With that awakening of the sleeping giant—the term is apropos, as the amounts of legacy content deemed valuable enough to be tagged for migration are vast—is the need for strategies to convert that content without breaking the bank. Stilo Enterprise Solutions, long known for its ability to manipulate massive amounts of data in exceeding complex configurations, has extended its expertise in this arena to deal with this growing industry need. With Stilo Migrate, organizations have access to an on-demand migration service. This shift in the publishing industry could mean a change as radical as ATMs were to the banking industry, which brought the public the ability to conduct every-day banking transactions on-demand, without the need to go into a bank or schedule an appointment with a banker. This model further democratizes the content conversion process, as the “pay as you go” model will inevitably remove the current substantial cost barriers that smaller organizations now face when trying to enter this space.
To learn more about the world’s first on-demand content migration service, visit the Stilo site.
]]>Just when it looked like these two camps would drift further apart, as DITA gave technical communicators tighter control over their content structure and wikis allowed the rest of the content to become as free-form as possible, Inmedius Software found a way to marry the two content forms in a way that considers the needs of both sides. By adding a DITA wiki to their content management suite, they have a browser-based DITA solution that can be used by non-technical content authors.
What this means for the industry is content portability, and speed of content portability. Instead of looking for Word documents on shared drives or SharePoint sites and converting it to DITA before incorporating it into a document and editing it, the content can be, simply, shared. The DITA formatting is already in place. For a glimpse into the future of a DITA-wiki hybrid model, read the case study published in the STC Intercom magazine.
]]>Given that the output is the client-facing content, a logical assumption might be that great content output needs to benefit from the various promises of content management in terms of accessibility, usability, and branded output. XSL (XML Stylesheet Language) turns bland XML content chunks into user-meaningful outputs through special transformations. For example, done well, XSL-FO transformations can turn a DITA-mapped content into PDFs, complete with headers, footers, TOC, and corporate branding. XSL can also transform content from one “flavor” of XML to another, allowing content portability between systems and databases.
At this stage of the content management journey, XSL tranformations are where DITA was to technical communicators a few years ago: mysterious, inaccessible, and a little frightening. Yet as some intrepid technical communicators hit the XSL highway and return unscatched, more and more follow in their footsteps. Antenna House, the leading provider of software for formatting XML document for electronic and print output, has provided a map of sorts, with a stylesheet tutorial plus sample files of formatting objects and sample stylesheets, available on the Antenna House site.
]]>The component content management system (CMS) vendors quickly got on board with the newer standards, and today, virtually all component CMSes support XML in at least the DocBook and DITA flavors. The number of case studies grew as organizations wanted to share their successes.
However, the situation on the training side isn’t as advanced. The authoring tools aren’t standardized, the learning systems often don’t support XML, and the end media may not take accept the outputs from content management system. What’s an organization to do when training deliverables are part of the content mix? Linda Urban, a long-time content development consultant, has worked on many a project where training has been one of the components, and has had to find ways of handling this as part of the documentation suite. Linda tells you what many vendors won’t, and helps you work around some of the technology limitations you’ll have to live with until the training industry catches up to the documentation side.
Linda shares her insights and strategies at Documentation and Training West in a case study on Modular Training Content.
]]>Sure, it takes a little more work, and is a little more cumbersome. But IBM, with their plethora of developers and technical minds, tackled a lot of the technical problems, worked out a lot of the kinks, and developed a number of tools that, put together, can create a prototype. At the very least, it’s the show-and-tell needed to demonstrate to your executive level what you need. Alternatively, it could be a way of helping writers structure their content into topic clusters.
Technical writers who learned help authoring in an academic setting will find task modeling and topic clustering simply new labels for familiar concepts. Writers who learned help authoring through a more organic route will find this a way of modeling human activity into a hierarchy of help elements that increase the effectiveness of a help system and the value to users.
Mark Wallis, an award-winning information developer for IBM Internet Security Systems, shares his experiences with task modeling in DITA, at Documentation and Training West 2008.
]]>MadCap didn’t sit on its laurels with the launch of Flare, despite the capture of 25 percent of the online help market by end of 2007. What they lacked in corporate size, they made up in development enthusiasm. Madcap followed its release of Flare with a complement of tools that a technical communicator needed to create a complete online help project. The lynch pin for the suite, called MadPak, was the interoperability factor. All the tools worked seamlessly together, to create an experience unlike any the industry had seen until then one, where technical communicators didn’t need to hold their breath while importing, converting, or compiling...just in case.
MadCap continues to build out its suite of productivity-enhancing software. Hard on the heels of Analyzer, the beta of Blaze has been released.
