Program of tcworld India 2018

On the two days of tcworld India, a top-notch lineup of speakers and unique presentations and workshops will put the crucial trends and business potential of technical communication in the limelight.

The main topics of the conference cover:

  • User Assistance
  • Content Production
  • Project Management
  • Career Mastery

Get an overview of our:

  • 29 Speakers
  • 2 Keynote Speakers
  • 26 different workshops, tutorials and presentations

Download the tcworld Program here.

(Further updates will follow.)

Keynote 1:

Envisioning The Future Of Product Content: Deep Learning, AI, And Bots

AI. Bots. Deep learning. Machines! They're everywhere — in our social media platforms, driving marketing campaigns, interacting with our customers. And soon they might be driving the content experience with YOUR product content. Are you ready for this brave new world?

Ready or not, Andrea's vision of the future of product content -- documentation, help and embedded content, instructional information, and even reference -- will help you to picture your place in this strange, new world.

Andrea L. Ames

Andrea is a sought-after keynote speaker and workshop leader with almost 30 years of content experience and the author of numerous journal and magazine articles and two technical books.

She speaks and teaches about how organizations can best leverage content to grow business and how to build content creator skills and capabilities for measurable impact. Recognized in 2016 by MindTouch as one of the Top 25 Content Strategy Influencers, Andrea is a content organization designer, content experience strategist, and founder and CEO of Idyll Point Group.

Keynote 2:

IoTaH - the Internet of Things and Humans

There is much talk about IoT, and most of this either has no effect on technical communication, or tries to solve problems that are not realistic while failing to solve problems that are. If no humans are involved, IoT is just machines talking to machines – which they have been doing for a very long time.

When humans enter the loop, technical information needs to be defined in a manner that allows both humans and machines to interpret the information in the correct manner. This is where structured authoring comes in, along with new techniques for defining interactions between machines and humans. This presentation will give you more insight into what is at stake when you are working in a field that connects the information dots between machines and human beings. 

Jang F.M. Graat

Jang studied Physics, Psychology and Philosophy and learned programming in a wide variety of languages and techniques. He has 3 decades experience as technical author, trainer, consultant and developer. He has given countless presentations, tutorials and courses to a wide variety of audiences around the globe.

His main skill is making complex technology understandable and showing his audience how to think outside the box. He currently lives in Amsterdam with his wife, a computer, a collection of musical instruments and 2 cats.

Our Speakers And Presentations

Get an insight into the speakers and presentations at our most important event for technical communication in India.

Workshop Sessions

Latest Trends in Technical Communication Industry (Presentation, Session 1)

Read More

(Findings from Adobe Tech Comm. Survey 2017-18)

What are the latest developments in technical communication ? Are there any region specific trends ? Are there any are best practices to learn from my peers in migration to structured authoring ? Any trends for which I need to unlearn and relearn ? Is DITA the leading standard for creating structured content ? Is chatbot a big thing and any learnings for me as a technical author ?

Every year Adobe undertakes Adobe Tech Comm Survey to understand these and other areas which are impacting Technical communication industry. This sessions will talk about the findings from the recently concluded 2017-18 survey and what are the new trends.

  • Presentation

Changing the Engine without Stopping the Car: Moving to Structured Authoring (Presentation, Session 2)

Read More

The benefits of using modern structured authoring platforms are often outweighed by one huge disadvantage: you either have to start rewriting all your content from scratch or take a long time-out in which you convert all your existing content to your choice of XML. This is not true for FrameMaker, as this authoring tool handles structured and unstructured content in the same way. Based on its built-in tools for conversion, this tool offers you a unique migration path from the old format-based markup to semantically rich structured content. At any given time, you can publish your mix of content to a large number of output formats. This presentation shows you how this process works.

