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DocTrain: Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication

Wednesday, May 07, 2008 — posted by Sarah

RJ Jacquez of Adobe
Senior Product Evangelist, TechComm Suite and e-Learning initiatives

(This is the first time he has presented this content.)

There are now four generations in the workforce; the youngest belong to Generation Y, the "video generation," born between 1981 and 2000. This generation assumes use of the Internet and technology such as picture phones, iPhone, email, instant messages, blogs, podcasts, social networking and bookmarking, tagging, wikis, and Second Life.

Adobe is organizing the first-ever Virtual Trade Show -- a conference on e-learning (!) that will take place entirely online with no offline equivalent. They're calling it the industry's "first true desktop trade show." It will take place in Second Life or something similar.

Internet video is growing explosively:
RJ believes that people are expecting their documentation support to be delivered in this medium. They are looking for screencasts or short videos to help them. Adobe TV, which has instructional content for design professionals, is now delivering high-definition TV on the web.

95% of online video traffic is Flash-based.

Adobe is claiming widest "reach" in the world -- 250 million PDF files on the public web and 98% installation rate of Flash Player. He's also put Adobe AIR on this slide, presumably because they would like for it to become the next standard.

Nice demo of PDF with 3D. The example is a brake assembly. Being able to manipulate the model is kind of fun, but the ability to remove pieces of the brake assembly part by part is really useful. The page has a series of buttons that let you specify which parts you want to remove. You can see the demo file here.

Demo of PDF with animation. Very nice. We have an example of this in our Web 2.0 white paper, available here (PDF, 1.7 MB).

And now Adobe AIR. His example is Buzzword help.

(Side note: RJ likes the phrase "really, really cool.")

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