Archive for the ‘Partners’ Category

That Was Quite A Year…

Posted on: December 29th, 2008

Earlier today I sat down to write the latest issue of our Channel Partner Newsletter and thought it would be fun to look back at all we’ve acheived in 2008.

Turns out that it was a lot….

And somehow in the middle of all this we also managed to find time to reconfigure and redecorate our entire office space!

If 2008 was full, we anticipate that 2009 will be even more exciting (although without the office makeover), with new initiatives being planned, more industry participation, increasing communications, and a growing sense of community with both our partners and our customers.

Thanks to everyone who made 2008 such a great year for the WebWorks team. We all look forward to working with you in 2009 – and beyond.

WebWorks in Japan

Posted on: May 21st, 2008

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Thanks to our Platinum Channel partner company XLsoft, the WebWorks ePublisher Platform received some attention at the recent SODEC trade show in Tokyo, Japan.

DW Got It Right…

Posted on: May 13th, 2008

Former NASCAR champion and current FOX TV race analyst Darrell Waltrip recently coined the phrase “coopetition” to describe when two drivers from opposing teams run nose to tail and use the draft to pull themselves to the front of the pack.

“Coopetition” being the combination of cooperation and competition to ensure a positive result for all involved.

I was reminded of the phrase during last week’s DocTrain West conference in Vancouver when during a panel on blogging The Content Wrangler himself, Scott Abel, said that they way for top blogs to build traffic is to build a strong cooperative relationship with other blogs that might be perceived as competition.

The more I thought about “coopetition” the more I realized that is didn’t only apply to the content industry blogsphere, but also to the various content solution vendors. Looking back at last week I probably spent as much time talking with other solution vendors as I did with prospects and customers. The conversations were all friendly, cordial and above all driven by a need to solve our customers’ business problems, not just the specific problems addressed by our own solutions, but all aspects of the content creation and publishing process.

Here at WebWorks we already have established partnerships with several companies who provide complementary solutions that work along side our ePublisher Platform. We are now engaged in even more conversations like that and hope to be announcing more partnerships over the next few months.

I guess “coopetition” isn’t just for race cars – it also works for software companies.

Unconferencing in Vancouver

Posted on: April 24th, 2008

Blogger and wiki aficionado Anne Gentle just invited me to participate in an “unconference” to be held in conjunction with the upcoming DocTrain West conference in Vancouver.

Of course I was delighted to be asked, but had no idea what an “unconference” was. The first place that a google search pointed me was the flagship of all wikis, Wikepedia. Annoyingly the Wikipedia page while citing numerous examples didn’t actually include a definition.

But it did link me to the “Unconference Blog” and according to them an “unconference” is a facilitated participant-driven face-to-face conference around a theme or purpose.

I like the sound of that. What also made participating in Anne’s suggested unconference even more attractive was that the proposed schedule said it would run to about “beer-thirty,” which sounds like my sort of time.

Naturally Ann has set up a wiki about the event and you can find out more, or sign up to attend, there.

I’ll be contributing a session titled Publishing is no longer the last step.. If you are attending DocTrain I’d love to see you there.

At the main conference I’ll also be presenting a session on Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information.

Oh and that wikipedia page – it now has the basic definition added – guess who did that?

7 things you must know about ePublisher Platform

Posted on: November 14th, 2007

When you become intimately involved with a product it’s often difficult to step back and distill its value into just a few simple direct phrases. Often it needs someone from outside to grasp what you have been saying and capture it.

RoundUp attendee Anne Gentle did just that on her blog. And with her permission here’s her

7 things you must know about ePublisher Platform.

1. Content is king. Your source content can be Word, Frame, or DITA. You can even convert other formats such as RoboHelp to Word or Frame and go from there.

2. Formats are separate from content and can be customized.

3. Combining content is allowed and even encouraged. Mixed content is just fine.

4. There are great demos (over an hour’s worth) on the Quadralay web site.

5. ePublisher has an extendable XML adapter. This extensibility means that no matter what XML you’re putting in, ePublisher can be extended to understand it.

6. You can automate the dickens out of your output build processes and integrate with development’s version control systems and build with the Auto-mapper.

7. The WebWorks Wiki (uses MoinMoin engine if you’re wondering) has lots of information and they encourage people to contribute to it.

Thanks Ann – we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.