  • Presentation

5 Things That You Didn’t Know Adobe FrameMaker 2017 Can Do (Session 3)

Read More

In this workshop conducted by Adobe Solution Consultant Bharat Prakash, we will dive deep into the powerful authoring and publishing capabilities of Adobe FrameMaker 2017. After the workshop, you will know how to:

- Manage projects from inside FrameMaker

- Quickly create and modify documentation in multiple formats

- Efficiently insert images/graphics in your documentation

You will also get an overview of how to work with structured content and personalize this content by setting up Dynamic Content Filters in Responsive HTML5 for DITA content.

  • Workshop

5-Point Recipe To Wow Audiences With Adobe RoboHelp 2017 (Session 4)

Read More

In this workshop conducted by Adobe Solutions Consultant Manminder Singh, we will focus on the key ingredients that help you design, manage and publish personalized and engagaing user-centric information.

In this session, the attendees will learn how to make good documentation great, by:

- Creating personalized content using Dynamic Content Filters

- Customizing Frameless HTML5 layouts

- Using Predictive search for faster results  

- Making content adapt to the different screen sizes

- Generating Online and Offline Help including mobile apps

  • Workshop

Adobe Technical Communication

  

Amitoj Singh (Session 1)

  • Product Manager, Adobe Technical Communications, Bangalore

Read More

Amitoj is Product Manager for Adobe Technical Communications Tools - FrameMaker, RoboHelp and Technical Communication Suite. A business technocrat with more than 10 years of experience in software industry. Started his career as a software engineer with Adobe in 2005 and been in Product Management space for last 7+ years.

Jang F.M. Graat (Session 2)

  • Founder & CEO, Smart Information Design, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Read More

Jang F.M. Graat studied Physics, Psychology and Philosophy and learned programming in a wide variety of languages and techniques. He has 3 decades experience as technical author, trainer, consultant and developer. He has given countless presentations, tutorials and courses to a wide variety of audiences around the globe. His main skill is making complex technology understandable and showing his audience how to think outside the box. He currently lives in Amsterdam with his wife, a computer, a collection of musical instruments and 2 cats.

Bharat Prakash (Session 3)

  • Solutions Consultant, Adobe Technical Communication, Bangalore

Read More

Bharat is the Solutions Consultant for the Technical Communication unit at Adobe and has more than a decade’s experience in software development, testing and consulting. Bharat is an expert in Structured Authoring and various industry standards like DITA and MathML.

Manminder Singh (Session 4)

  • Product Solutions Consultant, Adobe Technical Communication , Bangalore

Read More

Manminder is the Product Solutions Consultant for Adobe Technical Communication and ELearning line of products. He has been working with Adobe for 4 years and specializes in Adobe RoboHelp, RoboHelp Server and Adobe Captivate.  Manminder is an expert in providing solutions to the clients  and also guides them through the best practices to create and deliver content using the right tools.

Producing Videos Using Chroma Key Technology

Read More

For the longest time, chroma key (better known as green screen) technology has been an integral part of movie making, showing everyday humans interacting with aliens, dragons, and other imaginary creatures in exotic locales. The Cisco documentation team has been experimenting with harnessing this technology to make product videos more engaging.

This session is focused on sharing our experience and enabling others to produce chroma key videos.

  • Tutorial

Amel Abdul Rahman

  • Senior Technical Writer, Cisco Systems , Bangalore

Read More

Amel has worked as a technical writer for over nine years, in a career spread across Cisco and Nokia Siemens and previously as a software developer at Allgo Embedded Systems. Her interest is currently in video creation and next generation technologies like augmented reality in documentation.

Ashalatha Tom

  • Technical Communicator, Cisco Systems, Bangalore

Read More

Ashalatha works with Cisco Systems as a technical writer. She has nearly 10 years’ experience in the field of technical communications. At Cisco, she is part of a team that works on innovations that drive the future of technical communications, especially in the field of video direction and story boarding and also in delivering Augmented Reality solutions for Cisco products.

Up The Career Pyramid

Read More

Choice or chance. Go wide or go deep. Generalize or specialize. Linear or meandering. Some of the words that you would associate with a career path. Attend this session to gain insight into what it means to proactively build a career that is fulfilling and challenging at the same time.

