Due to product release pressures I’ve not had much time to look at the new version of Author-it, let alone get the SQL database setup so the rest of my team can get it installed and starting having a play.

Whilst we are getting some training organised, I’m confident that we are smart enough to figure out a lot of the basics ourselves (I’ve used Author-it before so can guide them a little) leaving the training for the harder things such as variants.

Having finally sourced space on a server my next task will be to setup the database on SQL Express. This is a cutdown version of Microsoft SQL Server, with much the same functionality but a maximum database size of 4GB. Some initial size estimates suggest we are WAY off that so I’m confident it’ll see us through the next few years worth of content creation.

Alongside this I’ve also been involved in what can only be described as a content audit across the company. I’m lucky that I have a colleague who is as keen as I am on making sure the right people have the right information, and that our information needs to be easy to find and maintain. She works in Product Marketing so there is a fair amount of crossover. At present we are mired in spreadsheet hell, but it’s starting to come together and, in the long run, I’m sure the various consumers of product information will start to see the benefits.

I do seem to moving away from being involved in new feature design work which I will miss, but for the meantime there is a bigger void that I’m aiming to fill with the ultimate aim of rounding out our product offering.

So, exciting times ahead and hopefully a lot of good lessons I can share with you.

Notes and thoughts from Day 1 of the User Assistance Conference

Session 1 – Tony Self – Emerging Help Delivery Technologies
It’s been quite a while since I heard Tony speak but as ever he provided an entertaining, if somewhat limited, presentation. Covering the various types of help viewing technologies he nicely summarised some of the available choices including the features to look out for, including the ability to wrap up an online help system in its own application (using technology like Adobe AIR). It was interesting to hear some Web 2.0 features making their way into online help technologies, including voting and commenting facilities which would give you direct feedback from the people using your help system.

Session 2 – Joe Welinske – Write Mote, Write Less
Embracing the Value of Crafted Words and Images
Another regular speaker and Joe was certainly fired up, challenging us all from the outset of his presentation to consider how we work in far more detail than we currently do. First up he suggests that we should be writing fewer words whilst making sure those words are correct and so lessen the impact on the reader, providing just the information they need and nothing more.

And then he hit on something that I’ve previously mentioned here (although Joe nailed it much better than I did), namely allocating writing resource to the highest priority pieces of documentation work, rather than the traditional approach of documenting everything. It’s a simple approach that, when combined with better writing, leads the craft of technical communications to provide much higher value to the business which is good news for all of us.

Session 3 – Sonia Fuga – DITA & WordPress Solution for Flexible User Assistance
A showcase style presentation of a stunningly simple concept. With a little bit of coding work (building a DITA importer to get XML content into the WordPress database), the team at Northgate offer a web-based help system which allows users to add their own notes and to vote for useful information, and which is can receive updates with new content with each release.

How? By using WordPress features. Notes are left as comments, votes are left using a WordPress plugin, and the updateable content is controlled by only allowing the customer (who has access to the WordPress admin screen) to create Pages, leaving the Posts controlled by Northgate. I use WordPress for this website, and spoke to Sonia in the evening to confirm some of the finer details. It’s a very clever use of WordPress, and I hope Northgate release their DITA importer to the open source community!

Session 4 – Question and Rants
A short session with four speakers each giving a two minute ‘rant’ and then taking questions. Nothing particularly noteworthy came of this but it’s a good addition to the usual style of presentations and made for a little bit of light relief.

Session 5 – Dave Gash – True Separation of Content, Format, Structure and Behaviour
Another familiar name, Dave is always entertaining and a very dynamic speaker and in this session he even managed to make the somewhat mundane topics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interesting!

Outlining some basic principles he showed how you could take an HTML file, full of embedded behaviours (javascript), style rules (CSS), and content and strip out all four parts into a more manageable set of files. This way, holding the style and behaviours in referenced files, you can make changes to either and have them ‘ripple’ through all of your deliverable.

Admittedly this was all done by hand but the basic principles are something that you should be following if you have that kind of output.

Session 6 – Matthew Ellison – User-centred Design of Context-sensitive Help
Interesting presentation by Matthew which started a little slowly, covering the history of context-sensitive help before taking us onto the idea of task support clusters. Originally presented by Michael Hughes at the WritersUA conference, the premise is to offer the user a smarter landing page, referred to as Keystone Concept topics here.

The key to a successful Keystone Concept topic is not to limit what is presented, and to consider that it should be different depending on the context from which it was launched, with the ultimate aim of getting the user back on task as quickly as possible. This includes any form of tips and hints, and crucially suggests NOT to include the obvious stuff (don’t answer questions that users will never have!). This mirrors part of the theme from Joe’s talk early in the day, and certainly seems to be a sensible goal given the business (time and resource) pressures we are all under.

