Adobe Events

When we started our well-intentioned move from providing users with paper-based documentation to providing them with electronic access to technical support content, we used the web as just another channel: Help 1.0. We populated websites with digital copies of printed documentation—downloadable, keyword-searchable PDF files. And, we repurposed content from printed manuals, pushing it to other digital formats (e.g., online help, CD, DVD). While these were all steps in the right direction, and at the time, the best methods for helping customers find information they need, they are no longer acceptable support solutions.

During this Adobe eSeminar, TCS Evangelist Thomas Aldous will interview content strategist Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, about Help 2.0. You'll learn how letting go of old school, preconceived notions about technical support have helped some of the world's biggest brands create engaging customer experiences. You'll find out how leveraging the knowledge of the crowd is helping users find the right information quickly and easily, regardless of who created the content. And, perhaps most importantly, you'll discover how adopting a Help 2.0 approach helps these organizations increase sales, reduce customer frustration and build meaningful customer relationships.

About Scott Abel

Scott Abel, aka The Content Wrangler, is an internationally-recognized content management strategist and social networking choreographer whose strengths lie in helping global organizations improve the way they author, maintain, and deliver information.

In addition to his popular business blog, TheContentWrangler.com, an online resource for content professionals with an interest in content management, content standards and content technologies, Scott maintains several online communities on Facebook and Linkedin, and is a popular and influential technology blogger on Twitter. He also manages the social networking activities for several software and services firms in the high technology and digital mobile publishing arenas.

The best in technical communication is here! With the all-new Adobe Technical Communication Suite 3.5, now you can author, enrich, review, publish and repurpose your technical content with a single integrated toolkit comprising of five powerful software.

Join Tom Aldous, Adobe Technical Communication Evangelist, for an interactive eSeminar, to find out how you can:

• Expand your outreach by delivering content to multiple channels and devices: Publish content in print or as WebHelp, XML, HTML, or PDF files. Deliver it to smartphones, eBook readers, and tablets (via the EPUB route) with the versatile, single-click publishing capabilities of Adobe RoboHelp® 9.
• Minimize localization time and costs: Smoothly repurpose content with the single-sourcing capabilities of Adobe FrameMaker® 10, as well as tight integration between FrameMaker and RoboHelp and leading content management systems like Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum, SDL Trisoft, Vasont Systems, and others.
• Accelerate time to market: Use roundtrip review workflows, commenting-enabled PDF files, and the aggregation capabilities of free Adobe Reader® and Acrobat.com to collaborate more efficiently with peers, SMEs, and others in today’s multiauthor environments.
• Deliver rich, interactive content to engage the audience: Include interactive videos, animations, graphics, quizzes, simulations, and show-me demos with the enhanced multimedia capabilities of Adobe Captivate® 5.5 (including new out-of the-box quiz templates, single-click publishing to YouTube, publishing in MP4 format for high-quality video streaming/podcasts/video tutorials),  Adobe RoboScreenCapture®, Adobe Photoshop® CS5, and Adobe Illustrator® CS5*.
 

*Adobe Illustrator CS5 is not part of Adobe Technical Communication Suite 3.5 and must be purchased separately.

Join Dr. Allen Partridge for an introductory session demonstrating the fundamental components of Adobe Captivate, and explaining how to use these tools to create eLearning modules. This session is intended for beginners who have already seen Part 1 in this series, and it will gently guide you to a stronger understanding of how to use Adobe Captivate to create slightly more complex eLearning content.

If you understand the basics of application development but are new to ColdFusion, this session is for you:  in this session, you'll learn how ColdFusion Builder 2 allows you to create ColdFusion 9 web applications ridiculously easily and how, in conjunction with Flash Builder 4.5, you can easily take your Rich Internet Application development to the next level.

Award-winning instructional designer, Cathy Moore will sit down with Adobe eLearning Evangelist Dr. Allen Partridge on Tuesday, September 7th at 8AM US Pacific (11 AM US Eastern, 4PM London) for an Internet broadcast discussion on Creating Effective & Engaging eLearning. Cathy is an extraordinary force in the eLearning community who's dedicated to saving the world from boring eLearning. She's the creator Action Mapping, a visual system for designing lively instructional materials that support business strategy. Cathy designs eLearning for Fortune Global 500 organizations, helps clients improve their own design skills, and presents at international conferences.

Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh and Vish to learn how to use project templates and master slides to give a consistent look and feel to your projects and templatize the slides you frequently use in Adobe Captivate 5.5 courses.

What’s in it for you?

After attending the session, you will be able to:

• View master slide
• Add a master slide
• Add objects to master slides
• Edit master slides
• Reuse master slides
• Create project templates
• Create projects from project templates
• Add master slide in project template
 

This session will help you learn how ColdFusion's built-in Solr support makes it easy to add powerful, intelligent search to your web sites. No previous experience required but familiarity with ColdFusion and databases is recommended.

Join us for an engaging and interactive eSeminar (the seventh in a series of seven), where we will take you through the steps required to move your Unstructured Content to an XML Workflow using Adobe FrameMaker 10 as your Authoring and Publishing Tool.

In this seventh eSeminar of the series –Now that we have converted your content to DITA XML from Unstructured, what can we do with it? In this eSeminar Tom Aldous, Adobe Technical Communication Evangelist, will demonstrate to you how Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe Technical Communication Suite are the lowest cost of ownership solutions for your DITA XML workflow.

Join Dr. Allen Partridge for part 2 of an advanced tutorial on creating soft skills simulations with Adobe Captivate. This session is recommended for intermediate and advanced users and assumes fundamental awareness of Adobe Captivate. Dr. Partridge will demonstrate and break-down the elements commonly used in creating soft skills simulations. This will be a technically oriented session focused on advanced actions and creating the logical decision trees and complementary functions to make advanced branching dependent projects really sing.

Learn how to easily generate office documents for reporting, decision making, and presentations. Read, create, and update spreadsheets using the new CFSPREADSHEET tag. Programmatically generate PDF files from Microsoft PowerPoint and Word files. Dynamically produce presentations in HTML or SWF from PowerPoint presentations directly on the server.

Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh and Vish for a hands-on session on how to add standard and interactive objects in Adobe Captivate 5.5. They will also discuss the best practices of using these objects in Adobe Captivate 5.5.

• After attending this session, you will be able to add:
• Text captions and rollover captions
• Images and rollover images
• Animations and animated text
• Click boxes and text entry boxes
• Buttons
• Mouse pointers
• Zoom areas
• Rollover slidelets
• Highlight boxes
 

Interactive PDFs are all the rage these days.

Join Tom Aldous, Adobe Technical Communication Product Evangelist, and Kevin Siegel, Adobe Partner and founder/president of IconLogic, Inc., for this interactive and engaging eSeminar and learn how to create highly interactive eLearning videos using Adobe Captivate. Discover the ideal setting for integrating the eLearning videos with Adobe FrameMaker. Finally, learn how to create conditions in Adobe FrameMaker, that will allow you to produce two distinct versions of a document: one for print (that would not include the eLearning videos) and one for PDF distribution (that would include the eLearning videos).

True single-sourcing with just a few clicks of your mouse using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite!

About Kevin Siegel, IconLogic, Inc.

Kevin Siegel is the founder and president of IconLogic, Inc. He has written more than 100 step-by-step computer training books, including Essentials of Adobe Captivate 5, Adobe Captivate 5: Beyond the Essentials, Essentials of Adobe Captivate 4, Adobe Captivate 4: Beyond the Essentials, Essentials of Adobe Captivate 3, Essentials of Adobe Captivate 2, Essentials of Macromedia Captivate, Essentials of RoboDemo 5, Essentials of Adobe RoboHelp 9, Essentials of Adobe RoboHelp 8, Essentials of Adobe RoboHelp 7, Essentials of Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, QuarkXPress 8: The Basics, Essentials of Adobe InDesign CS3.

Adobe RoboHelp is a powerful, versatile tool that’s often used to create large, complex online Help and documentation projects. Yet tools like RoboHelp also make it easy to simply start a project without any front-end planning – with a philosophy of “we don’t have time to define the project up-front; we’ll work out the details once the project gets rolling…. “But working like this – defining the project’s specifications and settings during development and under a tight schedule and full to-do list – can spell trouble. It’s hard to remember when to use certain styles or conditional build tags, and just hard to stay controlled and consistent.

We can avoid most of these problems by defining as many settings as possible when the project starts, while we have time to think. And it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort, often just a day or two to define a small number of crucial control files and settings.

