SLM (Service)

In this webinar, we demonstrate the DITA feature keyrefs and conkeyrefs in Arbortext. The keyref and conkeyref mechanisms allow you to easily switch variable content. We will demonstrate how to create keys and key references; how to combine keys with maps for easier manageability; and how to use conkey references instead of conref to simplify reuse and manage your content.This session is intended for Intermediate users of DITA and Arbortext.View the RecordingThe video is now available for viewing: Watch this episode of Arbortext TC Dojo Online on our Vimeo On Demand ChannelTC Dojo Mastermind group members can watch it for free on the forums.About The TC DojoThe TC Dojo is brought to you by Single-Sourcing Solutions. At the TC Dojo, you pick the topics and we find the experts. Be sure to vote on future TC Dojo webinar topics.

I'd like to encourage the users of this community to participate and attend our LiveWorx 2016 conference. It will take place in Boston, MA from June 6-9, 2016.   The call for participation is now open: LiveWorx : Contribute Your Story to LiveWorx 2016. ‌   Please select "Service Lifecyle Management" as the category for submitting anything related to Arbortext, Creo Illustrate, Service Information Manager etc.. We are very interested in hearing from you, and having you share with us and your peers about how you use the products, how you benefit, what advice you have for the rest of us! This will be a great opportunity to network, and we want to focus on you- the users!! So help me to make this happen- and plan on presenting and/or attending. (Presenters receive complimentary registration for the event).   If you have any questions- feel free to reach out to me directly and I'll try to help out.   Thanks again! Pushpinder

I am pleased to announce that the following are now available for customer download!PTC Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher 11.1 M010Release NotesPTC Arbortext Editor/Styler/Architect/Publishing Engine 7.0 M010 Editor/Styler/Architect Release NotesSPR Fixes

The PTC SLM Solution Management Team invites you to our upcoming PTC Technical Information Solutions User Community Webcast Series!On Wednesday November 18th, from 11-12pm EST join us for our next webinar: “Managing Translations with PTC Windchill Service Information Manager”, presented by Pushpinder Toor, SLM Solution Manager. Pushpinder will describe and demonstrate how to manage translations for service content stored in Windchill Service Information Manager.Use this link to register: Tech Tips Webcasts: Work Smarter, Not Harder: Managing Translations with PTC Windchill Service Information ManagerIn this webcast you will learn:How to use Windchill Service Information Manager to manage content translationsHow to automate publishing of language-specific contentAbout eliminating manual efforts associated with creating multi-language assetsQ&A sessionWe welcome your feedback on other topic areas you would be interested in hearing more about. Please send any suggestions directly to -

The PTC SLM Solution Management Team invites you to our upcoming PTC Technical Information Solutions User Community Webcast Series! We are hosting a monthly webcast to active support customers to keep you informed on the latest solution roadmaps, tips & tricks and best practices.On Wednesday, July 15th from 10-11am EST join us for “What’s New in Arbortext 7.0 and APP 11.1”, webcast presented by Pushpinder Toor, Solution Manager and Simon Taylor, Product Manager.  In this webinar, hear more about:New features coming in the next Arbortext and APP releaseNew features from previous maintenance releases you may have missedFuture roadmap Q & AClick here to register: Thanks and hope to see you attend!

Arbortext 6.1 M070 is now available for download from the ptc.com Support site.For more details regarding this maintenance release, please check out the release notes:For Arbortext Editor/Styler/ArchitectFor SPR Fixes in the release

Hi all-Now available for download are two of our newest releases - Arbortext 7.0 and APP 11.1. We are excited to provide you with some of the following changes:UI refreshInitial support for DITA 1.3Saving advanced searches for searching WindchillStyler source edit improvementsStylesheet property updatesAPP graphic downsamplingAPP external debuggerAnd more!Please check out the Arbortext Editor/Styler/Architect Release Notes here and APP 11.1 here. Remember that with this release you will be required to generate new licenses.Happy downloading!Pushpinder Toor‌Solution Manager

