Message from Sponsors -- June 3, 2011

by Tom Johnson on Jun 3, 2011
categories: advertiser messages

Each month I allow my blog's sponsors to include a brief message. This month I asked them to write about the biggest problem their company's product solves.

Scriptorium Publishing

We help companies with large amounts of technical content streamline their publishing processes, which results in cost reduction and quality improvements.

If you are responsible for technical content, you face a bewildering array of possibilities—XML-based authoring, traditional help authoring tools, wikis, customer-generated content, and much more. In a content strategy analysis, we review your existing content lifecycle, identify requirements, and then recommend a solution that fits your organizational constraints.

Contact us today to discuss how we can transform your content. www.scriptorium.com or [email protected].

MindTouch Wants to Help You Deliver an Exceptional Experience

MindTouch makes the world's most respected social knowledge base. We power purpose-built help 2.0 communities that connect companies with their customers. Millions use our software every day.

MindTouch Helps Solve Some of Businesses' Biggest Problems:

1. Increase leads generated. MindTouch customers report a 10% increase in leads generated from their MindTouch powered documentation.
2. Improved usability. Documentation is a critical step in your prospect's due diligence. The improved navigation, search and quality of content delivered by MindTouch converts more of these prospects to customers.
3. Lower support costs. Average cost of a support phone call — $155. Average cost of customer finding their solution via your MindTouch TCS documentation — $0.05. You do the math.
4. Team collaboration. Easily collaborate with contributors within and beyond the corporate firewall, because it takes a team to create the best documentation.

If you're ready to start providing your users with an exceptional experience in product help, click the link below and start your free trial today.

>> Start Your Free Trial Now.

Dr.Explain provides easy and cost-effective tools for creating software documentation on time in multiple formats

Dr.Explain cuts cost of creating help files, user guides, on-line manuals, and documentation for software applications. The combination of simplicity and flexibility allows thousands of people around the world to create professional help systems from scratch with limited or even zero experience in technical writing. Dr.Explain has the shortest learning curve — import your old documentation or create a new project with a single click and get to actual work immediately.

The unique built-in technology makes it possible to create documentation for application windows and screens almost automatically. Dr.Explain produces documentation in the HTML (on-line manuals), CHM (MS Windows® help files), RTF, and PDF formats from a single source.
The user interface is available in many languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, & Swedish.

Install the term-less trial copy from www.drexplain.com and discover that help authoring is not a magic anymore.

MadCap Software's MadPak ML Helps Companies Publish Content to Multiple Channels in Multiple Languages

Using MadCap's integrated technical communications and translation product suite — MadPak ML — authors can create content utilizing single-source functionality in Flare to publish directly to multiple outputs, including print, WebHelp, WebHelp for the iPad, mobile devices, and much more. You no longer need more than one tool for print and online documentation. Single-sourcing in Flare allows documentation teams to save time and resources, such as being able to create custom content quickly and easily. “Custom content is no longer burdensome, and when we edit a PDF, that edit is reflected in the WebHelp. That's a wonderful change from our old manual process,” said one customer. Updating content is also easier. “It's incredible how much faster it is to produce and update documentation using conditional text and snippets in Flare—and so much easier to ensure that this content is accurate and consistent.”

With Flare's native mobile output, content is frameless making it easily searchable using any popular search engine. Mobile content published using Flare is also device-agnostic, allowing end-users to view content on any device, including Android phones, iPhones and the iPad. “From using Web analytics, we discovered that many of our customers access our online product and support pages by doing a Google search,” explained a customer. “We took advantage of Flare's frameless mobile output and adapted it for our core WebHelp, which now can be easily searched from within Flare or using any popular search engine.”

Included in the suite is MadCap Lingo, a stand-along translation environment tool (TEnT) that can be used to translate content to any number of languages. The tight integration with MadCap Flare makes the translation process easier and more efficient. “In the past, we had different files for each language, which were difficult to maintain,” one customer recalls. “With MadCap Lingo and Flare, we only have to maintain one central project. It's a much better process.”

MadPak ML also includes MadCap Contributor for SME contribution and review, which makes it easy for anyone in your organization to edit and review topics, make annotations, and update content with a simple, easy-to-use interface. For more information on MadCap Software, click here.

Adobe

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information. Adobe's innovative solutions for technical communicators are market-leading best-of-breed software, and include:

• Adobe FrameMaker 10: The industry-leading template-based authoring and publishing solution for unstructured, structured, and XML/DITA/S1000D content. Easily author and aggregate content with an enhanced user interface and standards-compliant tools and templates, and quickly collaborate and review with out-of-the-box content management system (CMS) integration. Try now.
• Adobe RoboHelp 9: An easy-to-use solution for technical communicators to author, collaborate, personalize, and optimize content for help systems, policies and procedures, and professional knowledgebases for multichannel, multidevice publishing. Save time with collaborative reviews, reusable assets, and dynamic user-centric content. Boost participation with user-generated content and moderated or stored commenting. Try now.
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite 3: A complete and integrated solution for authoring, reviewing, managing, and publishing rich, engaging technical information and training content across multiple channels and devices from a single source. Develop standards-compliant content (XML/DITA/S1000D) with Adobe FrameMaker® 10 software, publish in various formats with Adobe RoboHelp® 9 software and Adobe Captivate® 5 workflows, collaborate with reviewable PDF files using Adobe Acrobat® X Pro, incorporate images using Adobe Photoshop® CS5 software, and add demos and simulations using Adobe Captivate 5. Publish to XML, HTML, AdobeAIR®, print, PDF, as well as a variety of mobile devices. Test-drive now.