  • Presentation

Amie Thacker

  • Customer Documentation Manager, Nokia, Bangalore

Read More

Started off as an individual technical writer and worked with companies like Talisma and Aztecsoft for 8 years before joining Nokia. Been with Nokia for 10 years, responsible for building teams from scratch of up to 40 technical writers. Currently manage 32 writers working for Nokia's Core products.

Solving Problems Creatively with Design Thinking

Read More

Design Thinking has become very popular in recent years. Although many companies are embracing it, some still believe it to be a design practice. While it is called Design Thinking, it can be applied to so much more than design as we think of design (industrial, interaction, or visual design of products).

Andrea has applied Design Thinking to solve problems and develop solutions in the content space, as well as to university curricula, small-town government, and community volunteer situations. As a framework of techniques that can be applied in nearly any domain, it's very powerful and flexible.

Join Andrea for this double session to experience the approach for yourself in a hands-on workshop. You'll leave with enough knowledge to apply Design Thinking in your own organization to solve nearly any business problem that comes your way!

  • Workshop

Andrea Ames

  • CEO & Content Organization Designer, Idyll Point Group, Ellsworth, USA

Read More

Andrea is the Program Chair for, and designed and teaches in, the UCSC in Silicon Valley certificate program in technical communication; has published two award-winning technical books and numerous papers and articles; and speaks regularly at conferences and professional organization meetings.

Recognized in 2016 by MindTouch as one of the Top 25 Content Strategy Influencers, she is a content organization designer, content experience strategist, and founder and CEO of Idyll Point Group. Andrea will also hold the keynote speech 'Envisioning The Future Of Product Content: Deep Learning, AI, And Bots' at this conference.

Reference Material - Topics Or Databases?

Read More

​​​​​​In the modern enterprise, structured information is everywhere - XML output from applications, JSON configuration definitions, even Excel spreadsheets. All of these information sources can be transformed for static publishing or dynamic presentation. At Nutanix, we have mostly moved away from creating substantial reference sets manually. In this session, we will cover some techniques for maximizing the business value and minimizing the overhead of information maintenance. Opportunities for further automation and refinement will be discussed.

Ben Colborn

  • Director of Technical Publications, Nutanix, San Jose, USA

Read More

Ben's department is responsible for all hardware and software product documentation for the company's enterprise cloud platform.

Imran Pasha

  • Technical Publications Manager, Nutanix, Bangalore

Read More

Imran Pasha is the manager of the Nutanix Bangalore technical publications team.

Content Strategy In An Augmented Reality World

Read More

The world of content creation has come a long way in a short time. It’s only taken a few years to switch from paper to smartphones. We’re beginning to see a world where we don’t have to view information on a handheld tablet, phone or watch. AR and VR are beginning to make inroads into the market – Google Glass notwithstanding. Our content must change to work properly on these new platforms. Join Charles as he explains how you can design or update your Content/Localisation Strategy to take advantage of VR and AR in the real world.

  • Presentation

Charles Cooper

  • Vice President, The Rockley Group, Schomberg, Canada

Read More

Charles works with companies to help them understand their content and ensure that it can be created, managed, and published quickly and consistently, while still meeting the needs of their users around the world.

15 Ways To Animate Your Content With GIFs

Read More

GIFs are eating the world. But they’re not just fun and games. See real-world examples of how animated GIFs are being used in documentation, support, and beyond. Get practical tips for when, how, and why to create them. In this session, attendees will learn:

- 15 ways to use GIFs in tech comm content
- Tips for when to use GIFs vs. videos vs. images
- Best practices for creating effective GIFs
- Gotchas to be aware of when using GIFs

  • Presentation

Snagit 2018 Tips and Tricks for Technical Communicators

Read More

Snagit has become the #1 most used software tool among technical communicators, according to a Content Wrangler benchmark survey.