Hello all-Arbortext 6.1 M060 is now available for download from the PTC support site.Some changes include:new environment variable allowing you to designate Styler as the default application when opening content from Windchillnew ACL set command for auto updating of gentextstripping of whitepaces for PDFsupport for Webtop 6.8 for customers using the Documentum WDK Adapterlist of SPRs as wellPlease refer to release notes and list of SPR fixes for further details:Editor/Styler/Architect Release NotesSPR Fixes

Hello A&D users,   I wanted to share this deck with you as it describes the key features in our next generation technical information solution for S1000D. Windchill 10.2 M030 is RTM this month and with it comes some exciting enhancements to the solution. Existing Arbortext S1000D customers are entitled to upgrade to the new solution if they are on maintenance. You can find more info on the solution on our website here.   Thanks   Ian Boulton.

Unhappy Customers are Just the Beginning.A perennial question in the technical communication community is how to justify our work in financial terms that management will understand. One partial answer is to consider potential consequences of putting insufficient resources into technical documentation. What happens if the material is poorly written, or not written at all? Consequences can range from unhappy customers to wasted employee time to debilitating lawsuits—and worse. Joseph Devney uses statistics and real-life examples to illustrate some of the risks of having inadequate documentation.This two-part session is accessible to All technical writersAbout the Visiting Dojo MasterJoseph Devney, M.A., of Linguistic Consulting, is an STC Fellow and president of the Berkeley chapter. He has seen his share of bad documentation, and done his best to improve it. Joe has been a guest speaker at several STC chapters and for other organizations, and taught document design at San Francisco Stat

The advent of electronic media and particularly the Web has profoundly changed how people seek and use information. Information seeking today is dominated by search, and not by search of individual works, but search of the whole: whole sites, whole doc sets, and, in particular, the whole Web. With search, and with hypertext systems, you don’t start at the top and work down, you dive to the bottom and work your way up or sideways. Despite these changes, much tech comm content is still organized top down and written to be read top down. But content organized top down does not work well for readers navigating from the bottom up. To serve them well, we need a bottom-up information architecture.We have thousands of years of civilization based on organizing information top-down. It is ingrained in our education and our culture, and in our processes and the way we create and manage content. Moving to a bottom-up information architecture is no trivial task, therefore. This first session in the

Do you have content in both DocBook and DITA? Are you worried that it has to be one or the other? Two doctypes means two stylesheets, right? It's not as bad as you think! If you've been following the teachings at the Dojo and using best practices, you're already using modular stylesheets. Come to this session to find out how you can toss up a new stylesheet for a new doctype in a matter of minutes!This session is intended for Intermediate users of Arbortext Styler.View the RecordingThe video is now available for viewing: Watch this episode of Arbortext TC Dojo Online on our Vimeo On Demand ChannelTC Dojo Mastermind group members can watch it for free on the forums.About The TC DojoThe TC Dojo is brought to you by Single-Sourcing Solutions. At the TC Dojo, you pick the topics and we find the experts. Be sure to vote on future TC Dojo webinar topics.

Today's exercises in video conversion remind me of the browser wars in the 1990s. There is no end to the pain of figuring out formats that will play well in everyone's browser on everyone's OS. Especially if you want to host the videos yourself. When you do as many videos as we do, here at Single-Sourcing Solutions, it starts to become impossible.In order to make it simpler, we decided to post all our old videos to YouTube, which means that we recently launched several YouTube Channels:Arbortext Monster Garage - all the videos from our famed web series about how to trick out your Arbortext environment, software, and publishing deliverablesSingle-Sourcing Solutions - these videos may not be Arbortext-specific, but depict related content to the work of authors, publishers, managers, and support personnel.TC Dojo - this is a mix of Arbortext Monster Garage and TC Camp. Videos are recordings of sessions where the topics were voted on by the community. The TC Dojo YouTube channel has copies

