soap! 2017
the best content conference
June 7-9 | Krakow, Poland
soap! is an exceptional conference any Content Professional will appreciate. We aren’t afraid to ask difficult questions, share real-life experiences, discuss problems. With the crowd of wonderful soapers – hungry for knowledge, tech-aware professionals – we share experiences and skills during workshops and talks, make meaningful connections and friends, have fun, and much more. soap! is an extraordinary, international community. Come join us.
speakers & trainers
Kristina Mausser
Kina’ole, Canada
Maryland Sara
SAP Hybris, Germany
Oded Ilan
Iridize, Israel
Adam Sanyo
ARM, Hungary
Marta Bartnicka
IBM Translation Services Center, Poland
Anton Bollen
TechSmith, Germany
Meike Chabowski
SUSE Linux, Germany
Barbara Szwarc
SAP Hybris, Germany
Justyna Adamczyk
SAP Hybris, Gliwice, Poland
Mateusz Wiktor
Braintribe, Austria
Natalia Katryńska
Senior Technical Writer, Poland
Alan Miller
Simply Consulting, UK
Brad Schmidt
MSD, Czech Republic
Dagmara Szostak
GET IT Language Solutions, Poland
Tomasz Poznański
Motorola Solutions, Poland
Joanna Malicka
Motorola Solutions, Poland
Wojciech Aleksander
GetResponse, Poland
Rahel Anne Bailie
Scroll LLP, United Kingdom
Daniel Barrio Fierro
Dolby Laboratories, Poland
Małgorzata Pytel
Flik, Poland
Dirk Göhmann
Appway, Switzerland
Cate Mackenzie
Appway, Switzerland
Paddy McShane
Optimal Workshop, Ireland
Tomasz Prus
Unit4, Poland
Matthias Kraus
CEO, Xeditor, Germany
Jarek Orłowski
Dynatrace, Poland
Łukasz Górnicki
SAP Hybris, Poland
Szymon Serwatka
Dassault Systemes, Poland
Patrick Bosek
easyDITA, US
Stefan Gentz
Adobe Systems GmbH, Germany
Piotr Nabielec
Produktywni.pl, Poland
schedule
day 1, June 8
9:00
9:15
9:55
If a document appears in your knowledge base but nobody reads it…? Then YOU should make some noise!
A Technical Writer’s core job responsibility is researching and authoring help topics. We’re not going to argue with that. But putting words and diagrams on a page is a first step, not the last. A well-researched topic, authored in full compliance with your style guide is great – but not enough to ensure that your users benefit from the content.
Producing useful content is more than just writing. Rooted in our experience at a growing micro-multinational company, we focus on activities that should be on your radar as a technical communicator:
• Findability
• Analytics
• User testing
• Engaging readers
10:40
11:00
11:40
12:25
Translation as a part of content management process can be easily overlooked. Preparing content appropriately may greatly facilitate translation: shorten turnaround times, avoid mistakes and, last but not least, decrease costs. The more content and more languages there are in your workflow, the more important it is to pay attention to the source quality. We believe that covering this topic, however short or superficial it might seem for such a vast subject, might greatly raise awareness and help improve both content management and translation/localization management processes.
12:55
common documentation issues, but also how to challenge yourself, how to jump over your own shadow, in trying to deliver the best-quality docs. This I call “dealing with documentation demons” :). In other words, the uncommon issues that happen from
time to time when delivering a software product and where the Technical Writer comes in to provide the best solutions possible as a documentation specialist. Having more than five years experience in technical writing, I am going to give some real-life
examples that explain goals and expectations as well as obstacles that can occur during such processes. To be more specific, these examples will relate to task managements in the ad-hoc world-wide project as well scaling documentation development
found therein. In other words, how to fall into documentation Mordor, only to quickly get back to Middle-Earth safely.
1:25
become more valuable!
2:25
3:15
4:00
4:20
5:00
I believe ‘documentation strategy’ is a set of ingredients, without which you are not able to support your customers and give them appropriate assistance.
There are lots of great books and fascinating articles about ‘content strategy’ and how it should be designed. However, I could not found enough information on how to solve practical problems, like:
▨ Defining audience
▨ Determining documentation types
▨ Setting-up processes and aligning them with engineers’ way of working
▨ Finally, building a successful documentation team.
I want to tell you my story and shed some light on potential problems you might have in early stages of building a new documentation team. I will share my recent experiences from very demanding and rapidly evolving ERP SW industry.
5:30
video into their learning, marketing and documentation strategies. Video is no longer bonus content. It has become an expectation and competitive advantage for many. So far, so good. Using video as a primary part of a content strategy has introduced
a new problem: How do you make your video content available to a global audience? The content needs to be scaled and made available to your global audience. Translating a video might seem simple, but it has many problems, ranging from budget to
distribution to cultural differences.Drawing from the input from global companies, video creators, translation agencies and 10+ years experience of localizing videos myself, this talk will explore common themes, best practices and many
lessons learned to help attendees create better videos while minimizing the problems with video localization.
6:00
During last 2 years over 1000 people went through my “personal and team productivity” trainings and online courses. In this presentation I would like to give an overview of the techniques and tools that people rated as the most helpful and also compare regular trainings and online courses and what makes them both effective.
