#STC13: The Future of Tech Comm is Here. Are you ready for it?

Future of Technical Communications is here – Are you ready for it?

Kapil Verma | Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Technical Communications

© 2010 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.

A little bit about myself..

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• Manage the Adobe Technical Communication line of products

• Responsible for product strategy/roadmap, customer relationship and partner ecosystem

• Attend several Tech Comm. focused conferences throughout the year


Human communication has evolved over the years..

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..And so has the role of the technical writer (or so we think )

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Image: http://www.contentrules.com/jobs/2012/02/24/what-does-a-technical-writer-really-do/


We believe that there are four main shifts happening in the tech comm industry today

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Need to be Efficient

Need to Excite

Need to be Everywhere

Need to Engage


The need for the 4 Es!!

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Need to be Efficient

Need to Excite

Need to be Everywhere

Need to Engage


Need for Efficiency

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In the current environment, more is being asked from fewer resources

Economic woes continue..

..while budgets are getting cut

Higher productivity demanded


A recent survey reflects this trend adequately *

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Number of UA employees

Number or scope of projects

Workload due to staff changes

13% 68% 19%

Reduction No Change Increase

4% 53% 42%

6% 72% 23%

Technical writing professionals are facing pressure to be more productive!

* The 2012 Writers UA Salary Survey: http://www.writersua.com/surveys/salary12/index.html

http://www.writersua.com/surveys/salary12/index.html


Structured authoring

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Movement to structured authoring has picked up in the last few years

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29%

42%

15%

28%

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

2008 2009 2011

Scriptorium SDL

% of respondents who are already doing structured authoring % of total, SDL and Scriptorium surveys

87%

45%

N/A N/A

Source: Scriptorium 2009, 2011 survey. SDL survey 1)Adobe survey to STC tech comm professionals 2012, N=237

Our own survey in 2012 reveals that 38% are already

doing/migrating /planning to move 1 to structured authoring


As expected, structured authoring penetration is higher in larger corporations though there are significant number SMBs doing it as well

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22% 21% 37%

6% 14%

13% 39%

33%

26%

32% 31% 24%

Small Medium Large

Structured Authoring Migration Trends Percent of total responses 1,2

No plans to move

Undecided OR don't know

Planning to migrate

Already doing OR migrating

Source: FrameMaker Survey to STC members (2012) 1) Sample Sizes: Small (1-99 FTE): 77; Medium (100-999):70; Large (>=1K FTE):90 2) Survey question:At what stage of structured authoring journey are you currently?

28% 35%

50%


Similarly, from an industry perspective, structured authoring adoption is quite widespread

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High Tech 38%

Telecommunications 11% Professional Services

11%

Others 9%

Manufacturing 6%

Engineering and Management Services

3%

Pharma/Biotech 3%

Health Care 3%

Education 3%

Construction 2%

Financial Services 2%

Military / Aerospace and Defense

2% Services 2%

Print and Publishing 2% Media

2%

Insurance 2%

Utilities 2%

Distribution of respondents who are already doing / in the process of migrating to structured authoring Percent of total (N = 65)

Source: FrameMaker Survey to STC members (2012)


DITA, by far, is the most popular structured authoring standard

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DITA 47%

Custom Developed/Other

38%

Docbook 13%

Military Standard 1%

S1000D 1%

ATA 0%

Source: Scriptorium 2011 survey

Share of Structured Authoring Market % of total already doing/currently implementing structured authoring


Several of our customers have reported benefits from migration to structured authoring

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“It takes us 40% less time to create the document in structured FrameMaker as compared to Word” - A large aerospace company

“With structured/XML, we can automate publishing from databases, besides the usual content re-use and efficiency in content development related benefits” - A large semiconductor company

“Saw 65-90% re-use when we moved to DITA in GSG and tips poster” - A large smartphone manufacturer

“In our migration to structured authoring, we expect 10-15% of content re-use” “Re-purposing to newer deliverables is another new possibility” - UK based organization in charge of maintaining safety standards on railways

“We also expect improved quality of content due to structured authoring principles” - A large US based chipmaker


Collaboration

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CMS adoption still has lot of headroom to grow..

