This month Noz Urbina reflects on choosing a CMS.

Find out more about a major client choosing a CMS. In this particular choice, it’s a multi-year, multi-million dollar choice. If all goes well, it will eventually be a system that touches from at least 1000, to many thousands of staff. Their demanding business context has quickly filtered the market from literally thousands to only a handful of systems. We’re now down to two major vendors. The first of these vendors is demonstrating their extremely powerful system.

However there is a problem.... find out more.

Strategies for Reaching Customers Anywhere, Anytime on Any Device

Held annually each winter, Intelligent Content 2012 is an intimate, three-day intensive learning experience designed to help attendees understand what is required to create intelligent content; content designed to be structurally rich and semantically categorized, automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable to any future functionality.

The conference starts with a full day of hands-on workshops taught by some of the industry’s best and brightest practitioners — folks who are down-in-the-trenches helping organizations do the work required to succeed in a global mobile world. The following two days are filled with presentations, case studies, and discussions designed to provide you with the knowledge you need to add intelligence to your content and streamline the way you create, manage and deliver it.

Whether you are struggling with traditional multi-channel publishing challenges, attempting to make your content findable to a worldwide, multi-lingual audience, trying to develop content-driven “apps” for smartphone users, or needing to create enhanced, interactive eBooks for iPads, eReaders, and other mobile devices, Intelligent Content is the conference for you!

Intelligent Content 2012 brings together a dynamic group of speakers to share their insights, case studies and solid suggestions for success.  Speakers include Mekon's Mark Poston who will be presenting Delivering Dynamic Content Solutions Using DITA on 23 February. Mark will be available throughout the event with Julian Murfitt at the Mekon stand

Publishing Expo is the UK’s only multi-platform publishing show dedicated to shaping the future of publishing. It is here that you will discover where the future of publishing is heading, and find the tools, techniques and knowledge to ensure your business remains at the forefront of this change.

Once again, the Publishing Expo team have asked Mekon to organise a programme of educational presentations in the Content Agility Theatre at Publishing Expo 2012. There is a growing demand for publishers of all kinds to support many new channels of delivery such as eBooks, Mobile devices and still more on the web. To this end we want to bring a program of short presentations that explain how new concepts, best practice and technologies are influencing publishers today and how can we learn from this to help our future content strategy to deliver more efficient workflows and new dynamic products. General thymes will include Best practice, Strategy, CCMS, Case Studies showing ROI.

The Content Agility Theatre will be an ideal opportunity for people and organisations that are leading the way in how we generate, consume and make sense of information to share their knowledge and expertise in the ever changing and evolving publishing world.

We want to hear from people and organisations that are using knowledge, information and technology in new and interesting ways. Presentations should be educational, conceptual or "thought-leading" oriented presentations, i.e., not a commercial sales pitch.

Submissions must be sent to . Please submit your initial interest and potential presentation title ASAP with your short description by
9 January 2012.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Publishing Expo 2012 – CA Theatre Featured speakers:

• Rahel Anne Bailie, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Intentional Design, will discuss making e-Pubs relevant to the audience as well as the business.
• Noz Urbina, Senior Consultant and Content Strategist, Mekon Ltd., will discuss updating your content strategy for a community-driven world.
• Brett Freeman, Content Publishing Specialist, Aptara, will address publishing content to digital platforms.
• Anne Caborn, Co-founder and Content Development Specialist, CDA, will take you through governing digital content to achieve agility while avoiding risk.

DITA 1.2 Mini Webinar Series.

December saw Noz Urbina join the DCL learning series for a three part mini series. If you were unable to join Noz in December, the three webinar recordings are now available online.

• Part 1 - "Keys and Conkeys"
  Learn to create keys and key references; combine keys with conditions for easier manageability; and use conkey references instead of conref to simplify reuse and management of content.
  View Now on congility.com


• Part 2 - "New Conref Features and Subject Scheme"
  Learn how to control metadata for various scopes; make quick, manageable, fine-grain changes to standard content with Conref Push; and learn to make use of DITA 1.2's new features for even simpler reuse and scaling.
  View Now on congility.com


• Part 3 - "Learning, Training, and the Rest"
  Learn how you can construct Learning and Training content from DITA for interactive learning and assessment delivery; how DITA supports delivering Learning Management Systems and SCORM packages; and what else DITA 1.2 has to offer, and where you can learn more.
  View Now on congility.com

This latest release includes the normal enhancements and fixes that have been identified since the last version.

Summary of enhancements:

• New Feature - Data Reference Manager (DRM). The Data Reference Manager (DRM) will help users with:insertion of references to other data modules, illustrations, references to technical publications and insertion of supplies, spares and support Equipment. Find out more.
• Updating of Reference Table - All S1000D Data Modules are provided with a references table which needs to contain all the References to other Data Modules and/or Technical Publications. An additional feature provided in this release is the ability to automatically update this table with newly inserted references. This updating can be triggered either manually, via a menu option, or automatically when carrying out a Final Output Build via a Preference option.
• ISO entity update - Eclipse S1000D for FrameMaker is in use around the world by authors using a variety of languages. The application now traps input of non-sgml characters directly from the keyboard without further action required by the author. For those who have a UK or US keyboard the ability to handle the Alt-NNN method of inserting ISO entities has also been implemented. The original ISO Entity method has been retained to enable the insertion of non-character symbols such as those available via ISOBox etc.

For more information please contact .

Hear more about one of the largest DITA Content Management projects of Noz’s career, and the biggest Content Strategy Audit (CSA) he’s ever done. With 1000 dedicated technical authors worldwide and 10,000 engineers looking to contribute natively into DITA topics. They said full roll-out numbers might be 30,000 users globally. If we opt to go for direct Engineer contributions, they will have more DITA authors than most companies have staff! Currently they are working off the file system - no CMS support.

Follow Noz as he works though this interesting challenge! Find out more.

Mekon are pleased to announce the release of Eclipse S1000D for FrameMaker Version 6.3.

Database Author Productivity Tool. Some of our clients do not have access to an S1000D compliant database and have been asking us if Mekon can provide anything to help with some of the functions that CSDBs provide. For some time a Database Productivity Tool has been incorporated into the Eclipse S1000D for Arbortext application and our users have found it to be an extremely useful addition to the application speeding up the production of Data Modules. What this tool can do is to help in the insertion of references to other Data Modules: Insertion of Illustrations, Insertion of references to Technical Publications and insertion of Supplies, Spares and Support Equipment.

This tool has been updated and is now included in this release of the FrameMaker application. The Tool has been enhanced in several ways. As with other aspects of the FrameMaker Application, provision has been made for configuring and automatic switching between, several independent projects driven by the MODELIC part of the Data Module Code. The Database Tables can reside either on the client machine or on a network so that many authors can simultaneously access the information.

See the Eclipse S1000D product page for more information.

Following on from the success of CS Forum 2010 the first public conference solely dedicated to content strategy, CS Forum 2011 is an annual European event, where international audiences can learn, share, and network.

Join content strategists, writers, web designers, developers, entrepreneurs and more from around the world this September, in beautiful central London, for Europe’s flagship content strategy conference. The event offers an extensive programme of 39 speakers including Mekon's Noz Urbina who will be presenting: B2B Content Strategy: How to create company - and customer-focused content.

Find out more