This is the third and final posting from me on the new functionality coming in the M020 release of Styler 6.0. This time I look at some work we've been doing to improve the accessibility of HTML and PDF output from Styler.Anyone familiar with document requirements for governmental departments in the US will probably have come across the term Section 508. In the US and elsewhere around the world you might also have come across the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C. These requirements are focussed on making published content accessible to readers who have trouble seeing, moving or otherwise accessing information delivered electronically. A number of the requirements for these standards are to do with how the information is displayed - not having moving backgrounds or using absolute sizes for text on a web page - but some are to do with how the information being delivered is encoded. And this is where Styler can make a difference.A large part of what's needed is to

Windchill PartsLink enables the construction of a hierarchy of classification nodes but applies this to WTParts.  This functionality would be very powerful if applied to Dynamic Documents to support reuse of information... helping users find what already exists and is available for use.http://communities.ptc.com/ideas/1744

Last week I wrote about the Creo Illustrate 2.0 Part 1 video.  Did you have a chance to take a look? If not I encourage you to do so when you have a moment. Today I would like to highlight part 2 in the Creo Illustrate 2.0 video series.Creo Illustrate 2.0 provides you with 3D Technical Illustrations that clearly convey complex information to a global workforce, reduce translation costs, and increase illustrator productivity. You’ll also be able to automate parts list creation.  In this 7 minute video, Tim Harrison, director of product management, continues to review enhancements for Creo Illustrate 2.0 which includes:Item list enhancementsNew API enables 3D interactive illustrations for supporting documents or webpages Dynamic parts list tableManually re-numbering items PublishingUser-defined/configurable “recipe” files2D formatsSVG exportPublish preview IP securityAdditional security for illustration publishingTake some time to watch the Creo Illustrate 2.0 Part 2 video and

Have you heard about the latest Arbortext Video Series found right here on the PTC Community? These short videos from product experts review the newest features, functions and enhancements included in Arbortext products and our Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) solutions. You will find step-by-step demonstrations and real-case scenarios highlighting the major advancements in the latest releases.  The first movie I would like to highlight is on Creo Illustrate 2.0.Creo Illustrate 2.0 Part 1In this 10 minute video, Tim Harrison, director of Product Management, reviews three major enhancements to Creo Illustrate 2.0:sBOM manipulationConfigure external/imported XML files New Illustration toolsMeasurement toolsConstruction datumsMulti-point (full assembly path) explode lines Animation – rework “unscrew” toolTemporary groupsPreview unscrewUser-defined axisTake a look at the Creo Illustrate 2.0 Part 1 video and let me know what you think. I would also love suggestions for future movie

An article on the technical and product evolution of Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher (formerly the 3B2 Publishing System)English / Italian(Article content as published in the UK ISTC Communicator Journal 2010)

Today's Service Lifecycle Management and Arbortext sessions theme has been around poor service performance. Everyone has a poor service experience. If you want to start a conversation at lunch tomorrow with the person sitting next to you bring it up. Service experiences can be a great conversational starter. Whether it is your car being maintained and serviced, appliance being fixed or maybe you sat on the tarmac for one minute too long due to the door being stuck (ok that is happening to me a lot lately).The first thing I learned in marketing 101 is if your customer is happy they will tell one person if they are unhappy they will tell a minimum of eight. That was 17 years ago when social media didn't exist. Now they just tweet it and it goes to hundreds, maybe thousands.What is the cost of poor service experience to the company? Poor customer satisfaction when they lose faith in their investment and the ability to maintain and service their product. Is the measurement loss in brand va

Today at 2:30 Mike Sundquist, PTC is presenting on the topic of  Product-Centric Technical Information in Gatlin A-3. I asked him what his presentation will cover, take a look and I hope you can join us. Video Link : 3047

