Giselle Conyette

Medworxx, Helping Hospitals Save Lives

Medworxx develops a strategic software platform that hospitals use to communicate, aggregate, and analyze knowledge. Today, more than 400,000 users in over 250 hospitals throughout North America depend on the Medworxx software platform to leverage the power of knowledge to increase competency, reduce redundancy and costs while simplifying the distribution of knowledge to staff and patients.

Launched in 2007, the Medworxx Emergency Readiness System (ERS) helps hospitals provide patient safety and care during a disaster. A web-based, hospital-centric application, ERS addresses the Joint Commission mandated all-hazards approach to emergency management and is NIMS, ICS, and HICS compatible. Hospitals use this application to address all four phases of emergency management: mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery with the ultimate goal of saving lives while preparing for and mitigating the effects of disasters.

Since hospitals play a key role in responding to emergencies, they need to respond rapidly, effectively, and efficiently, while complying with federal, state, or provincial mandates that govern emergency preparation and response. ERS tracks resources, skills, exercises and drills, provides readiness assessment reports, and automates workflows and processes to enable hospital staff to aggregate and disseminate information in real time to the right people. This role-based application is easy to use and highly flexible, and effectively supports your hospital’s emergency management requirements.

With ERS less paper is used since it is web-based. For example, staff can complete the incident message form online then upload it to a centralized location where staff can share information. And, hospital staff can update the form in real time as they take action on handling the disaster.

ERS reduces energy costs since the software subscription and license provides hospital staff access to a centralized server where they can store information on hundreds of patients in one place.

ERS saves time. Medworxx maintains the server hardware and software at a centralized location so hospital staff can use their time on what they do best – save lives.

These are just a few benefits of the ERS system. To find out more about the Medworxx product suite, go to www.medworxx.com.

InterCall helps green our planet with conferencing

InterCall, a subsidiary of West Corporation, is the largest conferencing services provider in the world. Founded in 1991, InterCall offers more ways for businesses to connect with customers and partners, across town or around the world, by offering the broadest range of audio, event, web and video conferencing services. 

Like many companies, InterCall is answering the call to practice environmentally friendly policies and work practices: 

InterCall marketing educates employees on "working green" through a company-wide weekly newsletter and encourages employees to work with environmental charities.

• Training is 90% remote, conducted through web, video and audio conferencing. Since these solutions reduce corporate travel, businesses are more productive and they save time and money. For example, 1400 trainees per month participate in public customer trainings. If they traveled by car, they would have to visit 350 locations, averaging 35 miles per round trip. With virtual training, there is a savings of 6.6 tons of CO2 emitted into the environment. As a result, there is an increase in customer retention and adoption of services; plus, the average customer usage increased by 50%!

• InterCall is a Platinum sponsor of Climate Action, a joint development of Sustainable Development International and the United Nations Environment Program. Together, InterCall and Climate Action educate businesses, governments and non-profits on how to reduce their carbon footprint and impact on climate change.

• On-site managers sponsor recycling programs for printer ink, aluminum, paper and cardboard, and implements policies on electrical usage like monitor standby and after-hours policies.

• InterCall encourages telecommuting to reduce the carbon emissions from corporate travel. Eight percent of their 2000+ employees telecommute full-time. Another 13% can telecommute part-time.

How InterCall provides green services

Helping customers become green: InterCall customers are integrating conferencing services into their green initiatives with great success. Esurance, a leading auto insurance company in the US, has saved carbon emissions by using conferencing services for interviews, training and more. Listen to this webinar where Esurance discusses their exciting green initiative.

Raising awareness: At GreenConferencing.com, InterCall educates organizations, customers and government on using conferencing and other practices to reduce carbon emissions and operate businesses in a more sustainable manner. This website includes links to educational resources, partner environmental organizations, and a blog on current topics that effect companies' efforts to "work green".

Leading green initiative with conferencing: In a recent survey, when asked about what companies are doing to reduce its carbon footprint, the top response was conferencing tools as a way to cut back on travel (66%).

Giving green rewards: InterCall launched the "Green Rewards" program where customers can cash in "Green Points" for every minute they use their dedicated conferencing account. With these points, customers can do green things like plant trees, buy carbon offsets, and purchase green office products. 

