Australian Unity Case Study at Conference in Seattle

The Sixth Annual WinWriters Online Help Conference, held in Seattle from 8th to 11th of February 1998, attracted 900 people from all around the world. An impressive array of speakers presented over 50 sessions in four different "streams", explaining new technologies, techniques, and software tools.

Tony Self, Business Development Manager and founder of HyperWrite, was again one of the speakers, presenting a Case Study of one of the first context-sensitive HTML Help systems. The system, developed in Melbourne for Australian Unity, provides online help for users of the Front Office system. HyperWrite also developed a software application called HHTEST to assist in the testing of the context-sensitivity before deployment.

HTML Help is a new technology from Microsoft, developed to replace the Windows Help (WinHelp) environment with one based on HTML. HTML Help features compilation and compression, an Application Programming Interface to Windows, author-defined indexing, self-contained boolean text searching, and a dedicated viewer based on Internet Explorer. HyperWrite was one of the first companies in the world to work with this new technology.

International Interest

HyperWrite's work has often attracted international interest. HyperWrite's Tony Self has been presenting talks at the major WinWriters conference in Seattle for many years. An interesting Australian Unity case study was the topic for the 1998 session. More recently, Tony has presented topics including DITA for Help and Responsive Web Design.

When presenting talks outside Australia, HyperWrite's Tony Self tries to share a bit of the "lucky country" with the rest of the world. This sharing sometimes involves handing out samples of Vegemite to often unwilling participants!