Presented by Catherine Long & Rich Perry | Varian Medical Systems

Wednesday, July 13, 2016
9am PDT | 12noon EDT | 5pm BST

You decide to move to publishing with DITA XML. It all appears wonderful. You purchase a CMS, select an editor, create your information model, and share the plan with your authors. This is great! You begin to analyze documents, get a style sheet designed, prepare and schedule author training, but then problems and issues of resistance start adding up. There are so many different document types (60) and so many global authors (100) who are not tech writers. You begin to realize that unless the company can stop needing to provide service and installation for 3 to 6 months, you are not going to be able to flip the switch and move to DITA all at once.

What can you do?
Make the move at your own pace, and publish documents with Word and DITA simultaneously. Doing so provides many benefits, such as bringing the different document types into the project a few at a time and training authors with their own content already in the system.

Join us for this Stilo DITA Knowledge Series webinar as Catherine Long and Rich Perry show you how this dual publishing helps you move through the process of moving to DITA so that the experience is easier, and perhaps cheaper, for everyone involved.

Register here

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MEET THE PRESENTERS

Catherine Long
Catherine Long has been with Varian Medical Systems for five years.  She was brought in to assist the service documentation department with authoring standards and the publishing process, as well as to lead the move to DITA XML.  Her challenge is to design a system architecture and provide training for 100 SMEs who write documents as one part of their busy schedules.  Her relaxation is to immerse herself in the worlds of Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Wilde, and others.

Rich Perry
Rich Perry manages a publication team responsible for processing technical servicing content at Varian Medical Systems. Over the course of his career work life, he has held various technical positions supporting military and medical devices. These experiences as an end-user of servicing procedures lit a fire in him that led to his avocation as a technical trainer, curriculum developer, and product support specialist.

Rich’s team is in the process of transitioning from an unstructured Word authoring environment to DITA. While he and his team have not fully implemented DITA, Rich is ready to share his experiences as the struggle continues!