General

Introducing The LiveCycle Post

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30 days
by in Community Help, General, LiveCycle

If you’re a LiveCycle user or consultant, you may have found it difficult at times to follow all those great blogs and resources out there in the community. That’s why we’ve brought you The LiveCycle Post, a human-moderated aggregator of the best user-assistance content from the community.

How does it work? Well, it’s simple. We read through a bunch of machine-aggregated blog posts every now and then and moderate the ones that LiveCycle users would find useful. These blog posts are authored by LiveCycle users, Adobe partners, customers, and Adobe employees.

And yes, if you have a LiveCycle resource that you’d want us to track, simply leave its RSS feed URL as a comment to this blog post. All rights for your content remain yours. We’ll also make sure we include your name and a link to your blog in the aggregated posts.

Here’s the link again: http://blogs.adobe.com/livecyclepost/.

Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors

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83 days
by in Announcements, Downloads, Events, General, Technical Communication

In May 2011, I had the opportunity to deliver a session titled Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors at the STC Technical Communication Summit in Sacramento, California. It was a great experience speaking on this topic to a predominantly American audience, since there was cultural exchange happening right from the word Go.

A variation of the session was also accepted on the program for the 2011 STC India Conference. I was looking forward to traveling to Chennai to present the session on December 3. Unfortunately, a middle ear infection played spoilsport and the doctor forbade me from flying for at least a couple of weeks. My colleague, Nandini Gupta, then graciously agreed to present the session on my behalf.

A slide deck for the session is embedded below:

Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors

You can download an audio recording of my session at the STC Summit from this link (~9 MB). The recording should be used in conjunction with the slide deck.
There’s more! The paper (accompanying this session) published in the Proceedings of the conference is embedded below. Happy reading!

Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors

Join me at STC Summit 2011

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328 days
by in Announcements, Community Help, Downloads, Events, General, Technical Communication

I’m excited to share that I’ll be part of STC Summit 2011, presenting the following two sessions:

A session summary for the second session is available from the STC Learning Center. If you want to read it right away, download the PDF from this URL.

I look forward to meeting you at the Summit!

RoboHelp Server: An introduction

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372 days
by in General, How to, RoboHelp and RoboHelp Server, Technical Communication, Tips and Tricks

As technical communicators, one of our key responsibilities is to optimize the value of the user-assistance content that we deliver. What defines the value of content? I focus on the following key indicators:

  • The topics should be search-optimized and populated with the right keywords. Users should be able to reach the right topics when they search using the relevant keywords (if not close to relevant keywords!).
  • Once users reach a topic, they should be able to quickly find answers to the most pertinent questions that they have in that product area.
  • Based on the Web traffic details for a topic, key documentation areas must be identified and optimized.

For optimizing content in alignment with these indicators, we need specific information about our users’ content access patterns. This is where RoboHelp Server proves valuable as a powerful application for hosting, tracking, and managing RoboHelp output in multiple formats.

The many reports that RoboHelp Server provides help identify how users navigate user-assistance content and the product areas where this content needs to be strengthened:

  • Search Terms with No Results: Search terms that returned no results and the number of times users searched for them
  • Frequently Searched Terms: Frequently-searched keywords and how many times users searched for them
  • Frequently Accessed CSH: Frequently-accessed context-sensitive Help topics and how many times they are accessed. The report is arranged by the context IDs of the CSH topics.
  • Frequently Viewed Topics: Report on Topics that end users view most often
  • Usage Statistics: Chronological graphical report of the number of hits to the Help system as a whole. Pages searched for and not opened reflect in this list. The usage statistics report has three additional tabs:
  • Page Views: Number of pages viewed over a given window of time. The window of time is determined by the labels along the X axis.
  • Pages Per Visit: Number of pages viewed per visit. Every instance when a user opens the project is considered as a separate visit. Visits from different Web browsers are counted separately.
    • Browser: Comparative data about the Web browsers in which users viewed the Help content
    • OS: Comparative data about the operating systems on which users viewed the Help content
  • Search Trends: The percentage of search terms that returned no results. The detailed view of this report gives the total number of search terms and how many of them returned results/no results.
  • Help System Errors: Error messages encountered by the current logged-in user

Ankur Jain, Adobe’s product manager for RoboHelp, shares his perspective of the business relevance of these reports in an excellent blog post titled, Create What They Want to Read.

For the while, I’ll leave you with some other insightful community content for RoboHelp Server:

Explore these links and do come back later for more information and tips. Happy reading!

LiveCycle ES2 Service Pack 2 available for download!

