Big Thing: Microcontent Rob Hanna, President, Precision Content

Optimizing the XML Content Development ProcessDeb Bissantz, Applications Engineer, Vasont Systems

Chaos to Coherence at Cisco Systems: Bridging Silos for Our Customers’ SakePritha Shivaji, Cisco Systems, and Rashmi Ramaswamy, Innovatia

4:00–4:20 How to Build Wickedly Effective Business Cases for Content Strategy Initiatives Alexander Lum, Director—Global Product Documentation Development, Ciena

4:20–4:40 Building a Global Content Ecosystem Is Like Finding Unicorns in a Blizzard: You Can Do It, but You Have to Know Where to Look

Michael Goldberg, Global Director, Content Marketing, Dun & Bradstreet

4:40–5:10 The Content Strategy of Civil Discourse: Turning Conflict into Collaboration David Dylan Thomas, Principal Content Strategist, Think Company

5:10–5:30 The Power of Learning You Were Wrong Megan Gilhooly, Senior Manager Content Strategy, Amazon Web Services

6:00–6:30 Walking Parade to Dinner Locations

8:30– Annual Karaoke NightBourbon Cowboy241 Bourbon Street, New Orleans



Wednesday, October 24, 2018


9:00–10:00 The Rise of the SME within Technical CommunicationsKeith Schengili-Roberts, DITA Evangelist, IXIASOFT

Find Your Global VoiceTina O'Shea, Director, Content Design and Strategy, Intuit

Managing Change with Content Development: You Can Teach an Old Dog a New Trick Marcus DeHart, Program Manager-Change Management, Amazon

Microsoft Word and DITA: Zombie Apocalypse or Enterprise Love Fest?Doug Gorman, CEO, Simply XML

Turning Marketing Metrics Upside-Down to Maximize Product Support ExperienceJake Rexus, Digital Help Content Strategy Manager, Autodesk

10:15–11:15 Managing Real People during Treacherous Content Migration ProjectsKari Halsted and Michelle Fredette, Puppet

Diversify Your Content EcosystemBernard Aschwanden, President, Publishing Smarter

Plan to Fail and then Bounce Back: Build a Realistic Plan, Detect Issues Early, and Get Back on Track Teresa Acob, Project Manager, Ryffine

Cross-Format, Cross-Silo: Lightweight DITA for Intelligent ContentMichael Priestley, Enterprise Content Technology Strategist, IBM

How to Automate Interactive, Responsive, Mobile Learning from DocumentationMatt Armstrong, Director of Vertical Solutions, Author-it

11:30–12:30 I’m no Virgin (Records)! Leading a Content Strategy in Small to Medium EnterprisesJohanne Lavallée, Senior Technical Writer, Signalisation Ver-Mac Inc.

‘Tis an Unweeded Garden that Grows to Seed—Cultivating a Weed-Free Content EcosystemHelen Saint Denis, Conversion Services Manager, Stilo International

Connecting Technical Communication to IoT Berry Braster, Technology Director, Etteplan

How to Board a Moving Train: Managing DITA Content Models in a Live Production EnvironmentBill Burns, Content Architect, Healthwise

Content Strategy to the Rescue! Transforming Content into Business AssetsTheresa Rogers, Senior Technical Writer, Oracle Opower

12:30–1:30 Lunch

1:30–2:30 We’re Going Mobile! Great! Are We Ready?Neil Perlin, President, Hyper/Word Services

Becoming the Voice of Your Leadership TeamBenjamin Curry and Alex Dimitropoulos, Salesforce

Content 4.0: Actions for Today and a Plan for the Future Pam Noreault and Chip Gettinger,

DITA Support Portals: A One-Stop Shop to Give Users Content on Their TermsJarod Sickler, Jorsek LLC, and Morley Tooke, Innovatia

TBD

2:45–3:45 Designing Personality in Conversational UIJonathan Foster, Principal Content Experience Manager, Microsoft

Reserved for Content Impact Award Case Studies

Preparing for Change in a World of Non-Stop Change: Beyond Chatbots and Voice Steve Manning, Precision Content Authoring Solutions, and Tammy Crowley, Innovatia

Success in Leveraging Legacy and Future-Proofing with DITA: Some Assembly RequiredRon Zwierzchowski and Susanna Carlisi, Ciena

Two Wahines Hang Ten Languages off BMC's Epic WikisLelani Prévost and Gina Fevrier, BMC Software

4:00–5:00 Conference Recap and Panel Discussion: Predictions for the Future Moderator: Jack Molisani, The LavaCon Conference

7:00–8:00 Hair and Makeup for the Walking Dead Pub Crawl

8:00– Closing Social: Walking Dead Pub Crawl

Welcome to the 2018 LavaCon Conferenceon Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management

LavaCon® is a gathering place for content strategists, user experience designers, documentation managers, and other content professionals.

Our Mission: To help organizations increase revenue and decrease costs by solving content-related business problems.

It’s one thing to hear people talk about content strategy and usability; it’s another to meet peers who are successfully doing it. Our speakers are practicing industry professionals who are eager to share their best practices and lessons learned—both what worked and what didn’t.

Choose from more than 70 sessions and workshops on how to plan, execute, and manage enterprise content development projects.

Ready for three days of great sessions, amazing food, and plenty of opportunities to network with your peers? Welcome to New Orleans!

Jack MolisaniExecutive DirectorThe LavaCon Conference

Contents

Sponsors and Exhibitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Sessions and Workshops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38

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6 LavaCon | www.lavacon.org

Sponsors and Exhibitors

Many thanks to this year’s sponsors and exhibitors!

Diamond

AdobeAdobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information. Adobe's award-winning software and technologies have set the standard for communication and collaboration for more than 25 years. Adobe's Technical Communication group delivers best-in-class tools, systems and services that help businesses streamline content workflows end-to-end. With our cutting-edge solutions, teams can effortlessly collaborate on the creation of ground-breaking content, manage and reuse assets efficiently, and seamlessly publish it across multiple channels and devices.

With the convergence of marketing and technical content across enterprises - Adobe's new-age solutions will empower organizations to create valuable experiences that build brands, drive demand, and extend the reach and ROI of customer-facing content, pre-sale and post-sale.

Adobe's Technical Communication products include the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe RoboHelp, XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe FrameMaker Publishing Server and Adobe RoboHelp Server.

Adobe FrameMaker is the industry-standard tool for authoring and publishing multilingual technical content across mobile, web, desktop, and print. Easily work with unstructured and structured content in the same documentation - however long and complex. Work faster and smarter with advanced XML/DITA capabilities. Publish next-generation HTML5 layouts with best-in-class search and navigation.

Adobe RoboHelp lets you create and deliver policy and knowledge base content for any device. Publish content as Mobile App, Responsive HTML5, PDF, EPUB, KF8, MOBI, WebHelp, CHM and more. Create next-generation HTML5 layouts with intuitive navigation. Help end-users find relevant content faster with best-in-class search, including search autocomplete. Dynamically filter content for personalized Help experiences. Generate content-centric mobile apps with a single click.

Adobe Technical Communication Suite is an all-in-one toolkit to create and deliver rich, engaging content experiences across devices. Easily author XML/DITA content with Adobe FrameMaker. Create Responsive eLearning modules with Adobe Captivate and interactive presentations with Adobe Presenter. Collaborate in real-time with shared PDF-based reviews using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. Publish content as Mobile App, Responsive HTML5, PDF, EPUB, KF8, MOBI, WebHelp, CHM and more. Deliver personalized Help experiences to end-users with best-in-class search using Adobe

RoboHelp.

XML Documentation Add-on for Adobe Experience Manager is a powerful, enterprise-grade DITA CCMS. Dynamically deliver DITA content directly to Experience Manager, thereby offering highly interactive and personalized experiences to end users. Effectively manage all critical aspects of your enterprise content workflow such as authoring, web-based review and collaboration, translation, project management, digital asset management, reporting, and multichannel publishing. Benefit from a unified content strategy by bringing marketing and technical content to the same platform, making it easier to deliver a consistent user experience pre- and post-purchase.

2018 Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management 7

Adobe FrameMaker Publishing Server is an enterprise software to automate multi-channel, multi-device publishing. Allow multiple users to access publishing services remotely, and manage your publishing setup with a comprehensive dashboard. Output technical content in multiple formats: Responsive HTML5, Mobile App, PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Microsoft HTML (CHM), Adobe Experience Manager Mobile and Basic HTML. Leverage out-of-the-box support for leading CMSs, or use the web APIs to smoothly integrate with other CMSs.

Adobe RoboHelp Server 10 extends the capabilities of Adobe RoboHelp and Adobe FrameMaker. Merge multiple segments of Help content, including responsive HTML5 content, into a unified information system. Host it for anytime, anywhere, any device access. Get extensive analytics reports on content usage, and use the insights to optimize Help content. Manage user rights and security, and take advantage of simplified deployment and configuration. Control operations remotely with an intuitive UI.

Sapphire

Quadralay® CorporationQuadralay Corporation, based in Austin, Texas, builds software and creates solutions for a variety of content publishing and web based applications. The company was incorporated in 1992 and eventually went on to graduate from the University of Texas’ prestigious Technology Incubator (ATI) program in 1996. Since its founding the company has been a premier player in developing solutions for the Internet and related web application programs.

The Company has prospered since its beginning and now provides services and products to thousands of customers in over thirty five countries worldwide. It has also partnered with numerous companies to collectively provide solutions to complex publishing and information deployment challenges.

WebWorks®

WebWorks is the brand under which Quadralay markets its products and services; the company utilizes the registered name WebWorks as its corporate URL (webworks.com) and its toll-free telephone number (877-8-WEBWORKS).

The company’s WebWorks line of products and services enables the automated delivery of online content into multiple formats, languages, and devices, including the packaging and delivery of content into its own exclusive web applications. These applications are designed for providing online help using only standard web technologies that function with numerous web browsing devices. WebWorks solutions are used by over 2,000 corporate customers in 6,000 locations across 35 countries.

Saiff SolutionsSaiff Solutions is a technical writing outsourcing company based in the Philippines, led by Founder and CEO Barry Saiff, a technical communications leader with over 30 years of experience, most of it in the USA. Saiff Solutions provides the best of both worlds—outstanding documentation with excellent quality control, at a fraction of US rates. Find out more at saiffsolutions.com.


Platinum

Astoria SoftwareAstoria Software is the world’s most successful Enterprise solution for XML Component Content Management and the first to deliver both an Enterprise-wide SaaS/On-Demand and an On-Premises approach to structured content management. Cisco Systems, Teradata, Xylem (formerly ITT), Siemens Healthcare, Northrop Grumman, LexisNexis, ShoreTel, and other Forbes Global 2000 organizations rely on Astoria to meet increasingly competitive demands for product documentation—high volume, accelerated time-to-market, and globalized output. Astoria Component Content Management, whether On-Demand or On-Premise, is an enterprise-wide solution for Translation-Enabled Content Management, reducing documentation costs up to 90%, compressing product launch times from months to weeks, and generating productivity and management benefits with its flexible delivery model. Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc., is based in San Francisco, California.

IridizeIridize is the first enterprise solution for real-time, contextual, training of web products.

Iridize is redefining the world of product and employee training with its new Context Aware Product Learning Mastery Suite that allows product owners to create a host of walkthroughs and guides which “sit on top” of the product interface, integrate with it and offer, small, bite-sized sessions, showing users how to operate the product.

The training is provided intelligently, as the user uses the product, and can be specific to his/her needs, roles, authorizations, and even use specific.

Iridize includes an advanced, user management and reporting dashboard which offers full analytics about guide use, down to the user level, as well as offering customization of the content and experience according to the organizational MO and branding.

The product is used today by large and small firms as well as Fortune 500 companies. Our customers include Macmillan, Nuance Communications, Network for Good, Towers Watson, and DocuSign, to name a few.

Whether you are an organization that wishes to:

• Quickly train and monitor new employees• Upgrade existing employees’ knowledge• Increase customer and user satisfaction• Reduce support and training costs• Enhance communication with customers

Iridize is your professional choice.


Vasont SystemsVasont Systems provides component content management software and XML data services to Fortune 1,000 companies and global organizations from a variety of industries, including manufacturing, technology, publishing, financial, and healthcare. Since 1992, Vasont Systems has helped companies organize their critical business assets, manage productivity, and disseminate information in many languages to multiple media channels while reducing their costs by an average of 63% and shortening overall cycle times by 75% on average. The Company has been named multiple times to the EContent 100 list of “best and brightest digital content companies.”

