RoundUp Archive - Technical Communication

Archive for the ‘RoundUp’ 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….

We moved to a quarterly release cycle, with regular patch updates.
We posted more technical information about our products then ever before.
We released an industry leading “Publish To Wiki” solution in 2008.3 that is already attracting interest from new markets.
We welcomed Group Wellesley, IFN Solutions Ltd, Scripto bvba, Shree IT, Suite Solutions, Tedopres, and User Aid as partners.
We continued to reach out to customers through Web2.0 initiatives such as these blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and The Content Wrangler community, as well as increasing participation in the established wwp-users Yahoo group.
With assistance from the fine folks at User Aid we completed the first phase of our documentation re-write project, and launched the new Documentation wiki.
We hosted another great user conference with RoundUp 2008.
We launched the online “Many Faces of WebWorks” Customer Gallery project.
We continued our successful Free Webinar series with attendance growing steadily throughout the year.
We developed more online short video tutorials.

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.

RoundUp 2009 – New Venue, New Dates – Even Better Value

Posted on: December 12th, 2008

A few days ago we announced on our Twitter feed and through a couple of other Web2.0 venues the dates and venue for next year’s WebWorks Users Conference.

RoundUp 2009 will be held from October 19 – 21, at the Hyatt Regency Austin.

While the date change is a minor one (we pulled the event forward to fit in around other Austin based happenings rather than conflict with them), the biggest change is that of venue.

While we are sad to leave behind the wonderful Stephen F, Austin InterContinetal, our home for the last two years, we are very excited about the possibilities offered by the Hyatt Regency, in terms of both facilities and location.

The Hyatt is located on the banks of Lady Bird Lake right in the center of downtown Austin and offers spectacular views of the city skyline, as well as the lake and surrounding countryside. It is within easy walking distance of the famous Austin downtown live music scene, as well as the growing Warehouse Entertainment District and the eclectic SoCo (South Congress) area. The famous Threadgills music venue is just a block away, and the hotel itself is situated on the 10 mile lakeside hike-bike trail.

Each guest room is guaranteed a view and all are fitted with the latest flatscreen TVs and an iHome docking station for your iPod or iPhone.

We worked very closely with the hotel to make this year’s RoundUp even more affordable in the current economic climate.

We have managed to hold the registration fee steady for the third straight year and the hotel rate will be the cheapest we’ve been able to offer so far with a special conference room rate of just $199/night.

Booking early will also make traveling to Austin cheap as there are some great air-fare bargains at the moment.

We are looking forward to welcoming our customers and partners to this great new venue for three days of product knowledge, case studies, industry trends, networking, and some Texas style hospitality.

And if you would be interested in presenting a case study or paper at RoundUp 2009, just drop me an email and let me know.

(As a little added incentive, presenters get a complimentary conference registration.)

Full details can be found on the WebWorks RoundUp website.

RoundUp 2008 – It's almost here.

Posted on: August 7th, 2008

I’ve just come out of a two hour meeting where we were going over the final “To-Do” list for RoundUp 2008.

This year’s WebWorks Users Conference promises to be even better than last year’s with more speakers, more topics, along with the first look at the ePublisher FALL release and it’s “publish to wiki” functionality.

RoundUp 2008 is only seven weeks away and the hotel rooms are starting to fill up.

If you are thinking of coming and haven’t yet registered, now is the time to do it. Hotel rooms are available, and from what we hear flights to Austin are still relatively inexpensive if booked now.

You can find out all the details at the dedicated RoundUp website

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.

RoundUp 2007 – Round up

Posted on: November 8th, 2007

It’s been just over a day since the end of our RoundUp Users Conference, and after some time to reflect, everyone on the WebWorks team had a great time meeting with customers and partners.

Although I was bouncing around most of the time doing behind the scenes stuff, I tried to sit in on as many of our customer use case presentations as possible. In each case I was impressed by how people have taken to heart the concept of ePublisher’s work flow, the benefits of single sourcing, the ability to accept, merge and convert multiple inputs, and achieved results above our expectations.

The feedback I heard on the technical sessions was consistently positive, with every single person who filled in a feedback form saying they had learned something new over the two-days. We couldn’t have asked for much more than that.

If you would like a flavor of the sessions check out these three posts on Anne Gentle’s excellent just write click blog.

Over the next few days and weeks we will be adding content from the Conference to the website and blogs. I hope to add a few more detailed observations and thoughts on this blog, but in the meantime perhaps the best summary of RoundUp 2007 came in an email from a customer this morning.

Great job with the user conference! Congratulations. Folks were excited to open the communication lines, and the content was very rich.