I recieve inquires about how to move a workflow from unstructured content (be it MSWord or FrameMaker) to an XML one often. The process requires several steps, but once mastered you will be able to “Unleash The Protential Within Your Documentation”.

This is where FrameMaker becomes automagical.

It is very important that you follow the series start to finish. I will bring a sample document through the full process and create all necessary system files. I will provide all files created on my blog.

Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 1:

Creating A FrameMaker Conversion Table 

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=2243310&loc=en_us

Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 2:

Creating A FrameMaker Conversion Table

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=2243307&loc=en_us

Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 3:

Creating A FrameMaker Conversion Table

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=2243304&loc=en_us

Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 4:

Element Definition Document (EDD) – Home Grown or a Standard

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=2243301&loc=en_us

Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 5:

Creating your Structured Template from an Unstructured One

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=2243298&loc=en_us

Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 6:

Structure Applications and What Is Necessary and How To Create

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=2243295&loc=en_us

Unstructured To XML Workflow Series Part 7:

Save As XML, Now What?

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=2243292&loc=en_us

I will be taking you through all the steps and workflow requirements to move you from anUnstructured To an XML / FrameMaker 10 workflow. It is going to be an instructional series.

Spread the word!

SAN JOSE, CA and DENVER, CO  May 30, 2013 — Content Rules, Inc. and Acrolinx jointly announced today the expansion of their strategic partnership in North America. Based in Berlin, Germany, Acrolinx develops linguistic analytics software that helps companies optimize their content for consistency, clarity, translatability, and findability. Content Rules is a Silicon Valley-based content strategy and development consultancy. This strategic alliance will extend the portfolio of the enhanced services that Content Rules offers customers, while providing Acrolinx the capability to offer on-site deployment and support services for its software.

“Our customers are the real winners with this alliance,” said Val Swisher, Founder and CEO of Content Rules. “Acrolinx helps customers achieve the great trifecta:  better quality content that is less expensive to translate and easier to find.”

“We are committed to our core business of helping our customers optimize their content,” said Andrew Bredenkamp, Founder and President of Acrolinx. “What Content Rules brings to the table is the capability to support customers who want to gain competitive advantage by improving the consistency, clarity, and tone of their language.  We’ve had a longstanding, mutually beneficial relationship with Content Rules. This is the next step in formalizing our partnership to better serve our mutual customers and prospects.”

The ultimate goal of this partnership is to speed up the deployment and validation process for customers. Content Rules will provide value-added services to clients, including full pilot and implementation support. For customers who already have Acrolinx, Content Rules will keep their deployment in optimal shape by providing ongoing maintenance and support for terminology, rule configuration, intelligent reuse, and SEO.

Acrolinx recently introduced the Website Checker capability to their suite of content optimization software. The Website Checker helps customers scan and analyze their own and their competitors’ sites to discover keywords and opportunities for improvement. “We’re getting great feedback on this new feature from customers who are concerned about SEO,” said Swisher. “The industry recognizes Acrolinx as a leader in helping writers create better language. We depend on Acrolinx to help us show our customers how to stay on top in an increasingly competitive field,” she noted.

“This alliance is a great fit from a professional as well as a personal standpoint,” added Bredenkamp. “Our corporate cultures align nicely, and we look forward to working together on projects such as webinars and tradeshows to educate industry professionals about our solutions for more engaging content, less costly translations, and more useful search capabilities,” he added.

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About Content Rules
Based in Silicon Valley, Content Rules, Inc. provides consulting and professional services to assist companies with the entire content lifecycle. Client list ranges from new technology startups to Fortune 100 companies across the high-tech, life sciences, medical devices and manufacturing sectors. Content development services include technical documentation, marketing collateral, and training courseware. Its consulting practice specializes in content strategy, structured authoring, new content delivery technologies, and global readiness. Learn more athttp://www.contentrules.com.