Join Tom Aldous, Adobe Technical Communication Evangelist, and Neil Perlin, an Adobe Partner and an internationally acclaimed Subject Matter Expert in online help and documentation, for an interactive eSeminar that looks at these files and settings, with a focus on topic templates, CSSs, table styles, skins, Resource Manager, and a written project description and quick-reference. You’ll see how, with just a day or two of planning, you’ll wind up with greater consistency and maintainability within and across your projects.

About Neil Perlin

Neil Perlin is an internationally known consultant, strategist, trainer, and developer for online help and documentation.

Join RJ Jacquez, Adobe Senior Product Evangelist, for a session on how to take audio editing beyond the features in Adobe Captivate using Adobe Audition. In this session you will learn best practices for moving your audio between Captivate and Audition, as well as tips for adding background audio that you can control with precision and more.

Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh for a hands-on session on using audio in Adobe Captivate. They will take you through different options to add, edit, and record audio to either slides or to the entire project. They will also show you how to add Text to Speech voices.

What’s in it for you?

After attending this session, you will be able to:

• Add audio to slides
• Distribute audio across slides
• Edit slide/slides audio
• Add Text to speech voices

Adobe FrameMaker 10 provides top quality S1000D compliance. Join Tom Aldous, Adobe Technical Communication Evangelist, and Ian Proudfoot, an Adobe Partner, for an interactive eSeminar where they explain why S1000D is now an unavoidable fact of life for many in the Aerospace and Defence sectors.

S1000D formalises many of the processes that have always been a part of the technical documentation lifecycle. Ian introduces each of the major building blocks of S1000D and demonstrates how FrameMaker 10 provides its innovative support.

Ian Proudfoot is an Adobe Community Champion,  the owner-operator of FrameMaker and XML consultancy iTP-X (www.itp-x.co.uk) and a member of the S1000D Electronic Publications Working Group. Ian has been in the aerospace technical publications business for over 30 years. He developed the first commercial S1000D publishing package in 1995.

Join Dr. Allen Partridge for part 3 of an advanced tutorial on creating soft skills simulations with Adobe Captivate. This session is recommended for intermediate and advanced users and assumes fundamental awareness of Adobe Captivate. Dr. Partridge will demonstrate and break-down the elements commonly used in creating soft skills simulations. This will be a technically oriented session focused on advanced actions and creating the logical decision trees and complementary functions to make advanced branching dependent projects really sing.

Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh and Vish for an exciting session on Photoshop roundtripping. Learn how to instantly update Adobe Photoshop files imported in Adobe Captivate projects, invoke Adobe Photoshop from within Adobe Captivate and keep the linked files in sync using a single click.

What’s in it for you?

After attending this session, you will be able to:

• Import Photoshop files
• Manage layers and layer comps
• Edit Photoshop files from within Captivate
• Update and relink Photoshop files

You can use Adobe FrameMaker in either of two modes: Unstructured or Structured. Both modes provide rich capabilities for technical communicators. Both provide template-based authoring and publishing. But how do they differ? What are the benefits of each mode? And which should you choose based on your documentation objectives?

Unstructured FrameMaker provides automated formatting through paragraph and character formats. Structured FrameMaker supports elements, attributes, hierarchical document structures, and what Adobe calls ‘guided editing’. If you need to work with XML, you will almost certainly want to use FrameMaker in the Structured mode.

Join Tom Aldous (Adobe Technical Communication Evangelist) and Alan Houser (Adobe Partner and a distinguished consultant and trainer in the technical communication space) for an interactive eSeminar, where we will consider the strengths of Unstructured and Structured FrameMaker. We will help you to decide which is more appropriate for your particular business and customer requirements.

About Alan Houser

Alan Houser is an Adobe Partner and a distinguished consultant and trainer in the fields of XML, XML technologies, publishing workflows, and authoring and publishing tools. Alan is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication, a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, and a popular presenter at technical communication conferences. He is currently serving as Vice President of the Society for Technical Communication, 2011-2012. Read more about Alan at Group Wellesley, Inc.

Join RJ Jacquez, Adobe Senior Product Evangelist, for a fun session on Flash, specifically designed for new users who are already familiar with Adobe Captivate. In this session, you will learn how to get started with Flash and how to create animation you can use in your Adobe Captivate eLearning projects.