ZoominSuite Solutions is proud to announce its new product brand, Zoomin. Zoomin’s mission is simple: to deliver your content to your customers across all touchpoints, quickly, easily and precisely. Zoomin is strongly rooted in dynamic content delivery with a deep understanding of customer engagement and the user experience. Zoomin’s dynamic publishing platform and analytics platform meets the need for innovative, enterprise-grade publishing solutions that substantially improve your users’ experience throughout their customer journey. Visit zoominsoftware.com for more information.

Gold

easyDITAeasyDITA is a next-generation, enterprise-level content platform that centralizes authoring, editing, and digital distribution of a company or organization’s knowledge products and assets.

MadCap SoftwareMadCap Software, Inc. is a trusted resource for the thousands of companies around the globe that rely on its solutions for single-source multi-channel authoring and publishing, multimedia, and translation management. Whether delivering technical, policy, medical, marketing, business, or human resources content, MadCap’s products are used to create corporate intranets, Help systems, policy and procedure manuals, video tutorials, knowledge bases, eBooks, user guides, and more to any format, including high-end print, online, desktop or mobile. MadCap services include product training, consulting services, translation and localization, and an advanced developer certification program. Headquartered in La Jolla, California, MadCap Software is home to some of the most experienced software architects and product experts in the content development industry.

ProgressProgress, a global leader in application development, is proud to feature Progress Sitefinity as part of its product portfolio. Sitefinity, a content management and marketing analytics


platform, provides marketers and developers the tools to support enterprise-level digital marketing, optimizing the customer journey with seamless personalized experiences across different technologies and devices. Please visit sitefinity.com.

PTCPTC helps companies around the world reinvent the way they design, manufacture, operate, and service things in and for a smart, connected world.

In 1986, we revolutionized digital 3D design, and in 1998, we were first to market with Internet-based product lifecycle management. Today, our leading industrial innovation platform and field-proven solutions enable you to unlock value at the convergence of the physical and digital worlds.

With PTC, manufacturers and an ecosystem of partners and developers can capitalize on the promise of the Internet of Things and augmented reality technology today and drive the future of innovation.

Scriptorium PublishingAll organizations have content. Whether it’s telling your brand’s story to future prospects, or providing important technical documentation in support of your products or services, managing that content efficiently is the difference between it being an asset or liability.

We’re Scriptorium Publishing, and since 1997, we’ve helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. Turning content into a valuable business asset.

Silver

BluestreamBluestream’s flagship product is the XDocs Component Content Management System (CCMS). XDocs is a complete, out-of-the-box enterprise DITA CMS that installs and deploys in hours, rather than days. Bluestream has been providing content solutions since 1997 and has customers in many verticals, among them software, oil and gas, health care, military, manufacturing, and finance.

Comtech ServicesFor more than 35 years, Comtech Services has helped our clients design, create, and publish information products that meet the needs of their users. We offer a combination of training and consulting services to help you define and implement the infrastructure needed to meet the expectations of both your leadership and your users. At every point in the information development life cycle, we offer expert advice and guidance to help you improve your processes, get to know your audience, fine tune your content, and use the latest standards and technologies. From process maturity assessments, to information models, to stylesheets, you’ll find the support and training you need from our knowledgeable consulting team.


CongilityCongility provides solutions for the publishing and intelligent delivery of structured content. DITAweb for personalized content delivery and IdXML for the publishing of DITA content into Adobe InDesign. DITAweb is a platform for enhanced user experience, enabling collaboration and intelligent delivery of structured content. It eliminates the need to browse through large documents for relevant content.

Today's customers expect self-service information, DITAweb's capabilities mean users can at last benefit from the intelligence of your source content. Customers can receive personalized and relevant content based on their products, role, device, location etc. they can easily find and be guided to related information. DITAweb provides low cost real-time review for an unlimited number of internal or external users. Integrated with your CCMS, authors can automatically publish to DITAweb and manage review comments within their authoring environment.

Rich APIs enable integration with core systems (such as CRM), mobile devices, and software for online or embedded help. DITAweb's easily accessible analytics provide insight into trends about your content. Come to our stand to see how DITAweb and IdXML can benefit your organization.

DeltaXMLDeltaXML is the leading provider of software tools for managing change in XML content. Many leading corporate and commercial document and data publishers rely on DeltaXML's speed and accuracy in their workflows to present authors, reviewers and customers with a comprehensive view of document and data changes within XML content. In addition to their general XML comparison toolkit, DeltaXML also provide tools tailored for DITA and DocBook comparison and merging.

CMS vendors and authors alike are already benefitting by letting DeltaXML identify, process and publish their changes. For more information on DeltaXML and their industry-leading products, please visit please visit deltaxml.com or follow us on Twitter @DeltaXML or LinkedIn.

InnovatiaFounded in 2000, Innovatia transforms our clients’ information into world-leading knowledge solutions that significantly improve their performance. Headquartered in Canada, Innovatia has more than 600 knowledge management professionals working in four countries across three continents, delivering business solutions to some of the world’s leading Fortune 500 companies. Innovatia delivers knowledge management services in three areas, including Learning Solutions, Documentation, and Technical Support; and purpose-built software products, including Procedure Accelerator and Procedure Flow. These solutions span the entire solution set from needs assessment, custom design, and development through delivery and support. More information at innovatia.net.


JANAJANA is a leading technical documentation services company with more than 45 years of experience in providing best-in-class XML consulting, authoring, and management services. JANA analyzes our clients’ specific requirements and existing technical documentation so that we can recommend and implement the software and service solutions that best meet their needs.

We have implemented, configured, and integrated hundreds of technical information environments for several of the world’s largest and most successful high-tech companies. Our experience in managing structured data systems allows us to simplify the process of data conversion, migration, and management, and lets our clients focus on what their companies do best. Learn more at janacorp.com.

JustSystemsXMetaL Author Enterprise helps you get to market faster by bringing structure and automation to content creation. Using XML standards such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), XMetaL enables authors and contributors to collaborate effectively and to repurpose high-value information into the myriad of languages and formats your customers demand. For more information visit xmetal.com.

Precision ContentPrecision Content Authoring Solutions Inc. is a full-service solution provider to medium- and large-scale organizations around the globe seeking help to better understand and solve their content challenges. Our core services involve designing and implementing innovative, scalable, and sustainable solutions for authoring, managing, and publishing high-value content.

Our highly-respected technical team of developers, information architects, and technology partners work to construct scalable, standards-based tool solutions. Our experienced team of technical communicators work closely with you to transform your unstructured content into highly-usable intelligent content for substantially improved future-proofing, accessibility, and multi-channel publishing capabilities. Once we are done, our trainers teach you everything you need to know to ensure a successful and sustainable hand-off.

We are a proud and committed member of the world-wide community of information professionals. We look forward to continuing the conversation around the importance of content creation practices as they pertain to improving the manageability and effectiveness of your content. Do not hesitate to contact us with your comments and questions. Learn more about how we can help you at precisioncontent.com.

QordobaThe Qordoba Strings Intelligence Platform enables product teams to create and update UI content without engineering involvement. Qordoba is the first and only solution that provides a single source of truth for product copy by making every application's words auditable, accessible and editable. Companies like Postmates, VISA and Marriott use Qordoba's platform to continuously iterate between


design and copywriting for personalized user experiences over mobile, web and embedded applications. With over 100 integrations, including GitHub, Sketch and InDesign, Qordoba's platform adapts to your stack and empowers your team to optimize UX.

ServiceNowServiceNow makes work, work better for people. Our cloud-based platform and products deliver digital experiences that help people do their best work. We are the world's fastest growing enterprise cloud software company with more than $2 billion in annual revenue. We employ more than 6,700 employees worldwide; and our more than 4,000 customers include the world's largest companies. Our purpose is to make the world of work, work better for people.

Stilo InternationalStilo International is the developer of Migrate, a cloud service that enables subject matter experts (SMEs) to automate the conversion of their content from various source formats including FrameMaker, Word, InDesign, and RoboHelp to DITA XML, and AuthorBridge, a new Guided + Fluid DITA authoring solution for SMEs and occasional contributors, that enables browser-based contributions to a CCMS at extremely low cost. Learn more at stilo.com.

Bronze

AppsoftXeditor delivers a web-based and highly intuitive XML authoring platform that not only satisfies end-users but also developers who need a modern and extensible framework. The user-friendly front end leads authors intuitively through a defined document structure with real-time validation. Our innovative JavaScript architecture allows seamless integration into existing technologies and systems (CMS, DMS, PIM, etc.) and may be configured for any DTD/Schema. We currently provide out-of-box support for DITA, DocBook, and PI-Mod. Learn more at xeditor.com.

Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL)Since 1981, Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) has been a leader in helping organizations maximize the value of their content assets through digitization, making reuse easier and providing greater accessibility. DCL are experts in converting content to XML, DITA, S1000D, and other structured formats. With DCL's highly automated processes, content quality is vastly improved, systems are future-proofed, redundancies are eliminated, and revenue opportunities are expanded. With digitization and content management expertise across multiple industries including financial services, publishing, life sciences, government, manufacturing, technology, and professional organizations, DCL uses its advanced technology and U.S.-based project management teams to help conquer the most complex content conversion challenges securely, accurately, and on time.


DCL is a multi-year winner of EContent's Top 100 companies.

For more information, visit dclab.com.

EtteplanEtteplan is a progressive group of more than 3,000 specialists who are working to spark positive change in the world of (content) engineering. We believe that solving tomorrow’s challenges will require a different, more structured, focused approach.

Etteplan provides design engineering services, embedded systems, and IoT services, and technical documentation solutions (including content quality software, HyperSTE) to the world’s leading companies in the manufacturing industry. Our services are geared to improve the competitiveness of our customers’ products and engineering processes throughout the product life cycle. The results of Etteplan’s innovative engineering can be seen in numerous industrial solutions and everyday products. In 2017, Etteplan had a turnover of USD $250 million.

We operate in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, China and the USA. Etteplan’s shares are listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Ltd under the ETTE ticker. More information at etteplan.com.

Fluid TopicsFluid Topics unlocks the delivery of technical content through any channel.

User guides, reference manuals, installation and maintenance manuals and knowledge bases aren’t merely product documentation—they are also tools for winning business, increasing customer satisfaction and building loyalty.

Fluid Topics is a revolutionary turnkey platform for dynamic content delivery: it transforms all forms of static documentation into a lively, simple and interactive online publishing system. Users can browse, read, search, annotate, comment, create alerts, send feedback to writers, and even create personalized documentation. For more information and a free trial, visit fluidtopics.com.

IngeniuxIngeniux Corporation is the leading provider of web and social content management software. Its technology empowers developers and content creators to build the next-generation web, with products acclaimed for ease-of-use, rapid deployment, extensibility, and low total cost of ownership.

More information at ingeniux.com.

IntuillionStart Small, Think Big. This is how our solutions allow you to adopt DITA. They can be deployed in a matter of hours and scaled over time. But we give you much more than just products. We are here to inspire you, share ideas, give you our back, and help you see what you probably are not seeing now.


Our solutions help you realize how structured content enables you to take customer satisfaction to a fundamentally new level and let your customers get an experience they couldn't have before.

More information at intuillion.com.

IXIASOFTFounded in 1998, IXIASOFT is a trusted global leader in the XML content management software industry. Its signature product DITA CMS is an award winning, end-to-end component content management solution (CCMS) deployed by industry leaders such as SAP®, ARM®, AMD and BlackBerry®. From authoring to reviewing, localizing and publishing, DITA CMS provides all the tools required for large, global organizations to support their entire DITA documentation process. IXIASOFT is also the developer of TEXTML Server, a native XML database and powerful search engine. IXIASOFT solutions are accessed by thousands of users worldwide in various vertical markets such as software, hi-tech, newspaper, and medical device manufacturing.

For more information, please visit ixiasoft.com or connect with IXIASOFT on Twitter and LinkedIn. Already a DITA CMS user? Join the IXIASOFT DITA CMS User Group on LinkedIn.

Oberon TechnologiesOberon Technologies partners with our customers and leading software suppliers to provide innovative solutions for creating, sharing and delivering information. With hundreds of customers, we are known for our integrity, accountability and commitment in every engagement.

Our solutions enable you to:

• Automate your content creation, sharing and delivery processes.• Deliver personalized information• Synchronize content across CMS, translation and publishing systems• Deliver your content to any device

Our services include:

• Content assessments and strategy• Systems/software analysis and integration• Software implementation, configuration and customization (Authoring, Publishing, and Content

Management software)• Custom dynamic-assembly publishing and delivery solutions

OvitasHeadquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, Ovitas provides Content Lifecycle Solutions, including consultancy, expert design, development, and deployment. We build solutions to fit your needs, using proven software products including Ovitas CMS, Ovitas Workflow Portal, Ovitas Publishing Bridge, the Ovitas Translation Management System (TMS) Bridge, and the Ovitas Portal Framework. These highly configurable tools for component content management, workflow, search and retrieval, and content integration let us build cost-effective solutions targeted at your highest priority business issues.

ovitas.com


oXygen XMLoXygen XML editor is the best XML editor available, with a large number of users ranging from non-technical to XML experts offering both XML development and XML authoring.

