March / April 2009 | DMV Home

Chapter Meeting Information

Upcoming Meetings

Attending meetings is a great way to learn new things and connect with technical writers around the East Bay.

East Bay programs are usually held at Crow Canyon Country Club in San Ramon. For details on meeting location and reservations, see the
meetings page on the chapter website.

March 5 , 2009

"Repurposing Content for Multichannel Publishing" by Liz Fraley

Reusing and repurposing content is all about improving efficiency: automating, accelerating, and merging applications, systems, and processes. In a multichannel publishing environment, it is critical that source development and its management are as efficient as possible. It all comes down to managing and reusing source.

Recycling content (chapters, graphics, etc.) is not new. What is new here is the common set of back-end structures in XML and the fact that more than one set of tools is explicitly focused on the specific needs of a given project.

Come to this meeting to learn strategies for handling and producing documents in a multichannel publishing environment. Understand how multichannel publishing works and how to repurpose and reuse all kinds of content.

You will be able to develop guidelines for reducing content and the effort for managing it.

Speaker Liz Fraely, founder of Single Sourcing Solutions, Inc., is a Single-Sourcing/XML Architect/Programmer. For nearly 10 years, she has architected and implemented single-sourcing systems.

Liz holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. She serves on the Council for the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the ACM. She is active in the XML user community, presenting papers regularly at industry and vendor conferences, including the PTC/User World Event and the Content Management Strategies Conference.

April 2 , 2009

"Managing Technical Documentation with Offshore
Staff" by Susan M. Granzella

For technical writers and managers, working successfully in today's business environment means performing a balancing act between reducing costs and ensuring continued excellent quality. Invariably, the term "globalization" will mean expansion of technical writing staff to countries offshore where English is not the first language and the customs and culture are very different.

Come to this meeting to hear about the success of Visa's diverse technical writers who consistently produce high-quality documents as a cohesive team. This partnership between onsite and offshore staff began four years ago, and included both predictable and unexpected challenges. What will also be shared are the common mistakes we can make when faced with dramatically different communication styles and significant time differences. Visa's team worked assiduously to fine-tune the workflow, to manage customer expectations, and finally, to empower the staff on both continents to excel and contribute to the department's goals and Visa's overall success.

Speaker Susan M. Granzella is a Senior Business Leader of Technical Communications Services at Visa Inc. in Foster City, California. For more than 10 years, she has managed the technical writing and publishing effort at Visa, distributing content to banks and processors world-wide. She manages staff in multiple locations in the U.S. and in Bangalore and Kolkata, India.

Susan holds an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Davis, and has served on executive committees for the Bay Area Documentum User Group. She has presented papers regularly at user and vendor conferences, including the PTC/User World Event and Momentum - the Documentum User Group Conference.

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