Agenda - Wednesday

Turning Search into Find (W1)
Matthew Ellison, Matthew Ellison Consulting

If you offer users of Help the choice of using the table of contents, index, or search to locate the information they need, most will opt for Search. And yet very often Search yields disappointingly poor results, ranging from an unhelpfully long list of hits to nothing at all. This leads to negative attitudes towards Help and a tendency for users to look for answers in alterative sources. This session explores a range of emerging techniques for improving the quality a Help system's search feature, making it more focused and less likely to return "Not found" results. The benefits of these techniques include a better chance of users finding the information they need in Help, reports of more positive experiences with Help, an increased uptake of Help, and more productive users as a result.

TBA (W2)
TBA

An Update on DITA Features, Tools, and Best Practices (W3)
Tony Self, HyperWrite

While DITA adoption is slowly gaining momentum, the DITA standard itself is undergoing a renovation, with DITA 1.2 recently released by the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. DITA tools are becoming more sophisticated, new DITA tools are appearing on the market in abundance, and familiar tools are adding more and more DITA support. As the improvements that the new 1.2 standard allow filter down into authoring and publishing tools, the capability and efficiency of a DITA workflow will become even more attractive. The rise of new document delivery platforms, such as eInk devices, eBooks and iPhones, is also relevant to DITA adoption. Perhaps because DITA is an open standard, and many tools are open source, finding best practices for DITA implementation from the range of approaches is a challenge, and some guidelines can smooth the road. In this session, we will take stock of where the DITA methodology has been, and is going.

Introduction to DITA Conditional Publishing (W4)
Dave Gash, HyperTrain Dot Com

One of DITA's primary strengths is in combining discrete data chunks into cohesive documents, but it also excels at the other end of the spectrum -- separating data chunks when necessary. This feature, called conditional processing, allows you to produce separate documents for different products, platforms, audiences, and so on, all from the same input. Conditional processing's control mechanism is metadata, "data about data", that you specify in your topics and maps to direct DITA's decision making process. This session introduces you to conditional processing and metadata. With appropriately designed and placed metadata, you can achieve dramatic single-source results with minimal effort!

UA Design and Implementation for iPhone Apps (W5)
Joe Welinske, WritersUA

The iPhone application development market has exploded since Apple opened the App store. Apple recently celebrated the one millionth application developed for their mobile platform. For UA developers this represents a new market for our services. It is also an area with numerous challenges in uncharted waters. All mobile apps can benefit from improved UI text. Word choices are extremely important with minimal screen real estate. While many, if not most, mobile apps are fairly simplistic, there is a rapidly growing list of application with relatively robust capabilities. Many of the more robust apps work in concert with web-based applications and knowledgebases. Joe Welinske is currently working on the design of Help for a range of iPhone applications, where his focus is on features that are not easily discovered. He'll share his experiences in this session. You will also be exposed to the iPhone user interface elements and the development environment. This session is technical in nature but does not require any experience with programming.