The XML authoring support is available on multiple platforms, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc. in different forms:

• as a desktop application• as an Eclipse plugin• as a Java component working inside a custom Java application or working within a browser as an

Applet• as a Web application running on a server and providing an HTML5+Javascript interface, thus making

XML accessible from mobile devices, smart phones and tablets

oXygen offers ready-to-use DITA support including visual editing, DITA-OT integration, DITA maps manager and much more. Its change tracking and annotation support, coupled with the possibility to create simplified user interfaces and its availability across platforms make it an ideal tool for capturing content from SMEs or for reviewing DITA documents. Learn more at oxygenxml.com.

SDLSDL Tridion Docs centralizes the creation, management and delivery of structured content. This includes technical and product documentation and self-service support content for customers and employees. SDL's cost-effective solution provides better processes, high-quality content, translation efficiency, and flexible delivery to any channel, in any language, and on any device.

SDL Tridion Docs helps your organization:

• Achieve global simship and improve time-to market.• Increase content reuse and efficiency while reducing cost and effort.• Automate delivery across all digital platforms and channels to enable employee and customer self-

service.• Simplify translation and multilingual content management.• Improve quality through integrated review and approval management.

With SDL Tridion Docs, you can create, manage and deliver DITA based content cost-effectively, adding internal efficiencies, maximizing content reuse, ensuring quality, and improving your customers’ experience.

SDL Tridion Docs is part of SDL Tridion DX, which brings together web experience management (SDL Tridion Sites), structured content management (SDL Tridion Docs), and language technology to power your digital customer experiences on a global scale, supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Simply XMLSimply XML™ offers a Microsoft Word-to-XML authoring tool called Content Mapper. Writers see the familiar MS Word user interface with the ugly but useful XML behind the scenes. Content Mapper’s target customer organization realizes the value of XML as an architecture for content reuse and flexible publishing. Target authors use MS Word instead of a traditional XML editor because they want simplicity, ease of use, and immediate productivity. You can easily get control of MS Word, implement a writing standard, and


modernize your content supply chain. Our long-term background with structured writing and XML mark-up provide a great foundation for content creation and management throughout the enterprise. It doesn’t have to be complicated, its Simply XML. Learn more at simplyxml.com.

Single-Sourcing SolutionsWe can do it or you can do it (with a little help). Our customers want to utilize their products with independence and confidence. We understand that ultimately your staff will manage your deployment over the long term and for the benefit of your business.

We are authorized and qualified Arbortext professionals with more than a decade’s experience in the toolset and we are here to help!

Society for Technical Communication (STC)STC membership provides access to award-winning technical communication publications, educational offerings, CPTC Certification, career development, member perks, and professional networking opportunities. Membership helps support the advancement of technical communication as the discipline of transforming complex information into usable content for products, processes, and services-a mission that benefits consumers worldwide. Visit stc.org to learn more.

Trilyon ServicesTrilyon provides the finest technical writing and documentation expertise in the staffing industry. For more than a decade, Trilyon has set the standard for excellence and has contributed to the success of Silicon Valley's most well-known companies.

We offer the full spectrum of documentation, content writing and staffing services for any size company-from the largest enterprise to a bare-bones startup. Our writers take a practical, consumer centric approach, allowing them to tailor content for any audience. We can meet your technical writing needs with a cost-effective solution, whether you need a managed service with a team to produce a complete line of technical documentation, or a single technical writer for a specific project. Our talent pool includes the best API writers, DITA specialists, instructional designers, content strategists, localization experts, videographers and editors.

By truly understanding your needs, we are able to tailor our services to perfectly match your unique requirements. We are driven to find the right candidate for the right job, enabling them to play a vital role in your quest for success. For more information, visit us at trilyonservices.com. You can contact us at [email protected].

WRIS mathMathML specialists are in town! MathType and MathFlow are your tools to edit mathematical and scientific expressions.

The newly released MathType 7 continues to offer powerful support for Microsoft Office on Windows and Mac and now works with Google Docs. Check our equation editor plugins for Arbortext, FontoXML, Oxygen (desktop and web), XEditor, or XMetaL.

Learn more at wiris.com.


Media

EContentEContent is a leading authority on the businesses of digital publishing, media, and marketing, targeting executives and decision-makers in these fast-changing markets. By covering the latest tools, strategies, and thought-leaders in the digital content ecosystem, EContent magazine and EContentmag.com keep professionals ahead of the curve in order to maximize their investment in digital content strategies while building sustainable, profitable business models. Subscribe to our free e-newsletter at econtentmag.com.

MultiLingualMultiLingual has been serving the language industry for more than 20 years with in-depth and current information.

TechWhirlTechWhirl is an online resource for anyone interested in the world of Content Management and Technical Communication. Experienced veterans, up-and-coming professionals, students, and leaders in the management suite explore TechWhirl to find new, compelling, thought-provoking, and helpful information on creating and managing the information assets critical to their enterprise.

From educational and research content to the latest news, features, and commentary, TechWhirl offers something for everyone who needs to know about technical communication and content management. We love this stuff and think that you should too. Please have a look around our site and let us know what you think.


Sessions and Workshops

Sunday, October 21

8:00– Registration, Coffee

9:00–noon Pre-Conference Workshops

Are You a Content Engineer?Alan Porter, Head of Strategic Services, [A]

In today’s multi-channel world, it’s no longer enough to just be a content creator. You need to be a Content Engineer. So what is a Content Engineer? Do you know where your content is going? And what its value to the customer and your company is? In this workshop, we’ll provide you with insights and techniques to answer those questions and others like it.

Content Strategy is about the who, what, and why of content. Content Engineering is about the how.

Technical Writing for TranslationMelinda Belcher, Senior Director, Mastercard

Do you write for a global product? Chances are your writing is going to get translated—badly. Here are some general guidelines you should keep in mind when writing technical content for translation. Because clear, concise, well-constructed content improves translation quality, reduces turnaround time, and keeps costs low—speeding time-to-market and accelerating revenue streams.

Context for Content? It Depends.Eeshita Grover, Senior Manager, User Content, Cisco Systems

When does the user need context for the content and when is content read without context? When it comes to content marketing, context is key. But when I write tasks for in-product content, is context assumed?

Managing Content Development Teams: Inner MasteryBarry Saiff, Founder and CEO, Saiff Solutions

For many managers of content teams, a two-word job description applies: Create miracles! Managers must effectively deal with a wide variety of pressures, concerns, obstacles, and issues. In the face of all of this, most managers do a great job. How can you not only succeed, but also enjoy your work? How can you reduce stress, improve results, and empower your team to continually excel? In this workshop, we'll explore the inner work that can catapult team success.

Machine Learning 101: Get Started with ChatbotsSteve Liang, Senior Solutions Architect, VMware

Machine learning (ML) and bots are hot topics for engineering and content teams, but it can be daunting to get started with an ML project. Come learn from the VMware team as they share their experience building recent ML projects. In this workshop, VMware discusses use cases for natural language processing, deep learning, and chatbots. You will get a primer on machine learning techniques, as well as hands-on experience building a simple, interactive chatbot with BotEngine.

Design Thinking WorkshopAndrea Ames, Founder and CEO, Idyll Point Group

IBM Design Thinking is a human-centered and collaborative approach that enables people with different backgrounds to work together by using creative tools borrowed from different disciplines to solve complex problems.

IBM Design Thinking integrates business (viability), people (desirability), and technology (feasibility). We keep the main focus on users. We


develop empathy for them by putting ourselves in their shoes in order to deliver solutions that are meaningful to them, and that solves their problems and needs.

This workshop will give you an idea of how to tackle challenges by solving problems with a creative, iterative, and practical approach by working in teams and stepping out of your comfort zone.

Join Andrea for this hands-on workshop, in which you will be exposed to the practice of the IBM Design Thinking framework. Andrea will share tips on how to organize a workshop, how to facilitate it, and how to get the most out of it.

Building and Implementing an Experience-Focused Content OrganizationToni Mantych, Director of Information Experience, ServiceNow

Most of us have always considered tech writers to be user advocates. And though “knowing one’s audiences” is a fundamental tenet of good writing practice, we have often faced challenges getting reliable information about our audiences. With the proliferation of content, it is critical that we develop more rigorous and repeatable processes for identifying our audiences and understanding their needs. We’ll examine a catalog of strategies for collecting information about content consumers and developing and testing customer-centric content solutions.

Creating Unified Content Portals: The Key to Competitive AdvantageJim Edmunds, CEO, Ingeniux

A lot goes into creating a success unified content portal. By successfully bringing together disparate parts of your organization (e.g., technical documentation, training information, and support documentation) and breaking down content silos, organizations can revolutionize how content is stored, shared, and distributed throughout their organization—and beyond.

Discover what exactly a unified content portal is and how you can take the necessary steps to creating a successful one. Then, find out how modern organizations are adopting content-as-a-service (CaaS), search, personalization, and other strategies to make their content even more powerful.

In this session, you will learn about:

• The definition of a unified content portal and what a successful one looks like in the real world

• Case studies and examples of ways in which unified content portals are being adopted and used throughout a diverse range of organizations

• Core business drivers, ROI, and competitive advantages

• How a unified content portal breaks down content silos—using hands-on exercises and workshopping

• Best practices for attaining buy-in from key stakeholders

1:00–5:00 Adobe Tech Comm Tools Certificate Workshop

This workshop is open to all conference attendees, but separate registration is required at adobetechcomm.com/lavacon-2018.

Meet renowned leaders in the technical communications field, who are experts in using Adobe products. In this workshop, Bernard Aschwanden, Amitoj Singh, and Stefan Gentz will share tips on how to manage complex technical content and deliver exceptional user content experiences with the latest version of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite through presentations and live demonstrations.

Agenda:

• 1:00–1:30—Lunch• 1:30–2:30—Create and manage complex technical content (structured or unstructured) with the

all-new, powerful, future-ready Adobe FrameMaker (Bernard Aschwanden)– Boost performance with an all-new 64-bit FrameMaker.– Create rich, immersive content with unmatched image handling capabilities.– Experience faster opening and publishing of PDF and HTML5 files.


– Get started with XML/DITA authoring with an easy-to-use workspace, productivity enhancements, and lots more.

• 2:30–3:30—Learn to wow end users by delivering exceptional Help experiences with a reimagined Adobe RoboHelp (Amitoj Singh)– Create media-rich experiences using HTML5 and CSS3.– Customize layouts and templates with a powerful CSS and skin editor.– Personalize experiences using Dynamic Content Filters.– Collaborate using Git, SharePoint Online and more.

• 3:30–3:45—Coffee break• 3:45–4:45—Deliver a consistent experience by bringing marketing and technical content onto the

same platform (Stefan Gentz)

Explore the business benefits of an enterprise-class CCMS-XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager.

– Develop content using a simplified web-based DITA author tool.– Create standard compliant content easily using an out-of-the box ingestion framework.– Empower distributed teams to collaborate faster using a web-based review experience.– Effortlessly design and deliver immersive, omnichannel content experiences.

• 4:45–5:00—Certificates distributed

7:00–8:00 Speaker Reception at Mag’s 940

8:30– The Welcome to LavaCon! Drag Review Starring Princess Stephanie at Mag’s 940


Monday, October 22

7:30– Registration Open, Continental Breakfast

8:30–9:15 Welcome

Jack MolisaniExecutive Director, The LavaCon Conference

9:15–9:35 Content in a Zombie Apocalypse

Karen McGraneManaging Partner at Bond Art + Science and Author of Content Strategy for Mobile

A content zombie apocalypse is upon us! An onslaught of new mobile devices, platforms, and screen sizes—hordes of them descending every day. We're outmatched. There aren't enough designers and developers to battle every platform. There aren't enough editors and writers to populate every screen size.

Defeating the zombies will require flexibility and stamina in our content. We'll have to separate our content from its form, so it can adapt appropriately to different contexts and constraints. We'll have to change our production workflow so we're not just shoveling content from one output to another. And we'll have to enhance our content management tools and interfaces so they're ready for the future. Surviving the zombie apocalypse is possible.

In this talk, Karen explains how—by developing a content strategy that treats all our platforms as if they're equally important.