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32% 22%

35% 46%

57% 58%

68% 78%

65% 54%

43% 42%

1-9 10-99 100-499 500-999 1000-4999 5000+

Size of company (# employees)

CMS usage * Percent of total

* Source: FrameMaker Survey to STC members (2012), N=237

Overall CMS adoption is higher in larger companies

Use CMS 42%

Don't Use CMS/Don'

t know 58%


.. And is expected to grow more due to the structured authoring shift

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35%

58%

65%

42%

No plans/Not Doing StructuredAuthoring

Already doing/Planning to move

Don't Use/Don't know

Use CMS

CMS usage * Percent of total

CMS adoption by the state of structured authoring in the organization

* Source: FrameMaker Survey to STC members (2012), N=237


Need to excite

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Attention spans are crashing

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You read David Copperfield?!

Gangnam Style

Image courtesy: http://www.killianbranding.com/whitepapers/the-post-literate-era-planning-around-short-attention-spans/


Increasing Demand For Multi Media In Technical Communication


We are seeing increasing use of rich media in technical documentation to liven up the content

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~58% of the

respondents

41%

33%

11%

18%

Use images/vector art in their technical content

Use videos

Use hotspot linked images

Use audio clips

Use 3D models

Source: FrameMaker Survey to STC members (2012), N=237


In particular, video will replace good old words in many places

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• In a 2010 report from Cisco, 30% of Internet traffic was video. By 2013,

90% of Internet traffic will be video.

• 86% of those who browse the web prefer to watch videos over reading

• Virtually 60% of respondents said they would watch video previous to reading

text on the same webpage, and 22% said they generally liked watching video more than browsing text for examining business information.

• Having a video on your website increases

Google search rank by over 50 times.

Image courtesy: YouTube


Need to be everywhere

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Mobile Revolution: A Fundamental shift in the way content is consumed


We are already living in a world where mobile devices have a larger share of the market and our time

30

139 172

299

472

722

919

1,078

1,516

19 70

116

197 266

468

293 305 347

357

341

315 302 272

2008A 2009A 2010A 2011A 2012 A 2013E 2014E 2017E

WW Units sales by category In million units

Smartphones Tablet PC

16%

32%

-4%

CAGR 2012-17

Source: Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Gartner and IDC research

Smartphone sales have surpassed PC sales 2 years ago Explosive growth

(1..6x) in SP and tablets, while the

PC market declined

Mobile category expected to grow

at a fast clip


Need of the hour is creating adaptive content for multiple screens

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SINGLE SOURCE


Our survey of tech comm professionals reflects their strong interest in mobile publishing in the future

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5%

27%

3%

15%

11%

33%

Currently Publishing Plan to publish

Publishing to mobile trends % of respondents publishing/planning to publish to mobile outputs, N=237

EPUB Kindle HTML5

Source: FrameMaker Survey to STC members (2012), N=237

>=5x

5x

3x


Need to engage

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User generated content (UGC) revolution is upon us..

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500 Million tweets per day; ~5.8K tweets /second

More than 30 billion pieces of content (photos, links, stories etc.) shared each month

4.2 Million articles to date

72 Hours of Video uploaded Every Minute

Source: Lit search • http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57541566-93/report-twitter-hits-half-a-billion-tweets-a-day/ • http://blog.kissmetrics.com/facebook-statistics/ • http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics • http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57541566-93/report-twitter-hits-half-a-billion-tweets-a-day/

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/facebook-statistics/

http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/


..which means that “Democratization” of Content Creation is happening

Image source: http://lunavega.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/social-media-sharing-infographics.jpg

http://lunavega.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/social-media-sharing-infographics.jpg


