Tom Smith's Blog

We're delighted to announce that we have released the latest version of SDL Xopus 4.3. Our mission is to change the way organizations work with structured content, such as XML and DITA, by continuously simplifying the experience of creating, reviewing and contributing to this content. This latest release is another step towards that mission.

The growing community of SDL Xopus users worldwide can now benefit from the following:

• Support for Google Chrome

Now that Google Chrome is the second most popular browser with an approximate 28% global market share and is continuing to grow both as a consumer browser and within the enterprise, this is a signicant milestone for SDL Xopus and allows us to satisfy the growing demand for online XML editors worldwide.

• New UI and branding

We have designed a new look and feel for the user interface for SDL Xopus, which follows a fresher look and uses a 'carbon' theme. This look and feel now aligns with the SDL Structured Content Technologies suite of products as well as the wider portfolio of SDL technologies. For users who prefer the previous user interface, you can switch back to it. We have also made various improvements to the user experience by moving some of the menu items into more logical locations within the user interface.

• Copy and Paste improvements

The ability to copy and paste content into SDL Xopus from external sources, such as Microsoft Word or HTML content, is a major benefit of SDL Xopus as organizations look to move their content into a structured format and to merge content from different silos within the organization. We have made improvements to how copying and pasting behaves consistently across the multiple browsers we support, as well as improving the way that structured content is pasted into SDL Xopus.

• User experience improvements

We continue to look for ways to improve user experience. In this particular release, our context menu has been changed to include the insert and delete options and we have improve the layout of some of the interface options as a result of customer feedback.

• Performance improvements

As the leading browser-based XML editor, SDL Xopus must continue to improve its speed and capability to support the tens of thousands of users it has worldwide. With every release, we look to improve performance and this release is no exception.

Those are the highlights, there are many other improvements we've made, which you can find here. There's also a demo available of SDL Xopus 4.3.

You can also learn more about SDL Xopus and how it fits within the Product Content Maturity Model in this webinar coming up.

We hope you enjoy working with SDL Xopus!

I'm sure that most technical communicators today would list 'working with subject matter experts' among their top 5 biggest gripes about getting their job done. With departmental silos and colleagues that are 'just too busy' to bother reviewing or contributing to documentation, technical communicators find themselves fighting a battle for people's attention and struggling to convince the SMEs that their input is invaluable to supporting the customer. But that's only half the story. 

Last week, we announced the latest version of SDL Global AMS, with exciting updates for organizations that are looking to optimize their content for translation and improve consistency of the information they publish to customers.

Organizations creating structured content in JustSystems' XMetaL and PTC Arbortext Editor can now use the AutoSuggest feature in SDL Global AMS to ramp up the productivity of creating good quality, consistent content that is optimized for translation.

Today, with the help of our friend Sam, we want to tell the story of how organizations, and people like Sam, can transform their technical documentation 'towns' into engagement 'cities' that put customer experience at the heart of creating, managing and publishing technical information.

We're introducing the Product Content Maturity Model, explained simply by the video below staring our tech doc champion, Sam. 

Now there's a decent rhyming title for a blog post!

My esteemed colleague AJ Thomas wrote last week about DITA 'coming of age' as the theme for the 4th DITA Fest event coming up next month. As part of the discussions around this theme, we want to open up the conversations about DITA directly with you on Twitter.

So, we've decided to launch a contest to get the conversation going! And there's a delicious prize for the winner.

We invite you to post creative, inventive, humourous tweets (think of it as a bite-sized 140 character DITA topic if you will) that describes your thoughts about DITA, your experiences with it, why you like it, why you love it, or your advice for your peers. The geekier, the better!

All you need to do is to include the hashtag #DITAFest in your tweet and we will select our favourite tweet to win a prize our contest during the DITA Fest event on October 25. And you don't even have to attend the event to win.

We'll be tweeting and live blogging from the event so that those of you who can't even make it will be able to hear what's going on and join in the conversation. Just use and follow the #DITAFest hashtag and follow @SDL_SCT, @ScottAbel or myself @thomas_smithy for live updates from the event.