9:35–9:55 Managing the Politics of Content

Hilary MarshPresident and Chief Strategist, Content Company, Inc.

What does content strategy mean in an organization where “silo” is a matter-of-fact term and not a criticism? How do you introduce new ways of creating content when the organization's unspoken motto is, “That's the way we've always done it?” How do you create consistency and collaboration when divisions have their own budgets, programs, and sometimes even brands? How do you engender trust and promote information-sharing when content creators don't know one another? And finally, if division strategies include “create X amount of online toolkits,” how do you build the case that creating less content can be better?

Hilary’s talk establishes the vision for a new way of thinking about content that will help content strategists bring people together in a new way to make better content for more effective results.

9:55–10:15 Cowabunga! Surfing the Crest of the New Content Revolution

Rob HannaPresident, Precision Content Authoring Solutions

Our profession is on the precipice of something very new and very disruptive. What does the next step really mean for us? Will we adapt or will it spur on another new industry of content professional? How will we produce content for a new medium and still keep the lights on with continued needs for traditional channels of delivery?

Adopt too slowly and you'll miss the wave. Adopt too quickly and you run the risk of the wave dashing onto the sand. In this session, Rob Hanna explores how to ride the crest of the new content wave.

10:30–11:30 Breakout Sessions

Defining and Measuring Successful Content Experience ImplementationsDawn Stevens, President, Comtech

We all know we need to collaborate across silos to provide a total content experience. But what does successful collaboration look like? How do we quantify and measure it? Further, how do we measure the impact of a complete content experience ecosystem? What metrics should we be tracking before, during, and after its development? In this presentation, Dawn Stevens unveils a balanced scorecard of key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the entire process—from planning to development to user acceptance.

Planning a Content Delivery Solution that Works for You and Your CustomersMark Poston, Technical Director, CTO, Congility

This presentation explores the benefits of having a content delivery solution and looks at two sides of the implementation process—what content publishers need and what end users expect from a system.

Real-world examples are used to provide a checklist of requirements that can help companies decide what's initially important and how the solution might evolve over time.

Engineering the Content Convergence Across SilosAlan Porter, Head of Strategic Services, [A]

The convergence of Marcomm and Techcomm is a new reality driven by the needs of the evolving customer experience. But how do you prepare for that and leverage your content assets to deliver the greatest value? This session will discuss how


to apply content engineering techniques to enable content-as-a-service pipelines that unlock the potential of content assets across the enterprise, no matter where they were created, or in which system they are stored in.

Content Strategy for the Conversational InterfaceElena Ontiveros, Content Strategy Manager, Airbnb

Messaging is changing how, when, and where people talk to their favorite businesses. With technology that automates transactions, customer service and conversations like never before, how do you create a user experience that also feels human?

11:30–12:45 Lunch



Four Ways to Transform Your Organization with a Collaborative Content StrategyBonnie Chase, Product Owner, MindTouch

You have the technology and the people, but do you have the best content? This session will highlight four collaborative content strategies that you can implement across your organization to create high-quality content at a more efficient and cost-effective rate.

How to Ensure Your CMS Implementation is SuccessfulScott Youngblom, Cofounder and EVP, Oberon Technologies, Inc.

CMS solution providers promise shorter publishing cycles, greater efficiencies, and easier access to your information. What they fail to mention is that without the proper implementation plan and execution, the CMS can't deliver on the promise.

Oberon's experts have a 100% project success track record and will share the keys all successful CMS projects have in common. So you can avoid the pitfalls and plan a clear path to realizing the promise of a CMS solution for structured or unstructured content.

Give 'em What They Want: Delivering a Consistent Content ExperienceDustin Vaughn, Head of Solutions Consulting, Adobe Systems

The line between pre-sales and post-sales continues to blur. Our customers expect a conversation—an experience. Much of the purchasing decision happens outside of the “normal” (aka outdated) view of the purchase funnel. Surviving in this environment requires a shift in focus toward a compelling digital experience. Join Dustin Vaughn, Head of Solutions Consulting at Adobe, as he discusses the shift to digital experience and how tech pubs can drive this critical organizational change.

Your Chatbot can Talk Back...LiterallySusan Kelley, Information Engineer, CA Technologies

There’s a movement from more static, text-based chatbots to voice-user interface (VUI) programs like Amazon Alexa and Google Home/Office Assistant. And they’re being used in documentation help and implementation. In this presentation, Susan Kelley shares her research into the emerging uses of VUI in documentation and shares tips on how we can harness it.


Rebels with a Cause: How Marcomm and Techcomm United at Salesforce to Create TrailheadGavin Austin, Principal Technical Writer, Salesforce

Learn how the marcomm and techcomm teams at Salesforce unite to create Trailhead—a wildly popular learning experience that’s changing how

customers interact with content. See how a mix of videos, graphics, gamification, online help, marketing assets, and interactive learning paths increase business value and customer loyalty.


Building a Rock Star Content TeamEeshita Grover, Senior Manager, User Content, Cisco Systems

From interviewing, to hiring, to onboarding, and to making each one of them a success, so much rides on you—the manager.

Is it Time to Replace Your Legacy CCMS?Rik Page, Director, Bluestream Database Software Corp.

What can the DITA community learn from the approach to enterprise systems of other market sectors?

One of the promises made to companies moving to DITA was the portability of content and flexibility in the approach to future system choices. Years after deploying solutions, many companies are still struggling to make their investment work the way they want and deliver the benefits promised.

Other more mature industries have a more pragmatic approach to core systems with regular reviews and the ability to embrace change. What can we learn from this?

Changing your CCMS needn't be the herculean task you fear and may help you actually achieve the functionality you have always been promised. Bluestream has taken companies on this journey and developed a comprehensive methodology to ease the path.

Planning for Content Success (Hint: It Doesn't Start with Technology)Amber Swope, DITA Specialist, DITA Strategies

When faced with content issues, many organizations immediately start looking at technology options for a quick fix. Unfortunately, technology alone isn’t the answer—and it isn’t

even the place to start. Instead, look at the big picture and start at the beginning—clarify the business needs you are addressing, develop the information architecture to support them, then investigate the technology options and develop the process to support the solution.

Connecting a Chatbot to Your Technical Content: Myth and RealityFabrice Lacroix, CEO, Fluid Topics

Analysts predict that chatbots will be your customers’ preferred interface. How can you transition from carefully staged demos to real-life customers? Most chatbots today use rules, but tech content is textual, not rule-based. It is impossible to revamp thousands of pieces of content written for human readers into a formal rules-based system. The problem is how to connect the textual content with the bot’s inner processes. We will review various approaches and what this technology allows.

UX Strategy Spanning Marketing and Technical Content at SAPIrina Pashina, Senior Director, Customer Experience and Content Strategy, SAP SE

Today’s B2B customers complete up to 70% of their journey without contacting a vendor with most of the interactions in digital channels. Marketing, technical documentation, support, and other teams create and provide product-related content, often based on different strategies and in different digital properties. Learn how a unified, customer-centric UX approach to product pages, spanning marketing and technical content, significantly improved the digital content experience on SAP.com and contributed to improved business results.


5:15–5:35 Beyond TechPubs: Evangelizing Structured Content in the Enterprise

Don BridgesManager—Consulting, JANA

The presentation discusses the shift from “technical information is a backwater department that costs us money” to “technical information is a critical aspect of our customer experience effort” and the implications of that paradigm shift. Beyond bridging silos, the target is building a single source of truth for Pubs, Marketing, Training, and Service with a focus on how to improve the customer experience.

5:35–5:55 From Products to Experiences—And Why You (Yes, You!) are Part of the Customer Experience!

Stefan GentzGlobal TechComm Evangelist, Adobe Systems

“People buy experiences, not products,” Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, said recently at the Adobe Summit 2018. Almost every bigger company has recognized that it is in the customer experience business. Understanding the customer journey and the brand interactions across channels and platforms and their impact on the customer experience is crucial for creating a unified CX strategy.

But it’s a complex system coming with a lot of challenges: Multiple brand touchpoints have a cumulative impact on the customer experience. Inconsistent content experiences throughout the customer journey create a fuzzy brand experience. Marketing and technical communication content silos and a cluttered IT landscape create disconnected content worlds in voice and tone, visual consistency, and unified accessibility. Understanding that technical communication plays an essential role in the customer experience is crucial for creating high-quality brand experiences.

In this keynote, Stefan Gentz, Adobe Worldwide Technical Communication Evangelist, will dive with you into the world of customer experience strategy and how to blend technical communication seamlessly into the digital experience world of today's customers.

6:00–7:30 Networking Reception

9:00– Live Storytelling Event


Tuesday, October 23


9:00–9:20 The Price and Prize of Failure: Learning from Enterprise Content Strategy Mistakes

Jim EdmundsCEO, Ingeniux Corporation

“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”—Bill Gates

In this session, Jim Edmunds will explore how fear of failure and institutional resistance to change dooms many enterprise content projects and perpetuates strategies built to fail. Find out not just what you can learn from the mistakes of others, but also how it happens that in the process of making mistakes, we often discover our best ideas.

9:20–9:40 Minimum Viable Infrastructure for Enterprise Content

Sarah O'KeefeFounder & Chief Executive Officer, Scriptorium Publishing

As we begin to coordinate content across the enterprise, we need to re-examine our content infrastructure. Will we have a single, unified workflow for everyone creating customer-facing content? If not, what is the minimum viable infrastructure needed to make enterprise content a reality?

9:40–10:00 Migrating to Highly-Personalized Dynamic Content

Noel McDonaghDirector Content Operations, Dell EMC

We are already on the road toward liberating our content from archaic static delivery mechanisms to dynamic digital experiences. In this session, we will address some of the pressing challenges in our drive toward personalization:

• How many resources should we invest in an extensive search mechanism when more and more of our content is being accessed through Google search?

• What is the ROI and how much should we invest in search for our internal folks accessing content that is locked down from the public and Google?

• How do we provide personalized content that services each customer’s environment?


10:00–10:20 Hacking the Enterprise: The Continuing Emergence of the New Content Order

Cruce SaundersFounder, [A]

We are at a critical moment in history, with knowledge bursting at the seams of our organizations. Many of us still struggle to manage numerous modes of omnichannel content engagement: published, interactive, and automated. The solution requires vision to move toward a new order of content intelligence encompassing our organization's entire knowledge graph. It requires spanning silos, especially between marcomm and techcomm.

Join Cruce Saunders as he explores the new content stack, and how to future-proof content assets to meet the demands of ever-evolving customer experiences.


Level Up Your Content MetricsSara Feldman, MindTouch, and Neal Kaplan, Splunk

Learn about a quantitative maturity model for technical documentation. Use metrics to systematically connect content production to company-wide organizational value. Benefits include better customer experience, cross-departmental strategy, and content return on investment (ROI) that proves the value of a mature content experience.

Navigating Users through Knowledge: Structured Content is Good, but not EnoughAlex Masycheff, CEO, Intuillion Ltd.

We all want to provide users with relevant information that precisely addresses their needs. Semantically structured content is a must-have, but isn’t enough. To make the user’s experience really great, we have to navigate them through the knowledge about relevant possibilities and make suggestions. Any navigation requires a map. Navigation through the knowledge requires a knowledge map. We’ll talk about principles of building such a map and see how it can be integrated into structured content and content delivery channels.

Joining Forces: Content Strategy in Design SystemsMichael Haggerty-Villa, Principal Content Designer, Intuit

if you work on any digital experience, a design system is behind it. Content should be a part of that system. Design systems (such as pattern libraries) have been gaining prominence lately as

critical foundations for product and marketing design. For content designers, strategists, and technical writers, these systems present an opportunity to collaborate more closely with design and engineering partners and demonstrate the value of content. Let's talk about bringing that value to your organization and its design systems.

Content Design for the Conversational UIMelanie Seibert, Senior Content Strategist, WillowTree

Designing content for a familiar interface—like a desktop computer or smartphone—presents a number of challenges. But soon you'll be asked to design content for a conversational interface, or chatbot, which presents a whole new set of opportunities and constraints. Each type of chatbot (voice or text) has its own abilities and needs. How do you create helpful experiences for these interfaces? Together, we’ll learn to think beyond the screen, and take advantage of the exciting potential of the conversational UI.

A Journey to Intelligent Content DeliveryPam Goodrich, Technical Documentation Manager, Cherwell, and Joe Gelb, Zoomin Software

Learn how Cherwell Software used a digital experience platform (DXP) to implement a world-class documentation portal with minimal staffing and a condensed timeframe. Learn how we consolidated documentation for multiple products, versions, and languages into a single consolidated platform. We'll discuss how we sold


the project to Cherwell’s leadership, how we selected our vendor, and the challenges we faced during implementation.

