MadWorld 2013 conference review – Day 1

MadCap Software hosted their first ever conference, MadWorld 2013, last week, which I attended as an invited speaker. Here are my initial thoughts and reflections on the first day of the event.

MadWorld conference

It was a really well organised event

There’s an awful lot of preparation, effort and planning that goes into a successful conference, and MadCap did an incredible job, considering this was their first ever conference. They fixed any issues quickly, and they managed to get the mix right between fun, networking and education. They have given themselves a real challenge for next year in meeting the expectations set as result of this year’s event.

The event started at 8.30 on Monday morning, with comedian Wayne Cotter as the keynote speaker. Wayne has a Jay Leno style of comedy, and he managed to create an act that related to technical communication.

There were very good speakers

There were four parallel sessions, and I had a first session slot after Wayne, where I spoke about tablets. I had been quite nervous prior to the conference, but I had needn’t have been. The audience was very much the same as you’d see at other technical communications conferences.

The first session I saw was “Going Mobile? – How to Optimize Content and Select a Format” by MadCap’s Mike Hamilton. Mike’s presentation complemented my presentation on tablets, and Mike presented an honest description of what’s possible with mobile content today. By honest, I mean he had the confidence to talk about both the strengths and weaknesses of mobile content. For example, Mike demonstrated some of the limitations with using wide tables and images in the EPUB format, together with some workarounds.

Scott DeLoach spoke in the next session on “How to Not Let Team Authoring Drive You Crazy”. Scott recommends creating a global project, stripped of any “clutter”, from which you create new project files. He outlined the different options for source control with SVN and Git, and he had a number of useful tips for using the auto-suggest features in MadCap Flare to help writers apply variables and snippets. He also looked at how to deal with contributions from others and showed how this was much easier to manage if you are using MadCap Contributor.

After lunch, Sarah O’Keefe spoke on “Aligning Technical Communication with Business Goals”. Sarah suggested we grit our teeth and use the language of business strategy (“the language of the MBAs”) to explain the value of efficient content management systems. She highlighted how it can help the organisation meet its legal and compliance obligations, and how it can help significantly reduce localisation and support costs:

  • 50% of localisation costs can be tied up in DTP/formatting costs, so significant savings can be made by using templates.
  • Between 6-20% of an organisation’s revenue (and $6-$36 per transaction) is typically spent of support costs, so User Assistance that reduces the number of support calls can result in significant savings. (Source: Softletter and the Association of Support Professionals)

Ravelry logoThe presentation then took an unexpected and interesting turn, when a question from the audience led Sarah to talk about ravelry.com. Ravelry is a popular social networking site, with over 3 million users, for people who like to knit. Sarah demonstrated its sophisticated faceted navigation and search capabilities, and she described how a great deal of the creative input, design and modifications to the site are done by a large percentage of the users.

In the final session, Sharon Burton provided a live demonstration of the MadCap Contributor workflow. Contributor can be used to easily send topics or collections of topics to reviewers and experts outside of the core authoring team – they don’t need to use Flare, and they don’t need to use Microsoft Word. Sharon is an expert trainer, and her presentation built on the topics covered by Scott DeLoach.

Running at the same time was a session called “Flare Wish List and Kvetch”. Delegates were encouraged to bring their wish list and complaints. I doubt there are many software vendors that would have the courage to run a session like this.

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