6:10
8:00
on
day 2, June 9
9:00
9:10
9:35
In this session, attendees will learn:
▨About the Forgetting Curve and what it implies
▨About the forgetting curve in product support & training
▨Why this is becoming more and more complicated – and important – with
actual examples of human behavior via Iridize guides
▨How technology intrinsically disrupts our understanding of how to handle problems
▨Looking to the future – how can new technology allow technical communicators to offer more
creative solutions to organization for improving support and training and increasing customer satisfaction.
10:20
10:50
an open document license, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or Creative Commons? And did you know that we mainly use open (source) tools during the processes for the creation of our guides, quick starts, best practices? Sometimes challenging
– but when we miss an open tool needed for our purposes, we just develop it ourselves …. If you are curious to hear more about these tools and processes, just join the talk. Afterwards we can also discuss how even our readers can influence the
quality and output of the SUSE documentation work.
11:10
11:50
discuss how projects like this could be managed more effectively and how each stage of a project can be improved from the technical writer’s point of view.
12:35
content professionals take control of the narrative, increase understanding and raise the profile of content and content teams so that it’s viewed as a critical specialism on a par with it’s peers. I’ll show how to deal with the ‘Amateur Speculators’
and the ‘Opinions and Arseholes’ phenomenon to transform Content into a commercial specialism acknowledged for driving your company and delighting your customers.
1:35
2:15
In this session Stefan Gentz, Worldwide TechComm Evangelist for Adobe, will discuss the communication of technical content and how it’s becoming increasingly important to understand technical communication as marketing communication. The ability to blend marketing content and technical content into a unified customer experience becomes key to success. The foundation for this is dynamic, intelligent content that enables personalization and multi-channel content delivery to communicate with customers in all possible ways.
2:45
3:15
scope of project work. How do competent, but naturally reclusive individuals engage, connect to, and build rapport with often equally reclusive team members? How can we get the contributions we need without being a pain in the neck? I’d like to
share a few techniques from the world of UX, broadcasting, and pop psychology that may help.
3:35
4:15
or both. I intend to present the main internationalization rules using some best and also some worst examples from real-life localization projects. The opportunities are growing to go global with an online shop, an app or a booking portal, yet the
content creators repeat the same mistakes for the last 20 years. Presenting a few of DOs and DONTs, I hope to inspire my audience to a broader research on how to produce their content as “ready to go global”.
4:45
Have you ever felt stuck with the current shape of your documentation portfolio? Including only correct technical information, without paying attention to the content format, does not guarantee success.
In this short makeover story – featuring a before-and-after UX twist – we will present a solution-centered way out: how to change your perspective to technical communication in a range of aspects.
5:15
5:55
commonalities of experience that we share with our audiences. But empathy can only get us so far in the corporate realm of buy-in and budgets. Sometimes problem-solving when working with multi-disciplinary teams needs more than just a whole-hearted
attempt to understand each other and our feelings. In a world where the lines between channels and disciplines are increasingly blurred, and teams from diverse backgrounds must work together to create seamless content experiences, veteran content
strategist Kristina Mausser shares ways in which we can move beyond empathy towards something much more powerful, and much more effective for the content that we create and the global audiences that it serves.
6:10
on
theme
No matter what type of content you create, you always encounter problems. Complex or not – they like to pop up.
In the worst-case scenario it’s the user who encounters these problems. Imagine you’ve just finished assembling your brand new 2x2.5 meters wardrobe. You go to the last step of the manual which says: “Add 4 safety elements between the wardrobe and the floor”. Yes, it’s a real-life scenario!
At soap! 2017, we will share our problem-solving experiences to help each other deal with their content-related problems better.
problem
solving
our main sponsor
easyDITA is an all-inclusive, cloud-based DITA authoring tool and component content management system (CCMS) that makes it easy for organizations to create, share, and reuse information.
Everything you need to author, manage, translate, and publish your content is combined into one solution. Content is stored in a web-based, single-source repository where both authors and subject matter experts (SMEs) can access it and collaborate using easyDITA’s intuitive tools.
easyDITA was developed by Jorsek LLC, a Rochester, NY-based software development company dedicated to creating the next generation of documentation and information management tools.
our second main sponsor
Adobe has revolutionized how the world engages with ideas and information. Their award-winning software and technologies have set the gold standard in communication and collaboration for more than 30 years.
Adobe’s Technical Communication group delivers best-in-class tools, systems and services that help businesses streamline content workflows end-to-end. With their cutting-edge solutions, teams can effortlessly collaborate on the creation of ground-breaking content, manage and reuse assets efficiently, and seamlessly publish it across multiple channels and devices. Published content can be tailored to audiences, increasing relevance and consumption. All this, and more, while offering the highest return on investment.
sponsors
partners
contact
To talk about visual design and advantages of one font over another, drop a line to Karolina. If you’d like to sponsor soap! or become our partner and help the community grow, write to Aga. If you are interested in speaking at soap!, Piotr is the guy you want to contact. If you would like to get to know the head of soap!, contact Gosia.