11:45–12:45 Lunch



How to Run a Kickass Content TeamMelinda Belcher, Senior Director, Mastercard

Look at you! You're a successful senior manager. You have your own content team and everything. But now what? You've always had to manage up, not down. All of a sudden, you've got all these people looking to you for guidance—whatever that is.

Every day, you're fighting to get senior leadership to recognize the importance of content. How do you inspire and empower your team to help you in your mission? Start today with these tips and tricks.

Creating Interactive Intelligent Style GuidesGeorge Bina, Managing Director, oXygen XML Editor

Style guides started as set of rules written in prose that people had to learn and follow when writing content.

Using a style guide is a necessity to avoid repeating mistakes. To eliminate the overhead of learning all the rules before starting to write, we need intelligent style guides that enforce their rules automatically, detecting problems and offering possible solutions the writer can choose from. Such style guides are not only possible, but immediately available to you!

Visual Learning Ecosystems: The Future of Technical and Marketing CommunicationBarry Saiff, Founder and CEO, Saiff Solutions, Inc.

Today's consumers operate in a world of 6-second videos and bold images. To achieve continued success, technical, educational, and

marketing communication must evolve. How? Visual Learning Ecosystems (VLEs) address the needs of 21st century learners. VLEs combine media elements—animations, videos, graphics, and text—to create large sets of educational information, presented to consumers based on their choices. VLEs can be incorporated within products or interface with products, to provide real-world, practical educational experiences.

Getting Your Content Ready for Voice-Activated SearchAhava Leibtag, President, Aha Media Group

By 2020, Gartner predicts that 50% of all searches will be voice searches, which means your content needs to be conversational and voice-ready. Learn how to build skills (apps for voice) and get your content ready for voice search, including how to use voice-activated search as part of marketing strategy, the tactics to prepare your content for voice search, and innovative ways to use voice as a marketing tool.

Smart Procedures at the US Department of DefensePradeep Jain, Ictect Inc.

Nobody knows paperwork like the Pentagon. Without exaggeration, the Department of Defense (DoD) has policies and procedures for writing policies and procedures. This is the story about how the DoD tried to modernize how it documents policies and procedures, what it learned from its first efforts, what it found actually works, and what it can see on the horizon as even more dramatic innovations. Put simply—what it has found is a smart way to do smart procedures.



Lightweight Documentation for Small TeamsAnthony Apodaca, Business Development, Xeditor

When it comes to technology and tools, the amount of options can lead to a form of choice paralysis. It can be very expensive and time consuming to sort it all out. And if you are a small team with limited resources and budget, it can be hard to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. In this session, we'll review some great open-source technologies for teams to get started publishing web-based documentation and practical ways to get started today.

Using Tone to Make Content MeaningfulSusan Blue, Content Strategist, and Jasmine Probst, Content Strategy Manager, Facebook

A well-developed product voice is essential for establishing a personality and consistency across surfaces. But how do we add nuance to communicate in a manner that's contextual yet still on-brand?

Enter the almighty art of modulating TONE. Tone work is the secret sauce teams apply to make content meaningful. Adjusting tone makes messaging relevant to the situation a user is likely facing. It helps account for stress cases more fully, meaning product experiences are appropriate and better reflect real life.

The Next Big Thing: MicrocontentRob Hanna, President, Precision Content

It has been exhilarating riding this wave of change, but our journey from unstructured document-based writing to structured topic-based writing is only the beginning. Before us, we see a new frontier that will change forever how we write and structure content for newer

generations of consumers and emerging technologies. These changes won’t just require new tools, they will require new skills for writers to master. And the journey continues from document-based writing to topic-based writing to block-based writing or microcontent.

Optimizing the XML Content Development ProcessDeb Bissantz, Applications Engineer, Vasont Systems

Are your writers spending hours copying SME content, cleaning the content, and adding XML markup? SMEs are contributing information in many formats. Writers copy and paste content from many sources. Do you need your SMEs to add comments or changes directly to the XML source content and see comments from other reviewers simultaneously? Are your writers spending hours compiling comments and changes from reviewers and automatically incorporate into the content?

Chaos to Coherence at Cisco Systems: Bridging Silos for Our Customers’ SakePritha Shivaji, Cisco Systems, and Rashmi Ramaswamy, Innovatia

We listen to our customers and want to make them successful. With our help site getting around 100,000 views a day (including negative feedback), this was a great opportunity to improve the experience. Everyone involved in the customer journey (from product development, to marketing, sales, training, support, and localization) came together to work on a fix. Join us as we relive our adventure merging content from teams on three different websites into a single content experience for our customers.

4:00–4:20 How to Build Wickedly Effective Business Cases for Content Strategy Initiatives

Alexander LumDirector—Global Product Documentation Development, Ciena

Can’t get adequate funding for your key content development strategic initiative? Your proposal to proceed is dead before it even get off the ground due to a poor business case or your key content development strategic initiative business case is not a priority as funding will go toward higher ROI business cases.


4:20–4:40 Building a Global Content Ecosystem Is Like Finding Unicorns in a Blizzard: You Can Do It, but You Have to Know Where to Look

Michael GoldbergGlobal Director, Content Marketing, Dun & Bradstreet

Building a global content ecosystem can seem like an insurmountable challenge. To make to work, you need the right mix of people, budgets, buy-in, and (most importantly) trans-silo negotiation skills.

In this session, Michael Goldberg shares what it takes to implement a successful global content ecosystem.

4:40–5:10 The Content Strategy of Civil Discourse: Turning Conflict into Collaboration

David Dylan ThomasPrincipal Content Strategist, Think Company

In the current political climate, it seems like we've all but given up on productive, respectful discourse. However, there are simple design and content strategy choices we can make that encourage collaboration over conflict, even when dealing with hot-button issues. In this session, we'll look at real-world examples of how the way we phrase a question or design an interaction can have a huge impact on the quality of conversation, and the three rules they share.

5:10–5:30 The Power of Learning You Were Wrong

Megan GilhoolySenior Manager Content Strategy, Amazon Web Services

Being right feels good. But great things happen when we prove ourselves wrong. In this talk, Megan will tell stories that illustrate the power of learning you are wrong.

6:00–6:30 Walking Parade to Dinner Locations

8:30– Annual Karaoke Night at the Bourbon Cowboy


Wednesday, October 24



The Rise of the SME within Technical CommunicationsKeith Schengili-Roberts, DITA Evangelist, IXIASOFT

It used to be that technical communicators would interview subject matter experts (SMEs) and then effectively convey that information to end users through product documentation. But increasingly, as work cycles get shorter and methodologies like Agile take hold, the SME has increasingly become a direct contributor to the process of delivering technical content. This represents a fundamental shift in the way that technical communicators are expected to work. The process becomes more collaborative, and the ability to structure and edit content effectively becomes a core job requirement. Content software vendors have had to adapt as well, as SMEs demand tools that allow them to convey information to the process easily. Learn more as IXIASOFT Market Researcher Keith Schengili-Roberts examines the trends that highlight the rise of the SME within technical communications, and its implications for you as a writer.

Find Your Global VoiceTina O'Shea, Director, Content Design and Strategy, Intuit

Your brand guidelines probably include a page or two about voice and tone. They might describe your brand voice as friendly, authentic, and trustworthy. But just as your brand is unique, so are each of your global markets. How well does your voice travel to France, where language is more formal? Or Brazil, where it's more casual? In this session, we’ll share our fixed-flexible-free framework for crafting voice guidelines that work for different markets while maintaining a consistent global brand.

Managing Change with Content Development: You Can Teach an Old Dog a New TrickMarcus DeHart, Program Manager-Change Management, Amazon

It's hard to let go of the tools and processes we're familiar with. But sometimes letting go is critical to scale with ever-changing technology. When it's time to make the next move, will you be prepared to usher your team into a bright utopian content ecosystem without losing valuable players along the way? We'll explore the hurdles of managing change as it relates to content ecosystems and how to prepare your team for the inevitable—and succeed!

Microsoft Word and DITA: Zombie Apocalypse or Enterprise Love Fest?Doug Gorman, CEO, Simply XML

More than a billion enterprise authors use Microsoft Word. Far less than 1% of that number use an XML editor.

“We hate Word because it is out of control,” says the tech pubs manager.

“We love Word and everyone uses it,” says the enterprise executive.

“Your people need to learn DITA and use an XML editor,” says the tech pubs manager.

“We've got jobs to do and use Word,” says the enterprise executive.

In this session, we examine the love and hate from both perspectives. We talk about the benefits of the XML architecture that is coming to your enterprise. We talk about efficiencies of information reuse and single-source publishing at the enterprise level. We discuss the needs of information consumers who want just enough of the right information at the right time on their devices of choice in their languages of choice.

In the end, will the love your organization has for providing better content for your information consumers and saving money avert the DITA Zombie Apocalypse?


Turning Marketing Metrics Upside-Down to Maximize Product Support ExperienceJake Rexus, Digital Help Content Strategy Manager, Autodesk

Content strategy is dominated by marketing guidelines for measuring content success. However, customers seeking support don't want to engage with your content. They need to find a solution and get back to work.

Turn that marketing strategy upside-down! Focus on what your customers really need and want out of a support site. Learn which content metrics to focus on for an optimal self-service experience.


Managing Real People during Treacherous Content Migration ProjectsKari Halsted and Michelle Fredette, Puppet

You’re starting your content migration project. You’ve lined up the financing, the tools, and the logistics. But have you planned for the human factors: the emotional and physical toll? Over the course of 18 months, we migrated our docs from lightweight markup to structured content. We’ll talk about managing the team’s emotional health at each stage, how we handled cross-organizational stress-points, the things we did right, and the lessons we learned about team-building and well-being along the way.

Diversify Your Content EcosystemBernard Aschwanden, President, Publishing Smarter

Sales. Marketing. Training. Technical communications. They all generate content to drive revenue, so why do they work in different silos? There is just one customer at the end of the day, and if you can build business value through shared content, it reduces costs, time to market, and internal bottlenecks. Manage what you say, how you say it, and when it's said to increase the top line and the bottom line in business. This means thinking about how you create, manage, and distribute content.

This case study explores how one company came to the realization that their staff could work more efficiently together, serve the customer better, and do so with a solid return on their investment in a component content management system (CCMS). We discuss background issues, how three sets of numbers (cost cutting, efficiency, and

growth) were identified as a business target, and how the company made its CCMS decision based on specific KPI they tracked. We'll discuss how the company got to where it stands now (two years later) and what comes next.

Plan to Fail and then Bounce Back: Build a Realistic Plan, Detect Issues Early, and Get Back on TrackTeresa Acob, Project Manager, Ryffine

Can the Agile mantra, “Fail Fast, Fail Often”, apply to projects in the structured content space? Instituting broad organizational change is challenging. With potentially hundreds of tasks to complete, there’s a lot that can go wrong.

How do you strike the right balance between trying to meet an aggressive timeline and building in schedule contingencies to mitigate risk? After your project kicks off, what can you do to detect problems early and adjust to reality?

Cross-Format, Cross-Silo: Lightweight DITA for Intelligent ContentMichael Priestley, Enterprise Content Technology Strategist, IBM

Intelligent content that is locked in a silo can't scale and can't solve enterprise problems. Lightweight DITA promises to address these problems with portable, scalable intelligent content that can cross tool and format boundaries, allowing communities to share tools and content across the enterprise. Learn the why, how, and what of Lightweight DITA and be prepared for the possibilities it brings to your content ecosystem.


How to Automate Interactive, Responsive, Mobile Learning from DocumentationMatt Armstrong, Director of Vertical Solutions, Author-it

In the rush to standardize content structure in the authoring process, we often forget to ask for whom are we developing content, what type of experiences do they want or expect, and how these answers should influence our workflows.

Modern HTML5 technologies are surprisingly powerful and can provide engaging user experiences with little or no changes to the authoring process. Join us for a discussion on how to start delighting your users by focusing on your content products.


I’m no Virgin (Records)! Leading a Content Strategy in Small to Medium EnterprisesJohanne Lavallée, Senior Technical Writer, Signalisation Ver-Mac Inc.

Convincing the administration in a small or medium business is just as hard as for the bigger businesses. You need a strong case, but how do you get through? You will after this session. You will learn what is the lean approach. You will learn how to see signs your company is ready for a content strategy. You will learn what kind of strategy you need.

