As the newest member of the OneStrand Team, this was the first industry conference that I have attended and it was a new experience that I will not soon forget. It was a fantastic opportunity to work with my fellow colleague Reeta Nye, along with partners and current and potential customers that are researching new S1000D solutions.
One of the most interesting aspects for me was listening to the different challenges and opportunities the delegates discussed when visiting our vendor stand. These industry specialists were needing to either upgrade their current S1000D solutions or required new capability to fulfill handling both legacy data through to latest S1000D delivery requirements. Regardless of their challenges all the people I spoke with wanted to know whether it was worth converting to S1000D now or later!
One of the things I did note was that although all Vendors at the end of the day have a CSDB, Authoring tool, PDF and IETM Publishing capability, what was interesting to see was the different approaches to ease of use and cost with these products. Melissa Pennline’s presentation and Reeta’s product demonstration proved to be very popular. During Melissa’s session on “S1000D Managerial Challenges” she discussed in detail the aspects of starting a new S1000D project, but the most interesting item was how she expanded on the need to transfer the knowledge we have to the next generation.
Reeta’s demonstration covered “Portal, Parts and Shopping Carts: Optimizing the Maintainers Experience”. Her discussion highlighted the latest capability in the R4i Software to support features that include “shopping cart functionality”, “fully customizable portal”, and “How to distribute content to mobile devices”.
Overall, the conference was well received and I believe that the attendees found the information shared was extremely beneficial, certainly those that had the opportunity to interact with the OneStrand team indicated that.
If you were unable to attend the ATA e-Business Forum, Team OneStrand look forward to seeing you at the S1000D User Forum and ILS Specification Day in London this October 14-17!
Carl Heinemann
Technology Consultant
OneStrand Inc.