At this workshop, learn to use the new Snagit 2018 to create and update visuals for your technical content. We’ll cover tips for accelerating common workflows, updating screenshots more easily, and getting value from new features like animated GIF creation.

Bring your laptop with the Snagit 2018 free trial installed, if you want to follow along. Each attendee will be provided one Snagit license key at no cost (limit 50).

  • Workshop

Daniel Foster

  • Snagit Strategy Lead, TechSmith, Okemos, USA

Read More

Daniel has 16 years of software industry experience, much of it in marketing communications, content creation, and social media. Currently he heads up market and product strategy for Snagit.

Building a Home for Excellence

Read More

Ever since companies began to realize that customer experience was critical to business success, improving customer experience has been at the heart of business strategy. Business corporations have come up with varied approaches to understanding customer behavior and infusing it with delight. Happy customers are good for business.

Over time, the more successful corporations have come to learn that an engaged workforce delivers improved customer experience. In the words of Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group of companies, “If you look after your staff well, they will look after your customers.”

Employee Experience Design has largely remained in the domain of Human Resources. That typically involves setting up employee policies, practices, and tools. It is, however, up to each function to design its own workplace experience to deliver customer delight. This presentation takes a close look at what this means for content creators.

  • Presentation

Edwin Skau

  • Director, Solutions by Design

Read More

Edwin Skau is a senior technical communications professional with over twenty years of experience in setting up and managing content artifacts and teams. He has worked in both product, and service industries in telecom/datacomm, security, banking, semiconductor and enterprise software domains.

He currently provides consultation in the areas of staffing, training, productivity coaching, and content strategy along with a virtual team of experienced professionals. His presentation and articles, drawn from his personal and vicarious experiences, are marked by his signature dry wit, reckless candour, and rare insights

Adaptive Content to the MAX - Embedded Interactive Procedures

Read More

Solving complex problems is always following a mental flowchart, so why not make that flowchart explicit and use modern techniques to turn it into an interactive embedded procedure? This presentation connects the dots between human-machine interfacing, internet of things, embedded content and minimalism in user assistance.

The result is an intelligent machine, which combines data from its many sensors, human input and potentially data from external data sources, taking the user by the hand to perform maintenance and fix problems.

  • Presentation

Picture Perfect: Visualization Techniques for Monitoring Content Quality

Read More

This presentation introduces a set of visualization techniques to monitor the quality of content in repositories.

Typically, the main goals of any CMS are to reduce the amount of existing content redundancy and to increase consistency across documents. Accomplishing these goals can greatly reduce the cost of supporting a company's technical publishing operations. Additionally, most CMS software provides direct access to metadata about the shared document components that are re-used. However, there exists no standard way to monitor the critical metrics needed to determine to what degree the original goals of the system were met.

Consequently, this presentation introduces a series of visualization techniques that can be used to monitor base line metrics of content quality and editor productivity. These techniques include: Once a system-wide base line is established, progress over time can be monitored and used to justify the initial implementation cost of the content delivery system. The main benefit of this presentation is that it provides a set of visualization techniques to monitor the quality of content in technical publishing systems. It introduces a series of visual report templates that can be used to establish baseline metrics for content reuse and editor productivity.

Once a baseline is established, progress over time can be monitored and used to justify the initial implementation cost of the content delivery system.

  • Presentation

Jang F.M. Graat

  • Founder & CEO, Smart Information Design, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Read More

Jang has 3 decades experience as technical author, trainer, consultant and developer. He has given countless presentations, tutorials and courses to a wide variety of audiences around the globe.

His main skill is making complex technology understandable and showing his audience how to think outside the box.

Intelligent Information for Smart Users

Read More

In times of industry 4.0, tekom’s iiRDS (intelligent information Request and Delivery Standard) marks a new way of human-machine-interaction. iiRDS works with intelligent information and in two ways, meaning that it can be requested and delivered between individual undertakings.