‘Tis an Unweeded Garden that Grows to Seed—Cultivating a Weed-Free Content EcosystemHelen Saint Denis, Conversion Services Manager, Stilo International

In our own small branches of the content ecosystem, if we don't keep on top of things, our content can very quickly become overgrown, full of unwanted specimens and deadwood that can overwhelm and choke our most valuable content assets. For those making the transition to structured content models, such as DITA, this presents us with a good opportunity to tidy up our content at the same time.

In this session, Stilo’s Conversion Services Manager, Helen Saint Denis, will show how organizations can get rid of unwanted specimens and deadwood, identify opportunities for reuse-create once, publish everywhere-and put in place strategies for maintaining your content assets so as not to get overgrown again.

Helen will cover:

• Weeding (Content audit)• Preparing to transplant the good stuff (Pre-

conversion preparation)• Selecting the correct location (Identifying

topic type)

• Pruning (Ensuring content matches the content model)

• Looking after your new garden (Post-conversion)

• Thinning (Content deduplication and reuse)

Connecting Technical Communication to IoTBerry Braster, Technology Director, Etteplan

There’s a lot of talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how business models are changing as manufacturers are looking to improve their after-market business with predictive maintenance and new revenue streams. But what does this mean for the technical communicator?

How to Board a Moving Train: Managing DITA Content Models in a Live Production EnvironmentBill Burns, Content Architect, Healthwise

You’ve carefully developed and deployed your new DITA content model, and now you’re ready to turn your writers loose in your new component content management system (CCMS). Suddenly you realize that the model doesn’t account for all use cases, and your production engineers say they need other semantics to manufacture your content products. How do you juggle the requirements of your content developers and engineers while preserving the integrity of your content model?

Content Strategy to the Rescue! Transforming Content into Business AssetsTheresa Rogers, Senior Technical Writer, Oracle Opower

Dark forces are on the rise at Opower as 40,000 pages of random wiki content and team silos threaten to doom the operational success of client services. But all is not lost! Cries of anguish reverberating through the universe summon two


knowledge managers to this most worthy mission: to thwart ultimate destruction by creating a centralized, scalable wiki solution that

creates positive organization change, empowers cross-team collaboration, and delivers ROI for stakeholders with the metrics to prove it.

12:30–1:30 Lunch


We’re Going Mobile! Great! Are We Ready?Neil Perlin, President, Hyper/Word Services

You’re taking your content mobile? Great! But how clearly have you defined what “mobile” is? How going mobile will affect your content creation? Whether your business processes support going mobile?

In this presentation, we’ll look at these issues. First, three definitions of “mobile.” Then how your content creation practices have to change. Finally, issues like strategic support, standards, terminology, and more. You’ll leave with a solid understanding of the effect of going mobile and how to assess where you stand.

Becoming the Voice of Your Leadership TeamBenjamin Curry and Alex Dimitropoulos, Salesforce

Even well-functioning teams can become silos, and an executive's job is to break down walls so teams can accomplish company goals together. But how can executives inspire employees when they spend 90% of every workday in meetings—and the remaining 10% sprinting to those meetings? To get their voice out there, an executive often needs a communications and subject matter expert to assume it. Who better to do that than a doc writer or manager?

Content 4.0: Actions for Today and a Plan for the FuturePam Noreault and Chip Gettinger, SDL

Customer’s needs are changing. They expect unique personalized content. The content strategy evolution is shifting into new realms, while putting demands on existing delivery channels. What makes this difficult is organizations demand support for traditional information channels. In this session, Pam Noreault and Chip Gettinger discuss critical emerging trends, because they can take content to the next levels. They provide actionable ideas and share how you can plan for the future, while taking advantage of existing content investments.

DITA Support Portals: A One-Stop Shop to Give Users Content on Their TermsJarod Sickler, Jorsek LLC, and Morley Tooke, Innovatia

These days, technical documentation is as much about videos, forum posts, and blogs as it is concepts, tasks, and references. Modern users expect rich, curated information delivered quickly in a one-stop-shop. But delivering dynamic DITA content has been a struggle. Now, finally, DITA-based portals are becoming flexible and intuitive enough to deliver dynamic, relevant, and searchable content effectively and in multiple formats. Done correctly, an effective portal will enable and secure your digital future.


Designing Personality in Conversational UISteve Manning, Precision Content Authoring Solutions, and Tammy Crowley, Innovatia

How well do we understand the implications of adding personality to computing experiences?

Real-world examples increasingly demonstrate the challenges of spinning up a fictional identity while confronting ethical questions around trust, impact on culture, emotional sensitivities, as well as the extent of writing necessary for a quality


experience. Pretending to be human is different from being human-like, and we need to weigh the costs and benefits carefully.

This presentation will explore personality within conversational UI as everything from voice & tone to creating an independent identity - from the perspective of the writers who brought it to Cortana. You'll see how it relates to the core standard voice & tone principles for products and services, and might help you answer the question, "What's the difference between a bot and a conversation embedded in a product?"

Preparing for Change in a World of Non-Stop Change: Beyond Chatbots and VoiceSteve Manning, Precision Content Authoring Solutions, and Tammy Crowley, Innovatia

The world of content creation and delivery is changing fast. Last year, we were discussing chatbots and voice interfaces. Before that, it was self-serve knowledge bases. What will next year bring?

Join us on an adventure of how to create and deliver small, bite-sized pieces of content that can be consumed easily while delivering it to multiple platforms, like knowledge articles, blogs, chatbots, and the platforms that we don’t yet know about. You want future-proofed content, right?

Success in Leveraging Legacy and Future-Proofing with DITA: Some Assembly RequiredRon Zwierzchowski and Susanna Carlisi, Ciena

Were you at Lavacon 2017? Did you see the FrameMaker-based toolset underlying Ciena’s customer-driven migration to DITA? Automated conversion of unstructured content to DITA is a neat trick and takes minutes, but is only part of the puzzle. There are other moving parts. After reviewing the toolset and methods, you will learn how we applied the toolset and methods to support a writing team in creating and managing content with the same rigor as is applied to software and hardware.

Two Wahines Hang Ten Languages off BMC's Epic WikisLelani Prévost and Gina Fevrier, BMC Software

Through our award-winning wiki product documentation platform (docs.bmc.com), we deliver a fully-translated content experience for global customers. We've measured the impact this solution has in terms of time, cost, and viewership. We will surf you through our journey, which began with traditional help authoring tools to a wiki solution to optimize multilingual customer collaboration. So grab your board and shoot the curl as we surf through the process.

4:00–5:00 Conference Recap and Panel Discussion: Predictions for the Future

Jack Molisani, Panel ModeratorExecutive Director, The LavaCon Conference

7:00–8:00 Hair and Makeup for the Walking Dead Pub Crawl

8:00– Closing Social: Walking Dead Pub Crawl


Speakers

Teresa Acob

Teresa is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with experience managing a variety of projects, including global tools transformations and software and hardware development projects. She began her career as a technical writer working on a wide range of products, but then discovered her passion for a well-planned and expertly executed project and moved into a project management role. She has led teams of varying sizes and spanning the globe, and runs projects following Agile and waterfall methodologies.

Tom Aldous

Tom Aldous, the Founder/CEO of The Content Era, has more than 25 years of experience in the technical communications industry. Besides being the managing partner and lead XML/DITA/CMS consultant at Integrated Technologies for more than 20 years, Tom has also served as the Director of TechComm Business Development, Evangelism, and TechComm Consulting at Adobe, as well as a SVP of Global Operations at Acrolinx. At Tom’s new venture, The Content Era, his knowledge of content tools, markup languages, and best practices reduces cycle time and increases efficiency for his clients. Day after day, Tom relentlessly strives to grow from not only a business standpoint, but personally as well.

Andrea Ames

Andrea L. Ames, CEO, is the founder of Idyll Point Group and a content organization design and content experience strategy consultant. Idyll Point assists executives and managers to build content organizations that have measurable business impact, and provides content strategists with apprenticeship-style coaching to build the skills needed to provide content strategy leadership to their businesses. A published author and sought-after experienced speaker, Andrea brings to every discussion and presentation her nearly 30 years of experience in strategic technical and non-technical content roles across a wide variety of industries. She is also the Program Chair of the UCSC in Silicon Valley certificate in Technical Writing and Communication, and she teaches the program's courses in human factors, content design, and usability. When she's not guiding content leaders or teaching technical writers, Andrea is usually designing and making quilts, kayaking, or walking her dogs—all while binging on podcasts and audio books. Connect with her on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/andreaames/) or follow her on Twitter (@aames).

Anthony Apodaca

Anthony Apodaca leads product and business development for Xeditor, a web-based XML authoring tool by Xpublisher.


Matt Armstrong

Matt Armstrong is the Director of Vertical Solutions. He brings more than 15 years of channel development experience. A member of the Author-it team since 2006, he's been at the forefront of many of Author-it’s key projects in North America and Asia Pacific, helping multi-national organizations achieve faster time-to-market and dramatically lower their costs. Prior to Author-it, Matt ran a successful eLearning consultancy, working with organizations to understand and support their change management challenges when adopting new technology.

Bernard Aschwanden

Bernard helps companies generate revenue by improving content creation, management, and distribution workflows. He is the founder of Publishing Smarter (a company of content professionals helping with strategy, implementation, and communications), an Associate Fellow of Society for Technical Communication (STC), and a Past President of STC). Bernard has helped hundreds of companies implement successful content-driven solutions. He is focused on publishing better, publishing faster, and publishing smarter.

Gavin Austin

Gavin Austin is a Principal Technical Writer at Salesforce, where he writes everything from UI text to API developer guides. He helped Salesforce radically change its content strategy in 2015, and he has delivered a number of highly-rated presentations at Dreamforce, LavaCon, WritersUA, Agile 2013, Intelligent Content Conference, Information Development World, Content Management Strategies/DITA North America, and more.

Melinda Belcher

Melinda Belcher has managed all phases of content strategy—content strategy and content mapping, content partnerships and sourcing, editorial and social calendars, publishing and translation workflows, localization strategy, content audits and inventories, taxonomy, metadata, SEO, CMS upload and content tagging. Melinda is also well-versed in experience strategy, including information architecture, wireframes, user flows and prototyping. She is a certified scrum product owner and feels most comfortable in an agile, iterative working environment.

George Bina

George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor. He has more than 15 years of experience working with XML and related technologies, including XML-related projects, oXygen XML Editor. He has participated in open-source projects, the most notable being oNVDL, an open-source implementation of the NVDL standard, now merged into Jing and DITA-NG, the Relax NG-based implementation of DITA, which was adopted as reference schema for DITA in DITA 1.3.


Deb Bissantz

Deb Bissantz is an applications engineer at Vasont Systems. Before joining Vasont, Deb was a technical writer and tools administrator for multiple technical communications groups. Deb actively worked with these organizations to migrate their technical communications content to DITA and a CCMS. Deb has worked with and authored DITA content for more than 12 years. She is a voting member of the DITA Technical Committee. She co-authored the DITA 1.2 Feature Article: “Roles and Responsibilities of a DITA Adoption.”

Susan Blue

Susan Blue is a content strategist at Facebook, where she has worked on a range of products for businesses and consumers. She teaches classes to other Facebook content strategists about voice and tone and writing for emerging markets. She started her career as an English teacher and has done some combination of editing, writing, and content strategy for 20 years at places including Citysearch and AOL. She has a BS in English Education and an MA in English.

Berry Braster

Berry Braster has been in the technical documentation field for more than 14 years, and has helped implement content strategies, including the use of DITA and HyperSTE controlled language software. As Technology Director, Berry is involved with connecting technical documentation to the Internet of Things (IoT), and how to leverage on technologies like augmented and virtual reality.

Don Bridges

Don Bridges has been involved in the technical information lifecycle for 20+ years. He has worked with companies in multiple industries, helping them adapt processes and technology to meet business challenges. He was involved in some of the earliest large-scale DITA conversion projects and implementing technology that introduced single-source delivery and authoring at a corporate level. Don is from Louisiana and earned an Engineering degree from Louisiana State University (LSU).

Bill Burns

Bill Burns is an XML consultant and Content Architect for Healthwise, Inc. He has 24 years of experience in the technical communications and publishing tools industries, including 15 years working in the XML/CCMS space. Bill provides technical consulting and training services specializing in XML technologies, content management, XSL publishing processes, single-source process development, technical writing, and content internationalization. He currently resides in Boise, Idaho.


Susanna Carlisi

Susanna is a Senior Advisor–Content Strategist & Tools Specialist at Ciena. Serving as both a technical communicator and tools specialist for most of her 17 years at Ciena, she has an in-depth view of end-user documentation requirements and writer processes. Susanna manages and supports all tasks related to authoring tools setup and maintenance, authoring standards, and publication/single-sourcing processes. Susanna has been a key player and valuable asset during the transition Ciena has made to a DITA XML environment.