As well, RedDot realizes that web projects don’t have the same boundaries as databases, so ensures that any content can be re-used between web projects. This keeps all relevant content in a single repository, leveraging content for use in business contexts.
Authors simply select files or images, and incorporate the applications into the website as easily as they would select and attach text. In addition to the usual ability to author, edit, and publish, RedDot allows authors to seamlessly connect any other content in the database, whether that is in a forum, blog, or wiki, to create a richer user experience, and for users to search across all content, as well. The logical extension is personalization, and RedDot has been extended to take advantage of its Web 2.0 capabilities. Users can be served by specific languages, regions, occupational groups, departments, interests - by whatever audience designation is of use to the organization.
RedDot has published a white paper to help organizations understand how to facilitate corporate survival and growth.
]]>But there’s another explanation: passion. Rahel Anne Bailie is absolutely passionate about what she does which is why shes so good at it. As one of the leading content management strategists and usability experts in the Pacific Northwest, Rahel has developed a solid reputation as an innovative thinker, with a keen sense of business, and with the expertise and the network to get exceptional things done. Most recently, she chaired the very successful and critically acclaimed first annual Content Convergence and Integration conference, bringing together speakers and topics that are seldom connected. If your reputation is also shaped by the company you keep, well, lets just say Rahel keeps some excellent company. Don’t miss her presentation at DocTrain West, Content Management Successes: Separating Fact From Fantasy. She’ll inform and inspire you, guaranteed.
Read Rahel’s blog. You can reach Rahel via email or via telephone at +1-604-837-0034.
]]>Create sophisticated presentations by simply dragging and dropping existing content. By leveraging the single source architecture through your presentations you guarantee those sales figures are up to the minute correct when you deliver your presentation, even if your presentation was written months ago.
Using Author-it’s object oriented approach, presentations can quickly be chopped and changed on the fly to suit your unique situation. Absolutely no repurposing required. No copying and pasting or tricky conversion, simply find the content you need from other presentations or media, and drag and drop.
]]>In his technology column in The New York Times, David Pogue offers this advice: “When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.”
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Sullivan has decided to share his considerable knowledge of Adobe products - not just the Technical Communication Suite, but also the Creative Suite and related products - by setting up Single Byte, a site with tips, tricks, and tutorials. Catch his workshop, Single Sourcing with the Technical Communication Suite: Using FrameMaker to Manage Print and Help Authoring, at Documentation and Training West.
The use of metaphors were never perfect. Take the web page. The Web screens became called “pages” - likely because printing what was on the screen became a page and because, well frankly, the metaphor stuck. So what happens in an Ajax-driven, Web 2.0 world where the concept of “page” ceases to exist? How does this change how information architects, interaction designers, and, yes, users think of sites? How does it change their interactions with the components on the screen?
Such are the musings of Jess McMullin, co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute and founder of nForm User Experience. He has addressed the issues of designing and documenting interactions in a pageless world in Beyond the Page, which can be found on the nForm site.
Jess will be sharing his business acumen with his workshop, Hands-On Methods to Increase Your Influence at Documentation and Training West.
]]>Nicky Bleiel, an information developer with Component One, has done just that, and documented the proposal process for an ”Answer Station” that acts as an information portal, working with an existing corporate website, to provide a winning user experience.
Nicky will be sharing her expertise in this area at Documentation and Training West, with her session on Documentation Planning and Library Design in a Web 2.0 World.
]]>A number of years ago, Darren first demonstrated his knowledge of how to leverage the then less-known aspects of social networking by integrating technical information (his lesser-known background in technical communication came in handy here) with technologies that responded to user need: the social factor. It’s many years later, yet many companies are still talking about the “fire and forget” method of brochure-ware marketing, whether that be websites, PDFs, or physical bulletin boards (do business people still actually browse those for business information - well, anybody with any decision-making power?).
The content publishing world has gotten a lot more complex over the last decade, and without a way to coordinate efforts—to converge content where appropriate, to integrate content where appropriate, to aggregate, to syndicate, to archive, and otherwise govern your content—you’d spend all your time creating those authentic conversations and no time getting any other work done. To get some work-work balance going, you need to learn and apply techniques that help you devise a strategy that works for you and lets your maintain your sanity. How you do that is to listen to Darren speak at Documentation and Training West where he is delivering both a keynote presentation Social Media 101: now Everyone is a Technical Writer and a 60-minute presentation, The Many-Armed Starfish: Today and Tomorrow in Social Media. And, grab a copy of his new book, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Primer (co-authored with Julie Szabo).