Online Help Conference Europe 2007 report for technical authors

Last week's Online Help Conference Europe 2007 was a great success and great fun.

1. There seems to be an overall consensus on the future direction of online user assistance/online Help:

- Don't expect Microsoft to lead with new standard Help technologies that we can all adopt.
- A move towards more portal based information support.
- A move towards more collaborative authoring, incorporating content from others.
- Some technical authors are likely to be taking on more of an editing role. Others are likely to be focused purely on writing.

2. On stage, we saw Adobe demonstrating RoboHelp 7, followed by Madcap demonstrating Flare. Madcap probably chalked up a win on the day: its XML, table management and list ordering capabilities seemed to give it the edge.

3. One vendor managed to display a slide containing "it's" instead of "its". There were a hundred technical authors eager to tell him about it at the end of his presentation.

4. There were some very good case studies.

5. You can see our photos from the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/13696181@N00/tags/onlinehelpconferenceeurope2007/