"The Art of Proposal Writing" by Mr. Vasudev Murthy

Vasudev Murthy has a BE degree from Roorkee, an MS in computer science from Florida State, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. He is a Management Consultant whose clients include Citec (where he was the founder Director of the Citec Academy) and Austal Group. He was formerly with companies such as NEC and Deloitte & Touche. He was recently Chief Operating Officer at a Birla Software company. Apart from that, he has been a Visiting Professor at Indian Institute Management (IIM) Bangalore since last eight years and recently at TA Pai Management Institute Manipal where he teaches MIS and Management Consulting. His book "What the Raags told me," a novel based on 21 different classical Raags, was published by Rupa & Co. in August 2004.
 

"A Semiotic Approach to Technical Communication" by Mr. Sankara Sastry Rajanala

Sankara Rajanala works with Citec Information India as a Consultant. He has degrees in English literature (University of Hyderabad) and in English Linguistics (CIEFL, Hyderabad). In his 12-year career as writer and editor, he has worked among others, at Orient Longman, Cadence, TCS, and Oracle India; and SNS and e-cop.net in Singapore. Sankara is presently Education Manager of the STC India chapter. He is known for his contributions to the technical writing fraternity in India through groups like TWIN. He is the co-author of a language column called English for Special Purposes (ESP) in INDUS, the award-winning magazine of the STC India chapter. He has conducted several learning sessions and has taught technical writing.

"Technical Writing in User Experience Design" by Ms. Anupama Gummaraju

With about 6 years experience in the industry, Anupama is a group lead in the area of user experience, specializing in technical communication. She works with the Communication Design Group (CDG) at Infosys Technologies Limited, Bangalore. CDG specializes in user research, user interface design, user assistance, usability evaluation, multimedia, and graphic design.

"eDocumentation - A New Perspective" by Mr. Nanda Kumar Rajaram

Nanda, Sr Manager (Customer Fulfilment), leads the Customer Fulfilment division of Epiance. He has over 8 years experience in Project Management of e-Learning products and solution delivery. He is at the forefront of interacting with Epiance's customers in North America and Asia Pac regions. He holds a Post Graduation in Management from Pondicherry Central University. He is also a PMP-certified Project Management professional from Project Management Institute (PMI, USA)..

"Financial Services – An Emerging Market for Technical Writers" by Mr. Shoumitro Goswami

Shoumitro recently returned to India to set up AustalGroup, a financial services outsourcing firm that specializes in providing high-end research and analysis to global financial services clients in areas such as investment banking, equity research, hedge funds, venture capital, private equity and commercial banking. Shoumitro was most recently employed in Investment Banking at Banc of America Securities in San Francisco. He spent his time there in their Technology group in Corporate Finance sharing his time between the Software, Semiconductor, Communication Equipment and EMS sectors. Prior to that he was employed with Morgan Stanley where he spent his time in corporate finance, mergers & acquisitions and equity research.

Shoumitro graduated from Columbia University with a BA in Economics and East Asian Studies.

Technical Communication Quiz by Mr. Sandeep Balakrishna

Sandeep has over 6 years of experience in technical communication. He is currently working at a product development company in Bangalore. He is an administrator of the Technical Writers of India (TWIN) mailing list. He is known for his contribution to the technical writing fraternity in India through his TWIN posts. Sandeep is in the process of setting up a technical writing blog.

Pre-conference Workshop on "Current Trends in eLearning" by Mr. S.R.D. Vijay Kumar

The workshop will he held from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM on Friday, 25th March at Hotel Rama, 40/2, Lavelle Road, Bangalore. The workshop will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to eLearning

• Types of eLearning

• eLearning market scenario

• Emerging trends

• Growth of eLearning as a BPO segment

• Demo of Epiplex, an eLearning tool

Speaker profile: A Post Graduate University Degree holder with over 30 years of result-proven experience gained in the IT Industry in India and the Arabian Gulf. At present serving as Founder & CEO of Equitek, Bangalore, Founder & CEO of TeCOM, Bangalore, Mentor – Hew Softech Private Limited, Bangalore, Associate, Cosmos Inc, Jenison, MI – USA, and Associate, E.Horner & Associates, Sydney, Australia. Vijay has published several inspirational and thought provoking articles in various business publications like Business India, Business Standard, Financial Express, Businessgyan etc. Also, he was the architect of India's first ever BPO (3rd party) between Intellect Data Systems, an ERP major for the global Hospitality industry and HVSI, the world's largest Consultant to the Hospitality industry in 2000.

Fee: Rs. 100 for non-STC members. Free for STC members.

February 5, Delhi

STC conducted its first Learning session in Delhi on 5th Feb 2005 in the midst of extremely generous hospitality of Solidcore, New Delhi.

Around 16 people including the prime speaker attended the learning session cum meet up and in my opinion the meet up was quiet successful in terms of the discussions we had done at the end of it. I think companies should have provision to encourage their employees to attend such meet-ups and seminars which will definitely have a positive effect on their overall skill level and professionalism.

Newbies can definitely benefit from such meetings as most of them being in the 0-4 year category learned a lot from the discussions, the presentations and also from informal talks done in middle of the session. There was a presentation on XML basics and FM 7.0 and which was like a goldmine for beginners and which doubled as a refresher for experts in the field.

Asit Pant provided a splendid introduction session on XML and its capacity and how companies involving in documentation can benefit from the new technology. It was indeed one of the best presentations that I had ever come upon. "Simple, Precise and To the Point" would be the right words to describe the presentation level and Pant's immense exposure to the tools of the trade.

The presentation included the basic building blocks of XML and how to generate XML documents from within Frame Maker 7.0. The basic difference between structured and Unstructured Frame maker and usage of both versions was also discussed in the round table meeting. It was also estimated that sooner or later, only documents generated with XML compliance will be retained and all other documents in an organization will eventually be transformed to a XML compliant format.

A round table talk was held in the session to discuss various issues related to the technical writers and effective solutions for such problems. Few typical issues were also discussed regarding which many different opinions came up from the expert panels. Formally, the roundtable talks discussed these points:
 

• What should be the effective strategy one might keep in mind while looking for information from different people such as SME, Programmers etc?

• What is the ideal speed of work for a Technical Writer i.e. Pages/day?

• Should a Technical Writer be having a strong back in technical topics such as Programming and Testing Or should he be only involved with the writing part?

• Use of XML as compared to currently defined standards such as HTML or DHTML.

• Hybrid formats that include benefits of both XML and HTML technology such as Miva format.
   

We also had few discussion and informal plans to have similar meet ups at least once in a month and also to start training sessions by inviting experts in the field having expertise in different tools, technologies and best practices in Technical Writing industry.

The session was attended by professionals from variety of different companies such as Interrasoft, TCS, Cadence, Solidcore, Writeline, Sukhmani Software and few more prestigious names which in spite of my best efforts, could not be recalled. Cadence received the prize for maximum participation by having 3 professionals in the learning session.

Various experts provided different vies on the topics mentioned above and in the end, an informal conclusion was formed on the topic with several different opinions. The kind hospitality offered by Solidcore was recognized by each attendee especially after the free lunch hosted by it. Almost every attendee thanked Vipul and Harinder, both from Solidcore, for their kind hospitality.

Overall, the STC learning session left a memorable impression in the minds of attendees and in my personal opinion, everyone really enjoyed the time spend in the session. The attendees will definitely look forward to attend future STC sessions taking place in NCR region.

Compiled by Gurpreet Singh, CEO, Sukhmani Software, New Delhi