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AODC 2006
Rydges Tradewinds Cairns 3rd - 5th May 2006

The ninth annual Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference, AODC 2006, was held at the Rydges Tradewinds, Cairns, from Wednesday 3rd to Friday 5th May. It was a fantastic conference, with a great group of enthusiastic and friendly professionals attending.

AODC 2006 featured almost 20 sessions covering techniques, technologies, tools and case studies, presented by international and local expert speakers. Session topics include DITA, structured authoring, XML, usability, editing, migration to Microsoft Vista, user assistance, dynamic HTML and case studies. For all the details, see the agenda. Unfortunately the conference proceedings are not available for sale.

Highlights included "Choco" Munday's lively and amusing talk on Word Abuse,  Carol Barnum's interesting session on Indexing vs Full Text Search and Dr Tom James' presentation about Better Authoring through CSS and Micro-structures.

See the photos of the Cairns conference in the AODC 2006 Photo Album

Cairns Butterfly

Read about AODC 2006 in this report for Southern Communicator by Janet Taylor.

Two pre-conference workshops were held on Tuesday 2nd May, "CSS, Scripting and XML Primer" with Dave Gash and "Where Now? Tools and Technologies for Online Documentation" with Tony Self.

The Pursue IT Welcome Reception outdoors by the pool was the perfect end to the first day. Delegates and speakers enjoyed the opportunity to network over a drink or two, and then went off to dinner at various restaurants around Cairns.

Uncle Dave's Trivia Night and dinner on Thursday was a lot of fun. The setting was the Court House Hotel, with the old dock put to use "punishing" wayward participants. The Thorny Devils were the winners, being the only team to work out the complex repeating pattern of answers "a, b, c, d, a, b, c, d"! In the spirit  of fun, the losing team and the fifth placed team also received equally worthless prizes!

The Trade Exhibition was held in the unique tropical setting of a shaded terrace overlooking Trinity Bay. The weather was perfect for delegates to talk to vendors TechWriter Placements, AuthorIT, Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, Elkera, MadCap and Microway.

 

Sponsors

HyperWrite greatly appreciates our sponsors and exhibitors, who contributed greatly to the success of this event.

Adobe AuthorIT

Pursue IT

 Christchurch Polytechnic

Madcap Software Logo

TechWriter logo
 

Microsoft

About AODC

Since the very first Australasian Online Documentation Conference in Melbourne in 1998, the conference has developed a reputation as the premier event for technical writers, help developers, Web authors and documentation developers from Australia and New Zealand. Our speaker list reads like a Who's Who of documentation, as we strive to ensure that experts in techniques and technologies are available to share their knowledge and expertise. The conference is also a great place to network with other documentation professionals.

AODC is jointly hosted by HyperWrite and WritersUA, organisers of the famous Online Help Conference in the US. HyperWrite is an Australian hypertext and Internet company that has been a local pioneer and continuing leader in online documentation development.