As a newbie to the Tech Comm world I learned a lot from the summit at Adobe's Waltham office. I also had some of my impressions about the future of the industry confirmed. I had the opportunity to chat with other technical communication professionals and learn from their perspectives on the industry.

Technical communication and document management projects are moving away from unstructured authoring to structured authoring. Basically this means that writers and editors are using XML and XML tools to create and manage content. One presentation I learned a lot from was how one organization moved from purely a Microsoft Office authoring environment to using Adobe FrameMaker. I think FrameMaker could provide a benefit to my organization as well, but I have to do more hands on investigation with the product. There is a bit of a learning curve for those who manage the project or create stylesheets. For the authors themselves, there is a smaller learning curve because they just enter in content and mark it up.

On my trip back to my hometown in Massachusetts I plan on stopping by Adobe Tech Comm Enterprise Summit 2011 in Waltham.  With my work as a news designer I am very familiar with Adobe's Creative Suite, but I want to learn more about the software and tools Adobe has to help technical writers.

I am interested in a presentation by Ankur Jain about managing project communities collaboratively in the enterprise. I've worked on two agile teams lately to produce document products and this is always a challenge. It can be like herding cats to get all team members on board and involved in the online workspaces we have set up. This is especially true when it comes to managing documents as the end products themselves.

Other interesting topics to be presented include DITA, role of technical communicators, and trends in today's technical communication. I hope to take away some valuable information from this event.