Organizations are using various mediums to engage the end user community

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Image source: http://www.innovation-series.com/2012/12/17/wikis-for-innovative-work/how-to-use-a-wiki-imagecreditseoclerks-com/ http://onlinetherapyinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Online-Therapy-Insittute.Online-Coach-Institute-Forums.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hsWThc1UE9o/TK7kodO8XcI/AAAAAAAAP1Y/hCOjfnJSAII/s1600/blog.jpg

http://lunavega.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/social-media-sharing-infographics.jpg

http://www.innovation-series.com/2012/12/17/wikis-for-innovative-work/how-to-use-a-wiki-imagecreditseoclerks-com/






















http://onlinetherapyinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Online-Therapy-Insittute.Online-Coach-Institute-Forums.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hsWThc1UE9o/TK7kodO8XcI/AAAAAAAAP1Y/hCOjfnJSAII/s1600/blog.jpg


We already see some organizations starting to use these tools to better engage with the user community

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• Comments/forms for user feedback

• Allowing external edits

• Linking to external blogs

• Twitter for release notes

• Twitter stream in documentation

• Author DITA content and publish to wiki

• Commenting and editing by end user

• Content curation by professional writers

Wiki style editing

Social network integration End user blog

Commenting/ discussions

A project management software company

A CAD software company


In Summary..

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Adobe Perspective: Key Elements of Tomorrow’s “Content Strategy”

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1

2

5

4

3


Adobe’s solution..

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© 2010 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential. 44

Adobe Technical Communication Suite 4


AUTHOR

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BE EFFICIENT


In FrameMaker11, we are providing a multi-view XML authoring environment to our users to meet their varying needs

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Output / WYSIWYG XML source

<topic>

<title>

<body>













</body>

</title>

</topic> • View and edit the

underlying XML source • Coloring and

indentation to support authoring in source view

• Current output view in FrameMaker

• Important for DTP, authors and a key strength of FrameMaker

Author

• Plain author view with no tags and minimal presentation of content (e.g. no pagination, format)

• Authors focus on the content and not on output

Multi-view FrameMaker editing environment


In addition, we have enhanced our XML/DITA support in FrameMaker11 with support for XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0

47 * Based on internal testing with various types of XML files and DITAmaps

Key capabilities

• Ability to write and run Xpath expressions. XPath 2.0 supported

• Query builder for writing complex queries, along with auto-suggest

• Set the scope i.e. current file/all files/folder/ditamap/book

• Comprehensive results pod for navigation and saving of results

• Access history of last 15 queries

• Run an XSL transformation within FrameMaker 11. XSLT 2.0 supported

• Define and store “transformations” for later use.

• Global and application specific transformations supported

• Set the scope i.e. current file/all open files/folder

• Ability to choose the XSLT processor by the user (in addition to XALAN

and SAXON)


On the DITA front, we have made several enhancements to enable easy professional publishing of DITA Maps

Enhanced options for publishing DITAMap

Automatically generate TOC, Index, List of Tables, LoF

Generate a flat/nested book/composite doc

Specify different templates for each level (Chapter,

Section, Sub-Section)

Option to set page numbering, chapter, section, sub-

section numbering and pagination

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DEMO


We have also made under the hood improvements to result in better performance when working with large XML files

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3.0

8.1

36.1

47.3

11.8

3.5

20.5

35.1

57.7

Content heavy

DITA Format

DITA Conref

DITA Xref

Dense element tag

FM10

FM11

398.8

XML Open Performance improvement 1,2

Avg. File Open time in 5 repetitions, in seconds Performance improvement Percent

97%

18%

-3%

60%

14%

Source: Internal testing with 5 different types of XML files 1) Files were opened and closed 5 times, and average open time was computed 2) Other apps running on the test system were Acrobat, MS Word and Browser


AUTHOR

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BE MORE PRODUCTIVE


Now you can get your unstructured content to DITA/other XML easily through the new “Smart Paste” feature

54

Topic

Title

p

Body

ol

li

li

image

tgroup

table

tbody

row


Be more productive when working with various objects in FM11

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Create and apply styles to objects i.e. graphic, anchored frames, text frames, graphic frames, equations, and text line

Object style designer and object catalog

Flag and remove overrides

Structured workflow support


Use your keyboard to smartly insert elements, attributed and even work with styles, conditional tags, variables etc

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• Inline catalogs

• Type ahead supported

• Insert single element or nested structure in one click

• Inline attribute editor

FM 8 behavior of cycling through the style list by

repeatedly pressing the first letter is supported in FM 11!