Happy tweeting!

Care to 'Tame the Tiger'? Keen to watch 'The Good, the Bad and DITA'? Want to learn about 'Responsive Communication' and its impact on global business from a professor of International Business? These are just a few things you can do at our Structured Content Summit in Brussels next week.

There's still time for you to join us (for free), so just fill in the form here and you're invited. Here's more detail about what you can expect:

Indi Liepa from Nokia will be talking about 'The Good, The Bad and DITA' at Nokia, focusing on how their complex and technical content is single-sourced and reused in DITA as well as being localized into 90+ languages, all to help achieve a strategy of reaching 'the next billion' mobile phone users across the globe. If your organization uses DITA and translates content or is planning on this approach to global content efficiency, then this is a great session to learn the best practices and the pitfalls to avoid.

All the way from the San Francisco, Pia Chamberlain from NetApp (another global organization that is working successfully in DITA) will be talking about 'Taming the Tiger' and managing multiple publications in a fast-paced world. This is a must-see if you are tackling the challenge of 'more content, more publishing, less time'.

We'll also have the professor's view on global business, with Dr Dennis De from the School of International Business at Reutlingen University presenting his research on 'Responsive Communication and What It Means for the Future of Global Business'. It will be a fascinating academic insight into one of the major challenges we face today - how to do business globally while engaging with customers locally.

We'd love to see you in Brussels next week!

On behalf of the team here at SDL Structured Content Technologies, we're delighted to announce that we'll be holding our annual Structured Content Summit in Brussels this year on 18th May at the Sheraton Airport Hotel. With the theme of 'global customer engagement', a cast of prestigious presenters from Nokia, NetApp and LetterPart and more, as well as a showcase of the technologies and strategies that help you bring technical information to life for your global customers, it's certain to be a great event for you and your colleagues to learn, network with peers and have the chance to ask the SDL experts any question that you like. You'll also get to see the latest versions and prototypes of our technology portfolio of SDL Xopus, SDL Global Authoring Management System, SDL Trisoft, SDL Contenta, SDL XPP and SDL LiveContent.

You can sign up for the event here, it's free and there are cocktails! What more could you want?

Continuing with the theme of events coming up this summer in Europe, we will also be attending the Congility conference, organized by the wonderful guys at Mekon. Yours truly will be presenting along with Indi Liepa from Nokia, so we hope to see you there if you can make it to Gatwick. We will also be at the NLDITA conference presenting the vision and the technologies that we think are going to change the way we create, manage, share and publish information across the globe.

We hope that you can join us for one of these events this summer around Europe!

Nowadays, conversation doesn't really mean what it used to mean. A natter, chat, banter, convo, chinwig, debate, repartee. This was something done via 'the old dog and bone', or via that lost art of having a face to face conversation. Now, apparently, 'conversation' encapsulates digital interactions.

Somehow an underlying theme of this year's TCUK conference in Oxford emerged unintentionally. Everyone was talking about 'Content Strategy'. It raised the bar in terms of the quality of presentations, discussions and ideas that emerged from the conference. It was a far cry from 'This is how to create a DITA map in XMetaL Author Enterprise' and more about 'What business benefits does my company and my customers get from structured content? And how do I convince management to invest in my content strategy?'. For those attending the conference who really want to affect change in their organisation with regards to technical content, they most definitely departed armed with ideas and initiatives they could get to work on.

I've been a little late to the party on this one, but I've been paying close attention to the recent furore surrounding Google's new as-you-type search results technology. It raised the whole discussion among the online marketing gliterati of how SEO would be transformed, with many suggesting that companies would now bid on single letter search terms. An interesting concept which could make not only a single word, but also an individual letter a valuable commodity. After typing in our own company name, 'SDL', to test out how Google Instant works, I wondered what this would mean for the humble acronym? IMHO acronyms could now play a more important role in online content.