Pre-empting this, I thought I’d open things up to anyone who might have any questions about the process we’ve gone through. So, if you want to know my thoughts on migrating content (how NOT to do it, perhaps?) or anything specific to Author-it then leave me a comment.

Over to you!

And there in is the my main point.

I’ve read a lot about the issues the STC are currently facing but have yet to read anything from the STC itself. No doubt there is an STC mailing list ablaze with such news but given the amount of negative press currently floating about on blogs and on Twitter I’ve yet to spy any sort of formal, or informal, word from the STC.

I’ll let you read into that what you will.

Elsewhere there are plenty of suggestions to solve the initial woes, and many ideas of how to help the STC modernise and become the organisation the members want and, as I’m not a member, I can allow myself to suggest that perhaps the time has come to wrapup the STC and let a new organisation grow from the ashes.

Those who are interested, and who believe our profession needs such an organisation will rally round and rebuild something. If there is not enough interest then perhaps that is a further indication that the STC has had its time.

I’m not suggesting that technical writers do not need an organisation like the STC, there are many many good benefits, and I’m fully aware there is a lot of history and hard work that has gone into creating and building the STC. But sometimes it’s better to cut your losses.

Of course, a large part of me hopes that it won’t come to that.

But I must admit, part of me is intrigued to see what would happen if it did.

Yet this is the predicament that many users of online help find themselves in, having strayed into the online help they have been cast into an ocean of information with no real idea of how to get back to shore. Ohhh sure, we tell ourselves that the there is an easy way to get to the information they want through our carefully crafted Table of Contents, or perhaps a more direct route can be navigated using that Index you toiled over for hours, or better yet if they use the Search functionality they’ll find what they want. Right?

And, ultimately, yes these mechanisms work. If you know how an Index is structured you can quite quickly navigate to a keyword that probably matches the information you are searching for and should, hopefully, take you almost directly to the very help topic you need. Same goes for the Table of Contents although they are a little more prescriptive and you need to know what you are looking for to be able to find it, and of course the Search will provide you with several help topics that are, probably, what you are looking for.

Meanwhile the sharks have gathered and are nibbling at your feet!

At the UA conference last year, Matthew Ellison gave a presentation on what he termed “Keystone Topics” and in the Summer edition of the ISTC Communicator magazine (again, chock full of good stuff, it’s worth the price of membership alone if you ask me) Paul Filby covers something similar, outlining how to provide “The perfect help-system landing page”.

And so, with all of that in mind that is my task today (yes, a Saturday).

The concept is simple enough. You create a single topic that will be displayed to the user when they bash our old friend the F1 button. That topic is unique to the help system and, based on context, can be used to display a smarter set of links to potentially useful information. If you have the means you could display the most commonly viewed topics or, as I’m doing, you can point to the start of several paths covering the most commonly used areas of the product.

I don’t expect to get ours right the first time round, but hopefully the concept will work. I’m including a small addition to the foot of each such topic, asking users to contact us if they have improvements. It’s only on the landing pages but I’m hoping it might drive a nice little cycle of innovation with direct feedback from the users driving the content of the landing pages in the future.

Hopefully the landing pages will give our users some where dry to stand and survey the land a little, with clear signs to help them get to where they want to go.

When I get to the bottom
I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and turn
and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again!!!!

Ever get that feeling that you’ve been here before?

I write this blog post with haste as I’m halfway through the penultimate week of a particularly arduous project. Not only are we releasing a new version of the product, but we are completing the first major stage of our move to Author-it.

Overall the migration has been pretty painless. There are still some Word templates issues to work around and getting to grips with Variants has still to be tackled, but overall we are pretty happy with our choice. The only major gripe we have is partly our (ok, MY) own fault, and it’s here that I’ll offer the most valuable tip I can.

If you are migrating legacy content to Author-it (we were moving from Structured FrameMaker), make sure you thoroughly test and check the import settings. Time constraints had me rush this stage and we ended up paying for it, spending far too long cleaning up rogue topics than we had planned. Every cloud has a silver lining though, and it does mean that the documentation is now far more consistently written and styled than it had been. However, going through some 5000 odd topics by hand wasn’t the greatest use of our time!

Soon we will be looking to how we can leverage the output to provide better access to information, feeding into the developer community website we have already built, and improving how we deliver information alongwith our product set.

For the former we have taken some inspiration from the presentation by Rachel Potts and Brian Harris (Red Gate Software) at last years UA Conference, titled Delivering Help in a Support Portal. For our implementation the Publications team will take the lead, and it’ll be interesting to see where it takes us. Web 2.0, anyone?

We will also be looking to provide better online help by introducing Keystone Topics, as suggested by Matthew Ellison. Author-it should make these topics, which are the first topics the user lands on when they start the online help and which provide sensible links to common information (rather than just providing repurposed user manuals), very easy to build.

Two of the team will be in Cardiff for the conference this year so it’ll be interesting to see what we learn there and how we can really start to leverage Author-it in more and more powerful ways. I’m definitely keen to start innovating what we do and, in a few weeks time, we won’t have any further barriers to stop us.

As I normally do, I reviewed the list of actions I jotted down before I left and looked over some of the last bits of work I completed, just to make sure I had been focussing on work and not been too distracted in the run up to the holiday.

One thing that leapt out at me was how I still, all these years later, struggle with consistency. It isn’t something that comes naturally to me and, truth be told, I’ve still to find a working system that helps.

It’s all well and good relying on Style Guides and whatnot but until I can make myself write consistently it’s always going to be something I need to consider. It’s not a huge problem, I am talking about a very fine level of detail here, but it does irk.

Aside from that, the usual hurtle towards the finishing line is well under way and by the end of the month we will see where things stand and what things we need to tackle next. All part and parcel of software development and, even though it’s a high stress time, I did kinda miss the buzz whilst I was away.