informativeMedia - Online Help Conference Europe 2003

Like just about every other conference around the world, Online Help Conference Europe was affected by the current economic malaise. But although the attendance numbers were down on previous years, the people who did attend were rewarded with plenty of stimulating presentations.

Compared to previous conferences, this year's focus was less on technology and more on finding practical solutions to the problems that face today's technical authors. The diminished interest in technology was predictable. In the past, the world of online help tended to be pulled along by the evolution of Microsoft's technologies. This situation has changed. Some months ago, Microsoft pulled the plug on its Windows Help 2.0 and announced that it would come up with a different, unspecified form of user support some time in the future. Alternative technologies, such as Sun's JavaHelp, are advancing slowly and unconvincingly.

As a result, authors and the developers of help-authoring tools (HATs) are less certain about which technological directions to follow. Instead they are giving more attention to issues such as effective methods to single-source publications and ways to provide dynamic, server-based help. These to subjects featured most prominently in the conference's program, but speakers addressed the usual diversity of topics.

This year's exhibitors made up an interesting selection. Several of the established authoring-tool vendors were represented. Dr. Steve Cartmell was on hand to talk about Doc-To-Help, and Quadralay products were presented by their UK distributors, Mekon Ltd. However, after supporting the conference for many years, eHelp had chosen to be absent. This is unfortunate as many people would have liked to know eHelp's reasons for offering a new, Flash-based help format with RoboHelp X4.

Republico demonstrated two new tools, XDK and ReWorX. But of all the tools demonstrated, AuthorIT attracted the most interest. It provides an authoring environment quite different from its competitors. More importantly, it also offers significantly more features for managing the way a team of authors updates and reuses information. It will become an even more attractive proposition if future versions provide better integration with Microsoft Project or other common project management tools.

Perhaps because of the conference's slimmed-down format this year, some important topics received no or scant mention. How should technical authors respond to accessibility guidelines and regulations when developing help? How can we provide effective user assistance for small, mobile, computing devices? How can we use page-access statistics to improve server-based help? I suspect that some of these topics will be addressed next year.