In this presentation, Jan Oevermann explains the basic idea and the technical approach of iiRDS. You’ll learn how manufacturers can easily supply customers with the information for use they require and customers can easily integrate information for use from different manufacturers: Come along and get to know how smart factories will work in the future.

  • Presentation

Jan Oevermann

  • Team Leader, ICMS GmbH , Lindau, Germany

Read More

Jan is a PhD candidate at University of Bremen and Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. His research focuses on the improvement of semantic access to technical documentation. He works as a team leader at ICMS GmbH and is a visiting researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). As co-editor he is actively contributing to the iiRDS specification.

Understanding The Blockchain Technology

Read More

The blockchain technology is not a new technology. It is a combination of proven technologies like the Internet, private key cryptography, and a protocol governing incentivization. First implemented by Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, the technology is making its presence felt in domains like Finance, Supply Chain Management, Digital Identity/Storage, and many others. With emerging trends, like Internet of Things and Big Data also keen on implementing and harvesting the power of the Blockchain technology, it is clear that Blockchain is not just a run-of-the-mill fad. It is here to stay. 

  • Presentation

Mayur Bhandarkar

  • Senior Technical Specialist, Incedo Inc., India

Read More

Mayur has 11 years of experience in writing that includes Content Writing, Instructional Design, and Technical Writing. He has writing experience in domains like eCommerce, Banking, Anti-virus, PLM, and Big Data.

Bhushan Jahagirdar

  • Associate Technical Writer, TIBCO Software India Pvt. Ltd.

Read More

Bhushan is an Associate Technical Writer from TIBCO Software India Pvt. Ltd. He holds master's degree (MCA) from Pune University. He has 5+ years of experience in various roles like Development, Testing, and Technical Writing. He worked in domains like PLM and Interior Designing.

MadCap Flare: Overview and the Latest Updates

Read More

This session will have two parts. First, the MadCap Flare product will be introduced and demonstrated showing its core architecture and workflow. The second part will provide updates on the most recent releases and functionality added to MadCap Flare. Join Mike Hamilton, VP of Product Evangelism, for a comprehensive overview and learn why MadCap Flare is the leading solution for intelligent content authoring and publishing.

  • Presentation

Mike Hamilton

  • V.P. Product Management, MadCap Software, San Diego, USA

Read More

Mike is the V.P. of Product Evangelism and one of the founding members of the MadCap Software team. With over twenty years of experience in training, technical communication, multimedia development, and software development, he has worked with organizations such as Cymer, National Steel & Shipbuilding, and the US Navy.

He is a frequent speaker at industry events such as STC Summit, LavaCon and more, and is commonly quoted in technology articles in various trade publications.

Visualizing Your content

Read More

Up first Minnie will present an Introduction about how Technical Writing has changed over the years. Following that, she will talk about migration to videos and then finally focus on the Technical Videos. She will also teach the audience how they can present the information in an enhanced manner for their clients and discuss the tools that are available for making such videos and how quickly you can learn and using them.

  • Presentation

Minnie Kaur

  • Senior Technical Writer, e-Zest Solutions ltd, Pune

Read More

Minnie has more than 8 years of experience in the Technical Domain. She holds a dual Masters degree in the field of Communications from Pune University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prominently known for making versatile videos.

'Why Click When You Can Simply Chat!' - Transitioning To Conversational UIs

Read More

A conversational UI (CUI) is increasingly becoming popular due to the increase in native chat users. In this context, a lot changes from a content point-of-view compared to the traditional GUIs. The user-centricity goes more in the direction of natural language than concentrating on buttons, labels or technical messages.

The new age technical writers move from writing conventional instructions to more conversational content. This presentation will help to draw a comparison between traditional GUIs and CUIs and quick tips on how to design conversational scripts.