Bonnie Chase

Bonnie Chase is an Agile-trained Product Owner at MindTouch, creating a product that enables support agents to contribute content to an organization’s body of knowledge. Prior to shifting to product, she spent 10 years in the technical communication field, focusing on content strategy, knowledge creation, and user experience, and helping companies like Verizon, Hitachi, and Accenture empower their users through self-service. Bonnie has a MA in Writing and is KCS v6 certified.

Tammy Crowley

Tammy Crowley is an Information Architect with Innovatia Inc. She has more than 20 years' experience working with content and has spent the past 12+ years devoting her skills to delivering intelligent content. Most recently, Tammy has been working directly with a large, high-profile client to assist them in delivering intelligent content by creating and implementing content models, implementing her skills as a certified Taxonomy and Metadata Practitioner, and more. She is also a certified Enterprise Content Management Practitioner.

Benjamin Curry

Benjamin is a principal technical writer on one of Salesforce's internal content team. Passionate about breaking down silos to better enable teams to achieve their business goals, he spends his working hours reading and writing strategy documents, blog posts, and creating diagrams that describe the Salesforce infrastructure and the products it supports. He is a founding member of the Salesforce infrastructure blogging editorial board, and when he isn't working, he's in the mountains on skis or in hiking boots.

Marcus DeHart

Marcus DeHart's current role as program manager for Amazon is the culmination of 28 years in content management. As a writer, editor, and designer, he has crossed a wide range of media from his early days in desktop publishing and print marketing to the digital age of technical writing, instructional design, and motion design. Through it all, change has been a constant that he has successfully navigated and now he brings his experience and passion for content in this presentation.


Alex Dimitropoulos

Alex is a staff technical writer on the Salesforce InfraEng Doc team. He broadcasts infrastructure developments to the Salesforce engineering organization through newsletters, blog posts, and other marketing material. He also makes logos, icons, and infrastructure diagrams; co-leads a weekly Salesforce-internal series of writing tips; and creates content that helps Salesforce engineers get the hardware that they need to run their services. When he isn't working, he likes searching for records, new-to-him coffee shops, and loukoumades (Greek donuts).

Jim Edmunds

Jim Edmunds is the founder and CEO of Ingeniux Corporation a leading provider of digital content management software. Ingeniux software is used by organizations around the world to create and manage websites, communities and enterprise knowledge. The company was founded in 2000 to create innovative tools for managing and delivering content for the emerging digital marketplace.

Jim possesses a unique background in technology, publishing and entertainment. He has worked as an independent filmmaker, digital media producer, video game producer and senior technology manager. Prior to starting Ingeniux, he held leadership positions at Electronic Arts and Microsoft MSNBC.

When not talking about content management, you may find Jim craft vintning a new wine varietal. Ask him about his new CMS (Cab, Merlot, Syrah) Meritage.

Sara Feldman

Sara Feldman has more than 10 years of experience as a technical writer, primarily in the software industry and focused on customer self-service. She earned her BS in Technical Communication and Communication Studies from James Madison University. Sara is currently the President of the San Diego Chapter of STC.

Gina Fevrier

Gina Fevrier manages R&D projects for products that support UI and documentation in multiple languages. She has degrees in French, education, and instructional technology; and experience in teaching and technical writing. She also studies French literature with a focus on francophonie in the Americas.


Jonathan Foster

Jonathan Foster leads the Windows & Content Intelligence writing team at Microsoft. Their work includes UX writing for Windows, defining content experiences powered by and instantiated in AI, and writing conversational interactions for products that includes the virtual agent bot on support.microsoft.com. He created the writing team for Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana for the US and international markets, where they focused on the development of Cortana's personality while crafting fun, as well as challenging dialogue. They are now expanding upon this learning to create a personality catalogue for Microsoft's bot framework, as well as building an ML-powered chat-capability to support those personalities.

As a writer, Jonathan started out in film and television writing screenplays and working in development. He was eventually drawn away from Hollywood by the true innovative spirit of the tech industry, starting with an interactive storytelling project that was honored by the Sundance Film Festival. Now 9 years at Microsoft, he worked on Office and Xbox prior to Windows.

Michelle Fredette

Michelle Fredette is the manager of the Tech Pubs team at Puppet, Inc. She has worked in tech for the last 21 years as a writer, teacher, editor, content architect, and now manager. When not writing about configuration management and automation, she pokes away at a novel about roller derby.

Stefan Gentz

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 also 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.

Joe Gelb

Joe Gelb, the President and Head of Business Development at Suite Solutions, has over 20 years of experience helping enterprises implement, maintain and capitalize on structured content. At Suite Solutions, he has spearheaded the development of advanced technology solutions for product content delivery. Joe believes that a key to success in any business is empowering customers with the knowledge they need to succeed in their goals.


Chip Gettinger

Chip Gettinger is VP Global Solutions Consulting, SDL, managing a team who work with SDL customers in maximizing global content with SDL content management technology. Chip has more than 20 years of experience in global content strategies, publishing, business consulting, strategy, coaching, and component content management systems. He speaks and blogs about adoption, working closely with industry organizations, partners and customers in technology solutions and deployment.

Megan Gilhooly

As Senior Manager Content Management for Amazon seller support, Megan Gilhooly leads the editorial and publishing team for content, assisting sellers on all global Amazon sites. Prior to Amazon, Megan was Director of Information Experience at Ping Identity and, before that, Director of Technical Communications at INVIDI Technologies. Throughout her career, Megan has served as employee and consultant to various software companies, building technical communications products and processes. As a former online retail business owner and Certified Scrum Master, Megan brings a unique perspective to managing information development and communication teams. She has a BA in Speech Communication, an MS in Journalism, an MS in Strategic Management, and a Master’s Certificate in Technical Communication.

Michael Goldberg

Michael Goldberg has a wealth of marketing and content experience in the rapidly evolving technology, advertising, and big data spaces. As Dun & Bradstreet's Global Director of Content Marketing, Michael combines his marketing and journalism pedigree to develop engaging and educational content on a variety of topics. He leverages his insight and expertise to share insights at industry conferences and has written for a variety of publications and is often quoted online and in print on technology, advertising, and media trends. He is also an active member of the IAB B2B and the Native Advertising/Content Committees.

Previously, Michael oversaw corporate branding and messaging at native ad company, TripleLift. He leveraged his insight and expertise to produce, measure, and grow marketing campaigns across multiple channels. Prior to joining TripleLift, Michael played a pivotal role in establishing Martini Media's strong industry presence and developed the marketing plans for several unique products and services while serving as Marketing Director at Datran Media, now PulsePoint.

Pam Goodrich

Pam Goodrich is the Technical Documentation Manager for Cherwell Software. She has more than 20 years of experience writing technical documentation for enterprise software applications and has spent much of her career managing small writing teams. She specializes in user-focused documentation, DITA implementations, and DITA migrations.


Doug Gorman

Doug Gorman commercialized the structured writing methodology known as Information Mapping, bringing training and tools to more than 400,000 authors in 43 countries. Along the way, he learned about and embraced structured mark-up with SGML and, more recently XML. Through tools and training, Doug offers a realistic and cost-effective approach to improving the experience of information consumers and supporting processes that embrace content reuse and single-source publishing.

Eeshita Grover

Eeshita Grover is an experienced professional of 20+ years with a career equally divided across writing, teaching, and leading content creation and delivery teams. She has been with Cisco for the past 10 years, building and driving innovative content strategies with an emphasis on delivery for the web, mobile web, and video. Leading a change in mindset of writing teams has been one of the key contributors to her success.

Michael Haggerty-Villa

Michael Haggerty-Villa is a principal content designer and strategist at Intuit, where he leads content efforts on design systems and standards. He has been working on design systems for brands such as eBay, Disney, QuickBooks, and TurboTax, and his content strategy clients include HPE Software, Kaiser Permanente, Yellowpages.com, and others.

Kari Halsted

Kari Halsted is a technical editor at Puppet, Inc., where she works to uplift writing skills and practice throughout the company, particularly within the team that writes the docs for Puppet’s enterprise and open source software. Before Puppet, she spent 20 years at IBM, so she’s seen her share of DITA migration projects. She likes to run and read fiction.

Rob Hanna

Rob Hanna co-founded Precision Content in 2013 to change the way writers approach structured authoring. Having spent more than decade in this industry, he realized that organizations need to take a step beyond technology and expert consultants. Without fostering the necessary skills, organizations would continue to stall in their attempt to move to structured authoring. With this knowledge, he developed the Precision Content® methods, tools, and training. Today, Precision Content helps its clients make the move to structured authoring.


Pradeep Jain

Pradeep Jain is Founder and Chief Content Architect for Ictect, Inc. His specialization is in intelligent content, semantic technologies, streamlined XML authoring experiences, and content architectures for large-scale applications with an emphasis on those leveraging the latest Microsoft technology enterprise stack. He has extensive experience in implementing intelligent content processes for the Department of Defense (Air Force Departmental Publishing Office, Army Publishing Directorate, Defense Contract Audit Agency), the City University of New York, Peterson's Publishing, Thomson Reuters ScholarOne, and the World Bank.

Susan Kelley

Susan Kelley is an Information Engineer with CA Technologies. She holds two MAs, one from Carnegie Mellon University in Rhetoric, where she focused on analyzing linguistic strings in huge documentation sets using a proprietary computer program called "DocuScope" in order to determine patterns of repetition. Her current focus is on customer-centered ease of use in highly technical documentation for mainframe programs and big data.

Fabrice Lacroix

Fabrice Lacroix is the founder of Antidot, the company that puts enterprise content to work. A serial entrepreneur, he has been working for 25 years on the development of solutions that help customers make the most of their content and enhance their operating efficiency.

Johanne Lavallée

Cumulating over 20 years in tech comm, Johanne Lavallée spoke at LavaCon 2015; she’s in the LavaCon recap video, in purple and green. She has since spoken at STC Spectrum three times and given a few webinars and can’t wait to come back for more. Working since April 2012 for a manufacturer of programmable variable message signs and other systems that make up a smart work zone, she is coming into the intelligent traffic systems era enthusiastically.

Ahava Leibtag

Ahava is passionate about content and prides herself on tackling the toughest content projects—from healthcare to higher education to hip-hop (seriously). She has more than 20 years of experience in writing, messaging, and marketing, and is a well-recognized content expert. Her first book, The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web, was published by Morgan Kaufmann in November 2013. Ahava is the president and owner of Aha Media Group, a content strategy and content marketing consultancy founded in October 2005.


Alexander Lum

Starting as a software designer at Nortel, Alexander Lum climbed the ladder until 2010, when he made the transition to Ciena, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the US. He didn’t just move laterally, however; his career jumped forward as he became the Director of Global Product Documentation Development. Today, he specializes in end-to-end product document development and publishing. His primary focus today is improving customers’ user experiences and updating authoring tools with digital transformation initiatives.

Steve Manning

As a writer and manager, Steve Manning worked in the trenches, helping teams to create effective, usable, and reusable content. As a DITA Architect and Content Strategist, he solved content issues, created content and metadata models, and selected and implemented tools. As an Information Architect, he helped companies develop analytics and quality plans for technical documentation. Steve helped break new ground in structural content and reuse with The Rockley Group, as a contributing author of Enterprise Content Management (First Edition) and DITA 101.

Toni Mantych

In January 2018, Toni Mantych became Director of Information Experience at ServiceNow, where she leads a large and globally distributed information development group. Before joining ServiceNow, she was Director of Content Strategy and Architecture at ADP. She has taught a variety of graduate courses in the Technical and Professional Writing program at Portland State University and speaks frequently on content strategy and customer experience topics. In September 2017, she was recognized as a Top 200 Content Experience Strategist.

Hilary Marsh

Hilary Marsh is president and chief strategist of Content Company, a content and digital strategy consultancy. She helps associations, nonprofit organizations, and corporations get better results from their content by improving their practices for content creation, governance, management, and promotions. Content Company's clients include the American Bar Association, Endocrine Society, California State University, and the Florida Association of Realtors. Hilary is also co-leading a comprehensive research project about content strategy adoption in associations for the ASAE Foundation.

A leading content strategist since 1999, Hilary developed and taught the first graduate-level content strategy courses for the User Experience Design Masters program at Kent State University. She is starting an online content strategy school. She oversees the 30,000-member Content Strategy group on LinkedIn, and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences.

You can find Hilary on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slideshare.