0
499 days
by in Announcements, Downloads, General, LiveCycle

We recently released LiveCycle ES2 Service Pack 2 (SP2), a significant update to the LiveCycle server components. You can access the download page here. To download the service pack, you’ll need to log in using your Adobe ID and agree with the EULA.

The updated LiveCycle ES2 documentation is now live at the LiveCycle Developer Center. The Service Pack 2 ReadMe (PDF) describes how you can install the service pack. The ReadMe also lists the many customer-reported issues that were addressed in this service pack.

To review the Service Pack 2 release notes for LiveCycle components, see this page. A related announcement on the LiveCycle Product Blog is here.

Follow this blog to catch more updates and announcements from the LiveCycle documentation team.

Up for a design challenge?

0
562 days
by in Announcements, Events, General

Win $2000 + a copy of Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Design Premium software (MSRP US$1899) if your design is chosen the winner in the Threadless t-shirt design competition. Just use your design talents to create a tee inspired by the MAXtopia theme for Adobe MAX 2010. Contest ends August 29th, so don’t delay. Check out the rules at http://www.threadless.com/loves/maxtopia!

MAXtopia is the theme of Adobe MAX 2010: a unique opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, and business leaders as we shape the future of digital media together. See max.adobe.com.

Some new LiveCycle TechNotes

1
609 days
by in General, LiveCycle, Performance

livecycle.jpg

Here are a few new LiveCycle TechNotes that were published recently:
  • This TechNote describes how you can synchronize Tivoli dynamic LDAP groups with User Management ES/ES2.
  • This TechNote may help if you’re observing Process Management ES2 throughput issues for Oracle.
  • When an XDP form with relative references to images is rendered as an interactive PDF form through LiveCycle, and passed to the Output service for flattening or to the Assembler service for conversion to a PDF/A document, you may observe loss of images in the generated output. This TechNote lists a couple of workarounds for the issue.
To search for more LiveCycle TechNotes or TechNotes for other Adobe products, use the Only Adobe content option on the Search Community Help page.

FrameMaker, CMS, XML, and DITA eSeminars

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617 days
by in Announcements, General, Technical Communication Suite

Exciting news! Adobe is teaming up with partners to organize eSeminars on FrameMaker, CMS, XML, and DITA.

There are two eSeminars coming up in June:
  • Integrating Adobe FrameMaker 9 with Documentum to maximize content reuse with Linked2 on June 22
  • Sense out of Confusion: Streamline your Authoring by transitioning from unstructured to DITA XML on June 24
Stay tuned with RJ Jacquez’s blog for information about the contents of the eSeminars and to register.

LiveCycle ES2 Service Pack 1 available!

0
632 days
by in Announcements, Downloads, General, LiveCycle

We recently released LiveCycle ES2 Service Pack 1 (SP1), a significant update to the LiveCycle server components, LiveCycle Workbench ES2, and LiveCycle Designer ES2. You can access the download page here. To download the service pack, you’ll need to log in using your Adobe ID and agree with the EULA.

The updated LiveCycle ES2 SP1 documentation is now live at the LiveCycle Developer Center. The SP1 ReadMe (PDF) describes how you can install the service pack for LiveCycle ES2 server, Workbench ES2, and Designer ES2. The ReadMe also lists the 80+ customer-reported issues that were addressed in this service pack.

To review the SP1 release notes for LiveCycle components, see this page. A related announcement on the LiveCycle Product Blog is here.

Follow this blog to catch more updates and announcements from the LiveCycle doc team.

Contribute to Adobe Community Help

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646 days
by in Community Help, Downloads, General

In case you didn’t already know, you can contribute to the documentation for many Adobe products under the Adobe Community Help model. See this page for FAQ on Adobe Community Help. In short:

Adobe Community Help is a set of web services that provides instruction,
inspiration, and support. Community Help combines content from Adobe
Help, Support, Design Center, Developer Connection, and Forums – along
with great online community content – so that users can easily find the
best and most up-to-date resources. Community Help enables users to
contribute content and add comments to all learning content on
Adobe.com.

Your contributions can be in the form of tips, tricks, sample code, examples, comments, content-improvement suggestions, and more. A free Adobe.com account is all that you need to contribute. What’s more, if the moderators find your contribution helpful, they will reward you with Adobe Community Help points. Isn’t that cool?

Here are some other helpful links that will get you started:

Adobe Community Help Client (CHC)

Adobe has also created the Community Help Client (CHC), a next-generation AIR-based Help system that lets you make the most of Community Help content. See this page for information about downloading and installing CHC.

Mallika Yelandur, my colleague, has done a series of useful blog posts introducing the CHC and its features. Hop over to her blog!

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