DEMO


Create your own FrameMaker 11 experience (really) !!

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FM11 has workspaces to enable easy loading of the

UI layout with desired pods/panels

FM11 comes with standard workspaces to suite different roles and

workflows. These can be further customized

Now in FM11, you can also customize your

menus that are available in a certain workspace. For example, you can

hide entire or sub menus in a workspace


COLLABORATE

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EFFECTIVELY COLLABORATE


FrameMaker11 provides out-of-the-box integration with several leading CMS

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+ any other “webdav” enabled CMS

Content creation collaboration at no extra cost

FrameMaker ships with native connectors to

Documentum and Sharepoint and also

integrates with several CMS which support

webdav

In FM11, we now support custom attributes with

Documentum and Sharepoint


In addition, we do provide integration with several of the leading CCMS in the XML and DITA space

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Leading XML/DITA CMS Integration with FM

xDocs

•We are working to add more names to this list

* Intgration needs to be certified with FM11, currently certified with FM10 **Integration is certified with FM9 only

**

*


TCS 4: Shared PDF Reviews in FrameMaker 11

Save as PDF for Review from FM 11

Refresh to see other Reviewer’s comments

Import PDF comments Into FM 11

Reviewers only need free PDF Reader

Adobe ID / Password


ENRICH

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EXCITE YOUR END USERS


Making 3D even more dynamic

68 • Image courtsey: PlusDF.de, http://openclipart.org

JavaScript

Create links to part, view and animations stored within the 3D

model

Automatically generate linked table of views/animation/components

Provide interactivity between 3D parts and the content

Associate and run JavaScript on the 3D model

http://openclipart.org/


We have taken our interactive support with rich media to the next level with our video enhancements

69

Set poster by

picking a frame from video

Create interactive links with popular

video formats (FLV & SWF)

Import MP4 videos

VIDEO


Now in FM11, you can define hotspots on images, vector illustration among others to provide more interactivity to end users

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HOTSPOTS

Hotspots

Aliquam quis ante est. Proin nec ligula sed lacus venenatis blandit sagittis bibendum orci. Donec malesuada mollis lorem. Emperor Penguin adults are about 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall and weigh 35 kg (75 lb) or more , eget dignissim lectus facilisis sed. Proin volutpat bibendum hendrerit. Vivamus nec ligula

• Define “hotspots” on images/graphic

objects with internal/external links

• All supported shapes (e.g. rectangle,

circle, triangle etc.) can be used

• PDF, web and many other outputs

through FMPS supported

• Easily manage through hotspots pod


DEMO


PUBLISH

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BE EVERYWHERE WITH YOUR CONTENT


Embracing the Multiscreen Revolution

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KINDLE BOOK

MOBILE APPS

NATIVE MOBILE

APPS


Seamless publishing from FrameMaker in 3 easy steps using TCS4

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1

2

3


FrameMaker Publishing Server 11 is a comprehensive publishing solution with multi device and batch publishing capabilities

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Web help

EPUB

Kindle

Adobe AIR

PDF

Eclipse Help

Java Help

Oracle Help

Single sourcing, multi device publishing Schedule and automate publishing

Microsoft HTML (.chm)

+ More…


DEMO


CURATE

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ENGAGE YOUR USER COMMUNITY


Making documentation social..


Learn more

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Learn!

Product Reviewer’s guide has complete information and more than 20 videos along with how-to tasks for all the new features

Watch new feature videos on our Tech Comm channels on YouTube and Adobe TV

Detailed Version comparison chart with previous versions

Extensive documentation available in both PDF and online form in User guide

Product datasheet

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Play!

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Thank you! .com/adobetcs

@KapilVermaAdobe

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#STC13: The Future of Tech Comm is Here. Are you ready for it?

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