September 14th's Progression Evening's Special Speakers

Julia Oulette - Adobe Illustrator

Julia is an application developer and designer at Pixel Pros Inc. in Cambridge, Ontario. With 15 years in the graphics industry, she enjoys pushing graphic editing software to the max. From Illustrator 6.0 and the introduction of the gradient tool to Illustrator CS5 with perspective drawing and bristle brushes, Julia is passionate about using Illustrator to its highest potential. She also organizes and regularly presents at the Waterloo Region Technology and Design Meetup, a monthly meeting of designers and developers that share techniques, compare software tools and demo web and graphic applications. For fun, Julia loves to explore new places, play baseball and cook!

Peter Kehoe - Adobe Photoshop

Peter Kehoe worked in journalism as a reporter, photographer, and editor on weekly, bi-weekly, tri-weekly, and two daily newspapers before moving to monthly and quarterly trade magazines. He also worked on local cable productions and had a stint as an editorial assistant at TSN. He eventually opened his own communications business and published a magazine while working as a freelance writer before starting to teach communications in high school in 2003. He now concentrates on multimedia projects and manuscripts.

A graduate of McMaster (History), Sheridan (Print Journalism), and Ryerson (Journalism) before returning to teacher's college at Brock, Kehoe lived through the transitions caused by the introduction and ongoing upgrades in desktop publishing (Quark to InDesign) and related software (Photoshop and Illustrator) that have transformed the publishing industry over the last 20 years.

Shannon Lerner - Adobe Acrobat

Shannon has several years experience analysing business forms for paper and electronic distribution. She has worked extensively with Adobe Acrobat and LiveCycle, concentrating on e-forms and accessibility features.

Currently Shannon is a technical writer and forms analyst for Manulife Financial. She also develops intelligent forms and other small-scale solutions for local businesses and non-profits. For more information about Shannon, visit crimsonoak.ca.

David Jaarsma - Microsoft Word

David Jaarsma graduated from the University of Waterloo’s Rhetoric and Professional Writing (RPW) co-op program in 2000. He worked for two years as a technical writer at Hummingbird Ltd. where he developed a single-sourcing methodology for FrameMaker-to-WinHelp and FrameMaker-to-CHM workflows using Quadralay WebWorks.

After leaving Hummingbird, David worked for seven years as an IT business analyst at Toronto Pearson International Airport. While there, he defined templates and processes for the IT department, wrote functional requirements, business cases, and RFPs, and created a number of Word macros to complement the templates. David’s current position is the Lead of a small team of web developers that create internal websites and collaborative sites (wikis, blogs, etc.). He is also known as the “macro guy” for Word templates, and has developed a customized Word-to-HTML conversion tool in VBA.

Jessie-Lee Schwartz - Microsoft Word

Jessie-Lee Schwartz is a Technical Editor on a communications and information management team at a Waterloo-based technology company. She is responsible for ensuring the quality of her team’s deliverables, creating, maintaining, and promoting templates for the CIO Organization, and helping groups work collaboratively. She also serves as the co-champion of the Editing Community of Practice where she facilitates both a monthly and an online forum that connects editors and those in an editing-related role across the global enterprise. Prior to joining this company in 2008, Jessie-Lee spent seven years at North American Compendiums, a local publishing company, as a proofreader/copy editor and assistant office manager. When she’s not in the office, Jessie-Lee enjoys hanging out with her family, reading, hiking, and volunteering her time with kids in the community.

Bernard Aschwanden - Framemaker

Bernard Aschwanden is a recognized publishing technologies expert, an Adobe Certified Expert, a Certified Technical Trainer, and the author of numerous articles on xml-based publishing and single sourcing. He is the founder and President of Publishing Smarter.

In addition to his publishing background and speaking tours, Bernard teaches a variety of courses. These include XML, DITA, CMS tools and related technologies, best practices for structured authoring, content management, and tools such as FrameMaker and XMetaL. He also works with clients to convert legacy content, analyze documentation, review workflows, and identify best practices in technical communications.

Bernard is a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication and the immediate past President of the Toronto STC. He is a professor in the continuing education Technical Communications program with Seneca@York, on the advisory board for the Humber College Technical Communications program, and remains active in the STC delivering in-person seminars and online webinars to members around the world.

Christine McKarney - Robohelp

Christine McKarney has been a Technical Communicator for 15 years and has been working at Campana Systems in Waterloo for seven years. As GoldCare lead, she is responsible for project management of GoldCare writing assignments as well as producing her share of release notes, guides, training videos and website updates. Campana writers use RoboHelp 7 to generate HTML output – no paper for their clients. Christine has managed to obtain the dubious distinction of RoboHelp Go-To Person among her coworkers and is constantly amazed at the things that RoboHelp will and will not do.