How green are you? GreenConferencing.com offers a short quiz as a fun way to see how green you are! InterCall plants a tree for every quiz submission. So far, InterCall planted over 5,000 trees!

Want to learn more?

Go to http://blog.greenconferencing.com and http://blog.intercall.com.

Question for you

What is your company doing to green our planet? Let me know in the comments...

Companies face increasing urgency to communicate green initiatives to stakeholders

--- As seen in Backbone magazine, May 21 2008

TORONTO, ON, May 20 2008 – Communicating your company’s green initiatives can reap great benefits such as increased customer loyalty, enhanced employee morale, and increased value to the company’s brand image. With the threat of increasing climate change, companies have the opportunity to not only increase profits and reduce costs; but to make a difference, and even change the world.

Billions of dollars are being poured into green IT measures such as virtualization technologies to save energy, optimization of data centers to lower utility bills, e-waste reduction programs to mitigate the health and environmental risks of lead and toxins, and conferencing technologies to reduce CO2 emissions from travel and commuting. Companies are even going as far as forging partnerships in reforestation programs and funding community green programs. With so much time invested in such great initiatives, where do corporate leaders find the time to communicate their green initiatives to stakeholders such as clients, suppliers, partners, staff, and potential employees?

According to Giselle Conyette, Director of Con-Yet Incorporated, a professional writing outsource for technology companies, “The public needs to know that a company is “going green” because being green is now part of a company’s brand. Clients prefer to buy from companies who practice green business. And, new recruits are beginning to examine what companies are doing to save the planet before signing on.”

While getting your message out there is critical, Giselle advises companies to avoid green washing, which is making your company look more environmentally friendly than it really is. For time-strapped corporate leaders, Conyette advises encouraging employees through your code of conduct, policies, guidelines, training, best practices and rewards, and informing customers, suppliers and potential clients through the company newsletter, blog, website, press releases, podcasts, white papers, and webinars. This is a very exciting time to do business - what companies do today, can change tomorrow.

About Con-Yet Incorporated
As a professional writing company, Con-Yet Incorporated helps companies creatively capture technology products in words. Director Giselle Conyette provides over 12 years of experience in high-quality research, interviewing and writing on technologies for clients in various industries such as health care, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecommunications, government, banking, and energy. Clients rely on the writing they outsource to Con-Yet Incorporated because they consistently receive a complete and reliable product back: content is written clearly, easy to understand, and accurate. Dealing in leading-edge technical and business information, confidentiality is upheld. Con-Yet Incorporated is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. A tip sheet on How to write effectively when you’re in a real hurry is available by emailing conyette@sympatico.ca.

For information, contact:
Giselle Conyette
Director, Con-Yet Incorporated
Technology Creatively Captured in Words
Voice  416-593-7987
Email  conyette@sympatico.ca
Blog    http://giselleconyette.typepad.com/

Microsoft Word Versus Adobe FrameMaker For Creating Professional Documents

I use Word and FrameMaker to write creatively about technology. Both tools can produce professional documents but they each have their advantages and disadvantages.

Word is:

• Easy to learn
• Not as expensive as most desktop publishing tools
• Bundled with other applications such as PowerPoint, Excel and Access
• Good for simple documents where there is no complex numbering or formatting
• Great for small documents (less than 50 pages)

However, Word falls down when it comes to producing large documents. I've seen Word literally blow up documents where I had to spend hours rebuilding them from scratch. And, at 12:00 midnight while rushing to meet a major deadline, that is no fun!

There are problems with numbering too - especially with numbered procedures. If you move a numbered procedure to a different section of your document, chances are your procedure numbering will continue from the new previous procedure, and you’ll have to restart the step numbering manually.