  • Presentation

Nithya Krishnan

  • User Assistance Developer, SAP Labs, Coimbatore

Read More

Nithya is a User Assistance Developer and coordinator by profession.In her 10 years of experience in technical communication, she has authored end-user documentation artifacts across domains such as Healthcare,Mobility,Database Modeling, and Enterprise On-Premise and Cloud-Based solutions.

Transitioning From Structured Content To Intelligent Information - Ready For Information 4.0?

Read More

With the changes that arrived with Industry 4.0, there has been a revolution in how intelligent information is created, stored, or consumed by the user. Information 4.0 is all about the context to provide relevant information to the user at the right time. Information can come from anywhere, in any format, and can be made available to the user in multiple formats. This presentation will help you assess the maturity of your content strategy and the role of AI to get ready for Information 4.0.

  • Presentation

Nivedita Aggarwal

  • Director, Information Engineering, CA Technologies, Hyderabad

Read More

In her current role as Director, Information Engineering, Nivedita heads the Globalization team at the global level and Engineering Services teams at CA India Technology Center, which includes Information Engineering, DevOps Tools Services, Accessibility, and Secure Coding Development Practices teams.

Things You Shouldn’t Write

    Read More

    In this workshop, we will focus on best practices for writing less. What does the reader need? How can we cut down what we write to increase our productivity and value to our companies? In this workshop we will explore:

    -  Quick overview of Surgix and their Computer-Assisted Surgery System (CASS), the company and its documentation
    -  Its users and what documentation they need – what are the user stories?
    -  What is needed to restructure their legacy content from task oriented to user-stories
    -  What should not have been written…and why
    -  What should have been written…and wasn’t

    Workshop participants will be asked to join together to create an adapted and focused outline for documenting fictitious products.

    • Workshop

    Protecting All Shades of Intellectual Property

    Read More

    Every company has intellectual property that needs to be protected not just from infringement, but from simply being lost. This can happen when vital personnel leave the company; it can happen when managers are promoted, leaving behind a vacuum. On a smaller scale, this can happen within your team when you shift responsibilities or someone moves on to a new project within the department.

    What can you do now, when your team is intact and your knowledge is still contained within your company? What is there to protect?

    This session provides some ways you can prevent this knowledge loss. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the problem and some likely solutions that can help minimize how much important information is lost when an employee leaves.

    • Presentation

    Paula R. Stern

    • CEO & Senior Technical Writer, WritePoint Ltd., Jerusalem, Israel

    Read More

    Paula is the Founder and CEO of WritePoint Ltd., tekom-Israel President (and founder), Adobe Community Professional/Influencer, Chief designer and instructor of the WritePoint Technical Writing Course, Blogger and a Social Media Consultant.

    Can I Have The Cake And Eat It Too?

    Read More

    In life and at work, we often struggle with questions about whether or not we are doing our best. We feel that we are giving a lot, but receiving way less in terms of results. We tend to attribute our happiness and peace of mind to success.

    However, success is always relative, which means that in the process of achieving our notion of success, we often end up compromising on the quality of our life, and in turn lose sight of lasting happiness and peace. Here is where positive intelligence comes into the picture. Our mind is the most powerful object in our being; it is what teaches us to learn and unlearn.

    By working on our positive intelligence, we can:
     - Face and eliminate factors that are sabotaging our work and life
     - Enlighten the inner wisdom that has helped us in handling challenges in superior ways
     - Strengthen our positive intelligence quotient (PQ) brain muscles

    In this presentation, Prarthana will be talking of how improving our PQ is critical to enhancing our performance and that of our teams’. She will be providing strategies about how each of us can gain control of our own minds to achieve optimal success at work and in our lives.

    • Presentation

    Prarthana Ajith

    • Manager Information Engineering, Micro Focus, Bangalore

    Read More

    As a technical communicator, Prarthana has over 13 years of experience in writing across several technical domains for hardware, software storage and automation products. She has always striven to look beyond the horizon of her job to take up assignments that will challenge her on all fronts.

    The completion of these assignments have brought her immense satisfaction and pride. She believes that in life, change is the only constant, and that those that are able to adapt well to change are the ones who not only survive, but survive well.

