Report from Paris: TCWorld Roadshow with FrameMaker

The last event in the tcworld roadshow: Paris. Of course this city is famous for its Eiffel tower – a remarkable feat of engineering, built for the World Exposition in 1889 and expected to last only a couple of years but still standing today. And of course, this is supposed to be the city of romantic love.

But there is one thing that is special about Paris and does not get better anywhere in this world: having breakfast at a Brasserie. Forget about breakfast in your hotel, even if it is included in the price. Just ignore the hotel offers and walk out the door, talk a short walk along the Paris streets and you will hit one of the Brasseries in no time. Find one with a terrace in the morning sun and you are good to go. Don’t expect a waiter out here, just walk inside, take a croissant from the bowl that is always waiting for you on the counter and order a « cafe au lait, » then sit in the sun and enjoy life as it was supposed to be.

My Brasserie at the morning of this final roadshow event was just 100 yards from the roadshow venue, and the place featured a rack of philosophical books for guests to enjoy at the start of their working day. What a country, what a city, what a place to start the day!

The Paris event was one of the smaller in the roadshow, with translation companies pushing the balance over documentation management. Most of the presentations were repetitions of the ones that were held before, but of course, that is mainly an issue for those who travel from city to city along with the roadshow itself.

The discussion groups were nice and focused, and I happened to be in one that focused on quality. We did have a good time at this small but focused meeting. One of the presentations, by Stephane Arnaud of Euroscript talked about shared augmented reality, where a tablet is used to transfer photos or live video between a service engineer in the company and a customer trying to figure out how to solve a problem. With a grid overlay on the image and audio connection, the service engineer can direct the customer to perform the right actions. A live demo showed that it does work in practice.

My own presentation went well, as usual, and caused quite a number of questions in the following breaks. Many companies seem to have a problem with legacy documentation that needs to be converted and modularized. Using FrameMaker as the basic ingredient for smooth transition proves to be a solution that many CMS providers have not come up with in the past. Where theoretically a CMS based on XML with its own built-in or custom editor might seem to be wonderful, building on the existing power of FrameMaker does have its advantages in real life.

After a successful roadshow, taking us through 6 countries in Northern Europe in just two weeks, I am looking forward to delivering a 3-hour workshop on this same theme on June 25th, the day before the Congility conference near London Gatwick. Note that there are still some spots available, both for the workshop and the conference.