FrameMaker has several advantages. I'll name a few:

1. It's 99.9% bulletproof. Case in point: I was producing system documentation for a leading financial company. I had to update documents for 30 subsystems, which each subsystem being a chapter. The documents were complex with numbered headings, procedures, complex graphics and screens, and numerous cross references. Near the end of the contract, my coworker and I noticed that FrameMaker was taking a few minutes to generate the table of contents. To our surprise, we discovered the document totaled 1400 pages! I had only a few months to produce all these documents, so you can imagine I was working at top speed and multitasking like crazy - and FrameMaker crashed only once.
2. You can create multiple versions of a document quickly and easily. For example, with FrameMaker’s conditional text feature, you can single source printed documents for different audiences.
3. Cross referencing is very versatile. You can cross reference within your document and across documents. And, you can customize the cross reference formatting to include the chapter number and quotation marks, and include text before the page number. For example, your cross reference can say: See Chapter 1, "Introduction" on page 10.
4. You can use variables to customize complex numbering series. For example, your procedures can have numerical numbering for the main steps and alphabetical numbering for the sub-steps.
5. You can customize and save table formats. For example, you can create a table for your procedures where one column has the step number, and the other column has the action and result.
6. You can put a logo or a graphic in a paragraph style. This is very useful if you need a "hazard" symbol in a warning or an "exclamation mark" in an important note.

FrameMaker 8 has some very powerful new features:

Unicode support. You can produce documents in Russian, Greek, Turkish and other languages that use non-Latin alphabets.

Rich Media support. FrameMaker 8 supports Flash and Acrobat 3D, which makes it possible to produce interactive PDF files where you can include animation and voice over. Now, you can create much more engaging online documentation.

Tracking text changes. Like Word, you can now track text changes easily. And, you can use the History palette to highlight, accept, and reject text changes, and to undo multiple changes.

Dita Support. You can create and distribute topic-oriented information in XML and create DITA maps.

Microsoft Office 2007 support. You can import content created in Word and Excel 2007.

Although FrameMaker is expensive and has a huge learning curve, I vote for FrameMaker hands down because of its robustness and versatility.

Which tool do you prefer to create documents? FrameMaker or Word?

Let me know in the comments…

Website or Blog?

A lot of my friends and colleagues have websites; and lately, I’ve been feeling like an oddity not having one. After all, everyone has a website, right? Besides, a website can help me publicize my business, increase my sales, establish my online presence, make new connections, and do business all over the world without leaving my office.

Recently, I asked a well-respected and established entrepreneur if I should get a blog. He told me a blog will be a waste of my time because I’ll spend too much time blogging and not enough time establishing my business. So, I took the plunge and began to strategize my website.

My website designer friend is busy until the end of May because she is in very high demand. I cannot wait until May. I want my website now, so I decided to design it myself. I soon realized that I don’t have a clue on how to design my website. I have so many questions:

What colour scheme should I use? Should I use red, white and blue? Red, grey and white? Or, brown, green and white? I surfed the internet to find a colour scheme I like. The more examples I saw, the harder it was to decide.

How do I design my website? I considered using web design software like FrontPage, but I don't have strong web design skills and I don’t want to spend too much fighting with technology. I checked out some websites that specialize in designing templates. There is a myriad of choices, and I got lost in a sea of confusion.

What navigation system should I use? Should my navigation bar be on the left or at the top? Should I use square buttons? Round buttons? Links? Smiles? I don’t want too many special effects like spinning buttons or flashing arrows. All I want is a plain, simple website. At this point, a few hours passed; but I pressed on.

What background should I use? This is easy to decide. I don't want a flashy or colored background. I want the text to be easy on the eye so my visitors can read it quickly and easily.

Then, I have to think about page design, layout, fonts, typefaces, graphics, images, navigational rules... And, I haven't even thought about the content. It was the end of the day, and I still haven’t design a single pixel of my website.

Discouraged, I sank in my chair as I stared at my blank computer screen.

The next day, I went to an excellent seminar on how to get free publicity for your business. The trainer recommended we start a blog! After the seminar, I spoke with him and told him my dilemma. He recommended that I read the book Blog Wild! by Andy Wibbels. I hurried to the bookstore and snapped up the last copy. (I guess it's selling fast.) I read it, and I was sold. I decided to start my blog.

I checked out blogging software and was shocked as to how easy it is to use. All I have to do is sign up, choose the layout and design, and boom! I'm ready to blog. Just like that! It took me five minutes. And, I don't have to design the template. All I have to do is focus on creating great content, and I love it!

Who knows, I may get a website one day - but not today.

Want an immediate online presence? Start a blog. Now.