    And Yet It Matters: Optimal UA For Sustainable UX

    Read More

    It’s impossible to deliver a great UA if the inherent UX design of the app is flawed. This workshop explains the symbiotic relationship that UX and UA share – and emphasizes the importance of useful UX in delivering engaging user assistance. The workshop also covers:

    - the 10 design principles outlined by Dieter Rams with real-life examples, their significance in modern-day software design and correlation with how it can help communicate succinctly with users.
    - how to deliver proactive and optimal UA that compliments a minimalistic and usable design to ease the cognitive load on the user.

    • Workshop

    Priyanka Jayadevappa Pallagatti

    • Associate Manager, SAP Labs, Bangalore

    Read More

    Priyanka has 12 years of work experience in User Assistance and Engineering process at SAP in various roles - handling the deliveries of product releases as Delivery Manager; leading the UA team and managing end-to-end UA deliveries across geographies, documenting software across domains.

    Malavikha Anantha Shayanam

    • Information Developer and UA Lead, SAP Labs, Bangalore

    Read More

    Malavikha has 3 years of work experience as an Information Developer and User Assistance Lead at SAP - handling end-to-end UA delivery for various software projects across geographies; and authoring and publishing content for on-prem and cloud software applications across Business Intelligence and Mobile Domains.

    Pushing Syrup Through A Straw: When Content Exceeds Capacity

    Read More

    What happens when you are asked to do more with less - and more again, with less again? At some point, you have to make some tough decisions about the strategies available to you, and the tactics you can implement. This session is for technical communicators who live through burgeoning products, and changes to resources; it explores the five possible directions that a tech doc team can take. The session also explores several ways to work smarter, helping stretch resources to meet demands.

    • Presentation

    The Secret Lives Of Structured Content

    Read More

    Structured content is powerful. Structure lets content perform at optimal levels, delivering from multiple content sources, to multiple audiences, into multiple channels, through multiple interfaces, and often with more complexity. As we're challenged to meet the needs of more market segments with personalised content in an increasing number of contexts, it's critical to understand how much structure to apply, and how to make that structure stand up under the stresses of complexity and scale.

    This workshop will cover the processes for structuring content, and demonstrate the benefits that accrue as the sturdiness of the structures increase.

    • Workshop

    Rahel Anne Bailie

    • Chief Knowledge Officer, Scroll, London, UK

    Read More

    Rahel Anne is a content strategy geek, who consults to manage content as business assets. She is a supporter of standards, schemas, and semantic content, CKO at Scroll and organiser of 2 content strategy meetups. She is working on a next industry book right now.

    Operationalizing Augmented Reality in Large Enterprises

    Read More

    This session will cover how augmented reality (AR) applies to large enterprises that do not deal with consumer products. I’ll illustrate the opportunities and challenges of current AR technology through a close look at how Cisco Systems, a worldwide leader in IT and Networking, is implementing AR for its hardware products. At the end of the session, participants will have an understanding of how to implement and scale an AR solution in their company.

    • Presentation

    Sam George

    • Senior Documentation Manager, Cisco Systems, Bangalore

    Read More

    Sam manages the Switching and Wireless doc teams at Cisco Systems. He has been exploring augmented reality solutions for some time, and is very passionate about using AR to enhance the overall customer product experience. One of his current focus areas is the large-scale adoption of AR at Cisco.

    How Information 4.0 is Driving Industry 4.0

    Read More

    In this session, Stefan Gentz will discuss how Information 4.0 is becoming the backbone of Industry 4.0. He will explore how DITA feeds the tekom standard iiRDS, The International Standard for Intelligent Information Request and Delivery, and will give practical examples of intelligent information in Industry 4.0 and IoT scenarios. He will discuss how DITA, CCMS, MTS, RDF, and chatbots will form the future customer experience and introduce you to Adobe’s Information 4.0 Framework.