I just arrived in Orlando for PlanetPTC 2012. This is my 6th PlanetPTC conference and as always it is still honor to attend.  This year brings new excitement with new role marketing for PTC’s Service Lifecycle Management Solutions. I am excited to meet some new faces and of course say hello to old friends. We have a wide variety of activities planned this year around Service Lifecycle Management and Arbortext that you won’t want to miss. Here are a few highlights:Solution Expo:Come visit us in the Solution Expo where we have experts on Technical Information, Technical Information for FAD, Technical Illustrations, Service Parts, Warranty and Contract Management and Service Center.Usability LabsSign up to provide us feedback on Arbortext Editor, Windchill Service Information Manager,  Windchill Service Parts, Service Center and PTC Tech Support website redesign.Highlights of Monday agenda sessions you won’t want to miss:1:30 in Gatlin A-3, PTC Service Lifecycle Management Strat

Great news, with the upcoming release of the Arbortext Aerospace and Defense (AAD) software, 4.4 M030, users will be able to publish Creo 3D to the IETP viewer!  In the prior maintenance release, AAD 4.4 M020, a new enhancement allowed CSDB users  (through Arbortext Authoring Interface) to insert PCZ files and to select interactions contained within Creo 3D formats to be inserted automatically into a Data Module.  Now with the AAD 4.4 M030 release, these interactions can be initiated within the IETP view via a hyperlink. There are many types of interactions that can be contained in a 3D model, the prime one being animations.The Creo View integration with the IETP Viewer will allow users to click on a Data Module text hyper link that will open Creo View in a new pane and initiate the interaction authored into the DM.Look for future posts, we will be providing a short demo of this new functionality.For the release dates, please see the Product Calendar.

Not quite...There are not only different levels or versions of PDF, but there are also standards of PDF which are required for different consumers of the document. Each have their own specific requirements and each present their own challenges. I'm going to have a look at some of the requirements of PDF here and how using Arbortext products allow you to meet them.Lets start by looking at why you want to create a PDF in the first place.Some people are happy with just a plain old vanilla PDF. All they want is something that looks like a printed page so they can read it on their computer, stick it on a website or make paper copies. They're not too bothered about colour reproduction, download speeds, storage or accessibility. As long as it doesn't look rubbish, they're happy. That is fine. Nothing wrong with it at all. PDF is more than happy to give you this.But...What if you are bothered that the expensive glossy catalogue you've blown your marketing budget on looks as good as it can? Wha

You get it. You understand the value for having your content in XML. Perhaps you are already there or on your way. Now you have all of your content tagged and structured for optimal reuse. You breathe a sigh of relief.  Then you get the request to produce high quality designed outputs for things such as catalogs, product brochures, data sheets, or even advertisements, etc….  Can your rendering engine handle it?  If you have Arbortext the answer is definitely YES!  In this recording of the one hour webinar, we will show you how you can automate the creation of high volume, high quality output using the Arbortext Suite of products.  About The PresenterSimon Taylor is the Product Manager for XML Publishing and Layout Applications at PTC. Simon spends his time “thinking about putting content on pages”. He has defined the requirements for several full product releases, presented at numerous conferences, represented PTC and product during sales processes and otherwis

Recently, I been asked a few times about the Advanced Print Publisher's integration with Styler and the Publishing Engine. I have also heard some incorrect discriptions of how things work, so I thought I would take this opportunity to clear things up and give you some extra information too.As you should be aware by now, Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher (APP) is a print coposition engine. It is a very flexible and speedy one which can produce really high quality pages without needing any manual intervention. It was first integrated with Styler and APE in 5.4 as a technology preview, becoming production ready in the M060 release. The Advanced Print Publisher was integrated for a number of reasons, but its language capabilities (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew, Arabic and so on) and the increased typographical and layout capabilies were key.In Styler, you now have the choice of using APP, FOSI or XSL-FO to generate print pages. For the integration, we spent a great deal of time