After that, I had a few beers and a chat with some other delegates, and as ever it was great to hear that most of us have similar issues, problems and solutions.

I’ll post my notes from Day 2 of the conference tomorrow.

Work smarter, they say, so that’s what we are trying to do. In fact I’d hope that is what we are all trying to do but, like everyone else, it’s natural that once you have a process or a tool that works for you, you tend not to look about for a replacement.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, they say. But sometimes you need to break things, you need to reach the point where you know that accepting some pain, and possibly a small backwards step, will benefit you in the long run. So whilst it will be a wrench to leave our FrameMaker/Webworks based system, I firmly believe it will benefit us in the long run, and by “us” I refer to both the company and the Publications team I look after.

So, with Author-it licenses received, the first steps will be taken towards a database publishing system that will make it easier for us to work with the Training department, and ultimately make it far easier to publish the information our users require. It’s the first step down a long road.

Of course we won’t actually be breaking anything, and the migration of content and our working processes will take some time, as will learning the full capabilities and limitations of our new tool, but I’m kinda excited by the entire thing. I’m convinced if we are smart about how we handle the transition it will prove beneficial and, as I work with some really smart people, I’m sure we’ll flush out further benefits as we go along.

Consider this advanced warning that, for the next few months, I’ll largely be focussing on our transition from FrameMaker to Author-it. If you have any questions along the way, please ask, I’ll answer in as much detail as I can (company sensitivities will, of course, be my censor).

Ahh the internet is full of simple pleasures, like Wordle.

Give it the URL of your blog, a chunk of text, or your del.icio.us username and you get something like this (click for fullsize, requires Java):

No-one reads the documentation anyway, so why do we persist in writing user guides, instruction manuals and all the other types of document-centric information silos that we all quietly loathe creating in the first place?

Unless you have a contractual agreement to compile information into a document, it’s our job to figure out how best to get the right information to the user at the right time. It’s down to us, no-one else.

And I, for one, have failed to do my best, instead I’ve hidden behind the usual arguments of “ohh but that was how it was when I got here”, or “we don’t get to speak to our users so it’s hard to know what they want”.

OK, so I’m deliberately setting out a pretty bleak scenario here and, like everything, your own situation is probably not that dire, or is certainly further towards the ‘good’ end of a sliding scale.

However, the fact remains that a lot of thought and effort goes into creating content and perhaps not enough is placed on the delivery of said content. The mediums of the past are still valid but are increasingly being replaced and (and this is important) these new mediums are part of customer expectation.

I need look no further than myself to give you an example.

I am fairly careful with my money in that I tend to do a lot of research before buying a product. Whilst I have just purchased an iPhone, I didn’t buy the first version because my research suggested it would’ve been a mistake.

Part of my research is, quite simply, to see what kind of supporting information exists for the product I’m considering purchasing. Can I download or view the product documentation, and if so, what format is it in? What about user forums or support websites? Knowledge bases and articles? The latter are, increasingly, higher up my preference list than the former to the point where I’m pretty sure I’d buy if it had no user guide but a thriving user/support forum.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for our old friend, the product manual, but I would suggest it is under threat. Previously, to receive validated and trusted product information, I’d go to the product manual or support staff, anything that was produced by the people that make the product.

Now?

Now, thanks to reputation systems (points system that users build up the more the offer to, and interact with, a website) and the ability to cross-check information quickly and easily on the internet, I am far more likely to trust a post or article written by a complete stranger.

The wisdom of the crowd comes into play here of course, the more people that use your product the better the chance of a unique and useful scenario being documented and published, but there is no reason why we, the technical writers, cannot insert ourselves into that stream. Refocussing why we deliver information is a crucial part of the changes taking place in our industry.

Because, to be frank, if we don’t start looking around and changing how we work, we may soon be redundant. In every sense of the word.

Just a quick note to say it’ll be a little on the quiet side here over the next two weeks as I’m going to be a little hectic. I’ve got a product release (deadline of a week tomorrow), a new developer website to launch (deadline of a week on Monday), and after that a week long series of retrospective meetings that I’m facilitating. All of that takes me through to about the 21st of July.

That plus the remortgaging of our house and the imminent launch of iPhone 3G means when I’m not here, I’ll be asleep!

Until my return, check out my TechComms RSS List (download or view online), or take a cruise on the Writer River.

See you on the flip side.

The unstoppable Tom Johnson has cranked out a new Digg-style website aimed at collating the best blog posts and articles about technical communications, as voted for by registered users (that’s you!). It’s a great idea, and I really hope it takes off (whilst secretly hoping that at least ONE of my posts makes the front page one day!).

WriterRiver.com is a social news site for technical communicators, which means you can both submit and vote on news stories. When you submit stories, they initially appear on the Upcoming Stories tab. After a story receives 5 votes, it moves to the Front Page Stories tab.

Go and check it out, get registered and start submitting.