The WritersUA User Assistance Symposium brings you a full day of information-packed instruction from four acknowledged industry experts. A laser focus on user assistance has always been the defining characteristic of the events produced by WritersUA. As the software industry moves forward, you'll want to make sure your user assistance skills and knowledge place you at the top of your profession.

This information-packed event will be valuable for technical communication newcomers as well as seasoned veterans. The networking at this event may be worth the price of admission all by itself! Take advantage of this opportunity to move to the leading edge of your profession. Register today and ensure your place at the WritersUA User Assistance Symposium. We look forward to seeing you in the Boston area!

If you're visiting from out-of-town, you might want to take some extra time and enjoy the Boston area. The city offers an incredible array of historical sites, a vibrant nightlife, and plenty of great restaurants and shopping.

Doug Bolin - Razorfish

Doug Bolin, a User Experience Lead for Razorfish, has over thirty years experience with content projects, including large-scale web, intranet and extranet sites, interactive webcasts, rich media, broadcast television and print. His expertise includes information architecture, content strategy, usability and strategy with a focus on user assistance and globalization. He also teaches graduate level seminars on information architecture, ePublishing, and writing for the web and new media.

Scott DeLoach - ClickStart

Scott is the founder of ClickStart (www.clickstart.net), a user experience design, consulting, and training company. Over the last 18 years, Scott has presented over 80 papers on embedded user assistance, web-based Help, interface design, usability, and CSS at conferences across the US and Canada and around the world. He has been developing online Help systems since 1992, is a certified Flare, RoboHelp, and Captivate instructor, and is the author of CSS to the Point. Scott holds a Master's Degree in Technical and Scientific Communication from Miami University. You can email Scott at scott@clickstart.net.

Stan Doherty - Verivue Inc.

Stan Doherty has been active as an educator and technical writing professional for 30+ years in the Boston area. Stan has taught communications and/or tech writing at Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Bentley University. He currently teaches technical writing and modular information development part time at Bentley University. Professionally, Stan has worked as a technical writer, documentation engineer, and writing manager at Lotus Development Corporation, Parametric Technologies Corporation, and Sun Microsystems Inc. He is currently Director of Technical Publications at Verivue Inc., a video server startup company. Stan has also been a voting member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee for five years and serves on its Learning, Business Documents, and Help subcommittees.

Joe Ganci - Dazzle Technologies Corp.

Joseph Ganci is President of Dazzle Technologies Corp., a custom training and learning company located outside Washington. D.C. Since 1983, he has been involved in every aspect of multimedia and learning development. Joe holds a Computer Science degree, and is a published author, having written several books and articles about e-Learning. He is widely considered a guru, for his expertise in e-Learning development, has taught classes and seminars at leading universities, in many government facilities, commercial firms, and educational institutions, and has spoken at many industry conferences. Joe is a Captivate Adobe Certified Expert. He strives to better the quality of e-Learning with practical approaches that work.

Paul O'Rear – Microsoft Corporation

Paul O’Rear has been working with Help technologies since Windows 3.0 and has developed a wide reputation for his expertise with all Microsoft Help engines. Prior to working for Microsoft, Paul worked with Sageline Publishing/Sageline Software for several years producing innovative extensions to WinHelp and HTML Help. Paul also worked as an independent software consultant via his company Helpful Solutions for several years contributing to the development of the Deva for Dreamweaver help authoring tool, among other ventures. In 1998, Paul became one of the Microsoft Help MVPs.

In 2002, Paul joined Microsoft Corporation, working in Developer Division contributing to the content architecture, management, building and testing of perhaps the largest set of content that Microsoft ships – MSDN/Visual Studio documentation. Paul has also had the privilege of overseeing Microsoft’s Help MVP program taking over from Peter Plamondon in 2004. Currently, Paul is a Program Manager facilitating internal and external adoption of a new Help engine, which will ship with Visual Studio 2010. Commonly referred to as “Help 3”, Paul is enjoying the opportunity to champion a potential successor to HTML Help 1.x.

Joe Welinske - WritersUA

Joe Welinske is the president of WritersUA, formerly known as WinWriters. WritersUA is a company devoted to providing training and information for user assistance professionals. The WritersUA/WinWriters Conference draws hundreds of attendees each year from around the world to share the latest in user assistance design and implementation. The free content on the WritersUA web site attracts over 20,000 visitors each month. Joe has been involved with software documentation development since 1984. Together with Scott Boggan and David Farkas, Joe authored two editions of the popular and pioneering book Developing Online Help for Windows. He has also taught online Help courses at the University of Washington and UC Santa Cruz. Joe received a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1981, and a M.S. in Adult Instructional Management from Loyola University in 1987.