    • Presentation

    Stefan Gentz

    • Adobe Worldwide TechComm Evangelist, Germany

    Read More

    As the Worldwide TechComm Evangelist at Adobe, Stefan’s mission is to inspire enterprises and technical writers to create compelling technical communication content with the Adobe Technical Communication Solutions. Stefan is also a certified Quality Management Professional (TÜV), ISO 9001 / EN 15038 auditor, ISO 31000 Risk Management expert and Six Sigma Champion. He is also a member of the tekom iiRDS Consortium, the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee, and is the brain behind the world’s biggest DITA Conference: Adobe DITA World.

    As a popular keynote speaker and moderator on all major Technical Communication conferences and Adobe events, Stefan travels the globe the whole year.

    Taking DITA Into the Future: Beyond XML Tags And PDFs - With New Technologies.

    Read More

    DITA is not only a set of XML tags – it is first of all a content architecture which can be applied to many kinds of content: XML, HTML5, JSON, and even Word files. This workshop will not show you how to XML-tag content or how to create a PDF file, but it will allow you to apply the content architecture on a practical example.

    Together, we will create a small cloud based sample of topics for a particular use case. Using these topics, we will then demonstrate how these content molecules, combined with rich metadata, can be used as input for new and emerging content technologies such as AI, NLP, Chatbots and other software bots.

    • Workshop

    Feeding the Chatbot

    Read More

    Today’s content end users are different: Nobody reads books, nobody reads 200-page long PDF and only a few will actually use sophisticated filtered search portals. All they really want is an answer to their question – here and now.

    To meet these requirements, software robots - aka chatbots - using NLP, AI and ML are being implemented by many companies. IBM's Watson technology and Microsoft's LUIS are just some of the popular technologies. But there is a problem: The chatbots know nothing - and the right powerfood for chatbots is modular, well-structured.

    • Presentation

    Steffen Frederiksen

    • Founder, CSO and Director, Dita Exchange, Aarhus, Denmark

    Read More

    Since 1989, Steffen Frederiksen has been working with the creation, management and distribution of structured, reusable business content (operating procedures, business policies, product information, manuals, etc.). The work included methods, software tools, training workshops and CMS solutions.

    Content As A Code

    Read More

    Content as a code is simply treating your document as a code and not like a traditional document. Though our document is essentially a code file. If you open the code view of your help tool editor and look at the source, you can see the accompanying code that writers traditionally are wary about. If we move towards the direction of content as a code, we could utilize the web technologies to enhance our documentation. The idea is to make our tools and documentation source such that they are able to leverage the development in web. This would happen only when we create tool independent source.

    • Presentation

    Virendra Chauhan

    • Technical Writer, TIBCO Software, Pune

    Read More

    Virendra has over 7 years of experience in Technical writing, content writing. He has also worked in a startup ecosystem and varied domains like banking and retail. His hobbies include writing, researching, analyzing and learning new technologies.

    How To Train Your AI Using DITA

    Read More

    ​​​​​​How can a technical communicator build an Artifical Intelligence bot to respond and chat for product related help? We plan to walk the audience on how to create and train their own Artificial Intelligence service instance, and the content strategy that would be required for this niche gap in the industry. We would also be sharing with the audience on how we have leveraged the power of the inherent DITA semantics and structure to respond precisely to questions on product functionality.

    Vishal Palliyathu

    • Senior Information Developer, Cisco, Bangalore

    Read More

    Vishal has 11 years of experience, and is a Senior Information Developer at Cisco. During his earlier stint at IBM, he has led several acquisition, migration, and revamping efforts with a strong focus on better information design and ease of use using minimalist principles. His explorations into leveraging the semantics and ontologies of structured docs have resulted in a few patents on DITA.

    Balaji Kumar

    • Senior Developer, IBM, Bangalore, India

    Read More

    Balaji has extensive expertise in the transaction processing domain and cloud computing. Balaji has four patents to his credit.