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.