Alex Masycheff

Alex Masycheff is a CEO of Intuillion Ltd., which develops solutions for managing, automating, and delivering content. Alex has been in the content industry for more than 20 years. He led implementation of XML-based solutions in many companies, including Kodak, Siemens, Netgear, and EMC. Alex believes that a combination of structured content, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing can provide users not only with precise answers on direct questions, but also navigate them through opportunities they aren’t aware of.

Noel McDonagh

Noel McDonagh is the Director of Content Operations Information Design & Development at Dell EMC, where he leads teams in information development and delivery, and manages the information development tool chain. Noel has also been leading initiatives designed to drive the enterprise content strategy forward and improve the Dell EMC customer experience.

Before joining Dell EMC, he led a consulting division that provided content strategy and XML content management solutions for government agencies and the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and financial services industries.

Karen McGrane

If the Internet is more awesome than it was in 1995, Karen would like to claim a very tiny piece of the credit. For more than 15 years, Karen has helped businesses create better digital products through the power of user experience design and content strategy. She is Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, a UX consultancy she founded in 2006, and formerly VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish. She has led projects for dozens of publishing clients, including The New York Times, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, and Time.

Karen teaches Design Management in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, which educates students on how to run successful projects, teams, and businesses. Her book, Content Strategy for Mobile, was published in 2012 by A Book Apart.

Jack Molisani

Jack Molisani is the President of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an employment agency specializing in technical writers and other content professionals: ProSpringStaffing.com. He’s the author of Be the Captain of Your Career: A New Approach to Career Planning and Advancement, which hit #5 on Amazon’s Career and Resume Best Seller list. Jack also produces the LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication Management: lavacon.org.

Pam Noreault

Pam Noreault is a Principal Consultant, Team Manager at SDL Inc. She has 20+ years of experience in technical communications, education, and management. She specializes in content strategy, customer engagement, content conversions, and social networking strategies. Pam has an undergraduate degree in education from The Ohio State University and a master’s degree in English/Professional Writing from Wright State University. When not trying out new gadgets or trying to innovate in the business world, she’s hiking with her two dogs.


Sarah O’Keefe

Scriptorium offers content strategy services to help customers solve business problems and achieve strategic goals. Since founding Scriptorium in 1997, Sarah has worked with numerous organizations to assess content issues, develop solutions, and implement new technologies that unlock content value. She is the co-author of Content Strategy 101: Transform Technical Content into a Business Asset.

Sarah is fluent in German, reads voraciously, and enjoys swimming, kayaking, and other water sports along with knitting and college basketball. She has strong aversions to raw tomatoes, eggplant, and checked baggage.

Tina O’Shea

Tina O’Shea leads content design for QuickBooks, the small business software with millions of users worldwide. Her team is responsible for bringing the QuickBooks brand to life through voice and tone. Before working at Intuit, she led content and social media at LeapFrog, and worked on the editorial staff at Apple, where she helped develop the Apple Style Guide.

Elena Ontiveros

Elena Ontiveros is a content strategist who defines best practices for businesses who build bots and messaging driven interactions. With 18 years of experience writing for consumer brands in entertainment, gaming, and education, Elena now helps technology sound and feel more human. Born and raised in Chicago, Elena currently lives in San Francisco and spends her free time volunteering at the local animal shelter, getting lost on hikes, and planning her next vacation.

Rik Page

Rik Page is Sales and Marketing Director at Bluestream Software. Since 2001, he has worked with component content and document management solutions—custom DTDs and schemas, S1000D, iSpec2200, and DITA. His experience covers a wide range of industries, including banking and finance, where he studied the lifecycle of core banking systems. He has introduced the DITA standard into new markets, such as education and central government. A keen advocate of technology and innovation, Rik has taken part in multiple consultancy projects and helped formulate solutions all over the world.

Irina Pashina

Irina Pashina is a global content strategy expert and speaker with extensive experience in the technology and non-profit sectors. Leading a content strategy function at SAP, she feels fortunate to shape superior customer experiences with a focus on digital transformation. Irina has driven large content projects, and guided co-workers and teams in her various roles. Her ability to connect with people across cultures and functional areas has been a key factor for success in multiple fields of marketing and communications.


Neil Perlin

Neil Perlin is an internationally-known online content consultant for companies from startups to F100. He ran the Bleeding Edge for STC, was a columnist for STC and IEEE, and is a popular speaker for STC, TCUK, LavaCon, MadWorld, and others. He writes the Bleeding Edge blog and has written books on MadCap Flare, Mimic and mobile apps, and courses for Lynda.com. Neil offers training, consulting, and development for online help, mobile apps, mobile readiness strategy, and related areas through Hyper/Word Services.

Alan Porter

Driven to educate, inform, and entertain through content, Alan Porter is an industry leading content strategist. He is the author of The Content Pool and a regular conference speaker, workshop leader, and writer on content marketing, content strategy, customer experience, brand management, and content and localization strategy. He was named one of the top 25 content strategy influencers and a digital strategy thought leader in 2016 and 2017.

Mark Poston

Mark Poston has worked with many customers implementing DITA-based content delivery solutions and leading the technical requirements of Congiliy's DITAweb solution. He has also led the development of IdXML, a plugin for publishing DITA into Adobe InDesign. His experience and knowledge of DITA, and involvement in DITAweb since its inception led to him becoming the CTO of Mekon's Congility division.

Lelani Prévost

Lelani Prévost provides strategy and technology support to multiple business units, including R&D, Marketing, and Customer Success. With a background in linguistics and writing, she, by chance, found herself on the fun side of languages. In her spare time, she enjoys volunteer opportunities and has recently joined the board of Haiti on the Rise, a non-profit that funds programs for those affected by the 2010 Earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

Michael Priestley

Michael Priestley is a Product Owner and Content Technology Strategist, currently leading the IBM Marketing Taxonomy Guild to revise and align taxonomy initiatives across marketing tools and communities. He has experience working with and across documentation, support, training, and marketing content as an enterprise content technology strategist. He was one of the original architects and editors of the DITA standard, was named an OASIS Distinguished Contributor in 2017, and is currently co-chairing the Lightweight DITA subcommittee.

Jasmine Probst

Jasmine Probst is a content strategy manager at Facebook and has been named one of Fast Company's 100 most creative people in business. Her work spans a diverse range, including ways for people to rediscover memories, support charitable causes, and have options for what happens to their accounts after they pass away. Before her adventure in Silicon Valley, Jasmine was an independent consultant focused on lifestyle branding. She has a BFA in electronic media and an MBA in design strategy.


Rashmi Ramaswamy

Rashmi Ramaswamy is a part of Innovatia's Information Architecture team and works closely with the Cisco documentation team. Rashmi has a varied experience—support, training, tech pubs, project management, and information architecture. Her experience working with different teams helps her bring the best practices from each team to achieve a common goal—customer satisfaction.

Jake Rexus

Jake Rexus has worked in content strategy for 15 years with MSN, Amazon.com, and Autodesk. At Amazon, Jake was a content strategist developing email and self-help resources for Prime, Kindle, Amazon Video-on-Demand, Amazon Fulfillment Services, and other product lines. Jake brought the skills and metrics systems developed at Amazon to Autodesk’s customer support in 2013. Today, Jake manages a team of four content strategists developing self-service experiences for download, installation, and activation, Autodesk Account functionality, network licensing, and subscription transactions.

Theresa Rogers

Theresa Rogers is a Senior Technical Writer on the Oracle Utilities Knowledge Management Team, where she works with groups across the organization to design and implement content strategy solutions that help their teams succeed. She joined Oracle in 2016 as part of the Opower acquisition, and has more than 10 years of experience implementing technical communication and content strategy solutions.

Barry Saiff

After leading technical writing teams for some of the largest US companies, Barry Saiff moved to the Philippines to start Saiff Solutions, a technical writing outsourcing firm based in Tagaytay City. Barry has experienced technical writing outsourcing from both sides—as a technical communications leader in the US, and as a manager of offshore technical writers and customer liaison in the Philippines.

Barry has written articles about technical writing outsourcing and led webinars on the topic. He has consulted for a variety of companies to help them improve their content and content development processes. For more information, see saiffsolutions.com.

Helen Saint Denis

Helen originally joined Stilo as a technical editor and now works closely with Stilo’s Migrate customers, helping to analyze their content, configure conversion portals, and provide training and support. She has helped customers to convert many thousands of pages from FrameMaker, Word, RoboHelp, and InDesign to DITA and other XML formats. Helen holds a BA in English from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and has pursued graduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.


Cruce Saunders

Founder and principal at [A] and author of Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World, Cruce Saunders brings more than 20 years of experience focused on content delivery technology. His team has delivered more than 300 successful digital and content engineering engagements. Cruce regularly speaks on omni-channel content, content engineering, content asset valuation, intelligent content, machine learning, chatbots, AI, cognitive systems, customer experience platforms, organizational design and change management, and master content models. [A] operates in the US, Mexico, and Latin America, and serves large corporations, governments, associations, NGOs, and other complex institutions.

Keith Schengili-Roberts

Keith is the DITA Evangelist and Market Researcher at IXIASOFT. He is the Chair of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee and an active member of the DITA Technical Committee and the Lightweight DITA Subcommittees. Keith can often be found presenting at conferences, working with customers, and researching how DITA is being used and then sharing those results with the DITA community. Keith's popular industry blog, DITAWriter.com, has become a focal point on DITA resources and best practices. Connect with Keith on Twitter @KeithIXIASOFT.

Melanie Seibert

While she's the Senior Content Strategist at WillowTree, Melanie Seibert has taught content strategy at General Assembly and helped create digital experiences for Razorfish, Rackspace, and cPanel. She opines about content strategy on her blog Prose Kiln.

Pritha Shivaji

As Senior Manager for Content at Cisco, Pritha Shivaji leads the content strategy and creation team for Cisco’s Collaboration suite of products. Rising through the company from a writer to manager, she has led large content organizations by embracing change and bringing business relevance to her team. With a mission to empower customers through an effective content experience, she oversees significant contribution to all phases of the customer journey while handling ongoing product and process evolution.

Jarod Sickler

Jarod Sickler is a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester and an Information Developer at Jorsek LLC, makers of easyDITA. Most of Jarod’s time is revolves around developing clear, precise, and concise content and arguments. Any remaining time, Jarod spends in the outdoors, with his family, climbing rocks and ice.


Dawn Stevens

Dawn Stevens is the president of Comtech Services and Director of CIDM. With 28 years of experience, including 17 years at Comtech, Dawn has practical experience in virtually every role within a documentation and training department, including project management, instructional design, writing, editing, and multimedia programming. With both engineering and technical communication degrees, Dawn combines a technical foundation with strong writing and design skills to identify and remove the challenges her clients face in producing usable, technical information and training.

Amber Swope

Amber Swope is an internationally recognized expert on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) who specializes in helping teams develop their information architecture and implement DITA. With more than 20 years of experience in the information development field and 12 years of DITA expertise, Amber helps teams design and optimize their environments to improve efficiency and reduce costs. When she’s not busy helping to change the world with XML, she can be found playing soccer, walking her puppster, and enjoying Portland.

David Dylan Thomas

David Dylan Thomas serves as Principal, Content Strategy at Think Company and is the creator and host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast. He has developed digital strategies for major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. He helps organize Content Strategy Philly, and teaches content strategy for Girl Develop It Philly. The founder of Content Camp, he previously consulted at the Corzo Center for the Creative Economy and is the creator, director, and co-producer of Developing Philly, a web series about the rise of the Philadelphia tech community. He has given standing-room-only presentations at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, and the Wharton Web Conference on content strategy and emerging content trends.

Dustin Vaughn

Dustin Vaughn is the Head of Solutions Consulting for the Technical Communications group at Adobe. He has the privilege of working with companies all over the world that are dealing with big content problems and are working to innovate in big ways. Dustin has more than 10 years of industry experience and has served as a panelist, speaker, and Adobe representative at various conferences across the globe.

Scott Youngblom

Scott Youngblom is a co-founder of Oberon Technologies, which provides consulting and systems integration services to get the most value from your complete content lifecycle. Scott’s information technology career spans 25+ years, with more than 18 years in automated publishing solutions. Scott started his career in programming and steadily built his technical background to include deep knowledge of “best-of-breed” publishing software. He now applies this experience to help all Oberon clients achieve their goals and project success.


Ron Zwierzchowski

Ron Zwierzchowski began a career in Technical Publications at the top. His first piece of technical documentation described octal machine language codes for a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-5. Since then, he has been downwardly mobile, working in large corporations and small startups. Today, he enjoys the carefree life of a documentation manager, specializing in end-to-end product document development and publishing. His primary focus is improving the lives of technical writers, as he understands the direct link to superior customer user experience.

LavaCon Conference THE€¦ · LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy and Technical Communication...

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