Contact:
Alberto Cassola, SVP
Content Rules, Inc.
Phone: 408.395.8178 x 107
albertoc@contentrules.com

About Acrolinx
Acrolinx provides Content Optimization Software that enables companies such as Adobe, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Philips, and Siemens to make their content easier to comprehend, less expensive to translate, and easier to find. Built on a powerful linguistic analytics engine, Acrolinx helps you analyze and optimize the content you deliver to your customers. Learn more at http://www.acrolinx.com.

Contact:
PG Bartlett, SVP, Product Management
Acrolinx
Phone: 720.345.8157
pg.bartlett@acrolinx.com

Acrolinx helps your authors optimize your content and assess the results.

How Acrolinx® Works

The foundation of Acrolinx is a natural language processing (NLP) engine that helps authors create better content by checking it against corporate standards for terminology, spelling, grammar,  style, tone of voice, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

The following pages cover these major topics:

• Checking: The heart of Acrolinx is its capability to check and advise authors on their spelling, grammar, style, terminology and SEO. Acrolinx can also guide authors to reuse sentences that have already been translated instead of sending equivalent but slightly different sentences for translation.
• Authoring tool integration: This covers which authoring tools Acrolinx supports and illustrates the experience of using Acrolinx within those tools. You will also learn about the Desktop Checker, which lets you check content from any source; the Batch Checker, which lets you check many files at once; and the Software Development Kits (SDKs) that are available so you can build your own integrations with Acrolinx.
• Reporting & analytics: Learn about generating both standard and customized reports.
• Licensing: Describes all of the types of users that Acrolinx supports and how the software is licensed.
• System administration: Provides information on configuring and administering an Acrolinx system.
• Specifications: Lists support for languages, platforms and file formats.
• Implementation: Describes Acrolinx Professional Services’ standard “10-10-10” approach to implementing Acrolinx software.

The Technical Authoring market is starting to get real interesting lately. I have found a few authoring packages that focus on making it extremely easy for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to create core content to hand off to Technical Writers.

The one that stands out the best happens to be from a gentleman I met while over in Bangalore India. We were both attending the TCWorld India 2013 event. We were both presenters at the event to be more specific.

Alexander created a solution that reminded me of Captivate for rapidly creating task-based documentation. The product is called StepShot and it can be found at http:\\www.stepshot.net

http://www.stepshot.net

Basically Stepshot allows you to set a screen or region to capture screenshots and then builds DITA tasks or many other output formats from them. You can add titling and headings (context).

Very cool stuff. I highly recommend it. Acrolinx can work on all its output formats also!

Tom Aldous

Denver, Colorado – May 14, 2013 – Acrolinx announced today availability of its 3.1 release, which expands its support for SEO by analyzing websites for search engine optimization (SEO).

With the new Website Checker capability, Acrolinx customers can scan their own site and their competitors’ sites to discover their keywords and find opportunities for improvement. In combination with Acrolinx’s Batch Checker, this new capability gives Acrolinx customers a comprehensive view of their web content’s findability, readability, and correctness.

Acrolinx will demonstrate this new capability at its upcoming user conference, June 26-27, in San Jose, California. To register or for more information, go to http://www.acrolinx.com/newsreader-events/items/acrolinx-user-conference-2013.html.

Customers who are under current maintenance and have a license to Acrolinx’s SEO functionality can immediately download the 3.1 release.

About Acrolinx

Acrolinx provides Content Optimization Software that enables companies such as Adobe, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Philips, and Siemens to make their content easier to comprehend, cheaper to translate, and easier to find. Built on a powerful linguistic analytics engine, Acrolinx helps you analyze and optimize the content you deliver to your customers. Learn more at www.acrolinx.com.

Conference: June 26-27, San Jose, CA

Webinar
22 May 2013 | 12pm ET (18pm CET)

Conference: Apr. 15-17, 2013, Providence

2013 CMS/DITA North America