Berry Braster, Director of tedopress, delivered a valuable presentation on Simplified Technical English (STE) at the S1000D event in Clearwater. His simple and straightforward message—“be clear and unambiguous with your language”. Otherwise your choice of words can cause damage to equipment, customer dissatisafaction, legal action … even death.
The S1000D User Forum and ADL/SCORM PerformanceFest kicked off Tuesday, May 30, 2006 with an overview of the S1000D specification delivered by Thomas Malley (BAE Systems) and Paul Haslam (ONeil & Associates). The duo outlined S1000D core concepts: the data module (a stand alone information unit) and the common source database (a store for data modules and publications) and used examples (including a fictional Scottish Navy) to illustrate their points. Learn more.
Topping the list of the six big mistakes organizations make in the knowledge continuity arena is “relying on poor documentation”. According to a 2006 audiocast, “A Roadmap to Solving the Brain Drain,” provided by Information Mapping and KnowHow, “Like falling asleep at the wheel, you are courting disaster when poor documentation is combined with a brain drain event”.
“Fewer than one in five UK companies have a strategy in place to protect their digital assets from loss or degradation, despite a high level of awareness of the risks and potential economic penalties that might result.” – Source: Mind the Gap: Assessing Digital Preservation Needs in the UK (Digital Preservation Coalition).
In 2004, European Union (EU) regulators ordered Microsoft to produce a “workable” programming manual that would allow companies that use other operating systems (like Linux) to utilize the “grammar rules” needed to build software programs that could communicate with Microsoft products. Microsoft complied with the request, which was part of the an EU anti-trust lawsuit against the softare giant, but not to the satisfaction of regulators. The EU asked Microsoft to rewrite the manual because they were “dismayed with its length and its disorganization” The Wall Street Journal reported(registration required). Read the full article…
Tired of your project? Can’t wait until it’s over? Ready for a change? Or maybe you just like chaos. We’ve all been stuck with projects that we didn’t want anymore. If you’re really interested in killing the project—if you’re really committed to making it fail—nothing could be easier. Whether you’re a drone or a queen, you have the power to turn a thriving hive into a sticky mess. The key is to have a strategy.
The U.S. Government has experienced some of the biggest and most expensive content management snafus. Add another big one to the list. According to news reports, an analyst from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) violated the organization’s policy when he took home a laptop, a computer disk, and an external storage device, which was later stolen in a household burglary. The stolen equipment and storage devices contained the personal information of 26.5 million military vets—just enough data to support identity theft—information including names, birth dates, social security numbers Read the full article…
Today is the unofficial launch of our new website. The design team at TheContentWrangler.com is busy testing functionality, responding to reports from site visitors, and making improvements based on your feedback. So, please take a loook around this work in progress and let us know what is and isn’t working, what is confusing, what you like/dislike. We’ll do our best to resppond to your needs.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology Standardization announced the OpenDocument Standard, a format which enables users of varying office suites to freely exchange documents, has been approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard.
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While it may only take a minute to fall in love, website visitors decide whether to bail from a website in 50 milliseconds or less. This startling statistic comes from research conducted by Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, published the journal Behaviour and Information Technology.
James Robertson, head of Step Two Designs, speaks frankly with Rahel Bailie of Intentional Design in this brief podcast that offers practical advice for starting a content management project.
There’s a great article on the TaxoCoP wiki about terms used—and misused—by software and services vendors. In Vendors and fuzzy logic or “How product marketing abuses domain terminology”, Stephanie Lemieux examines “hot topic hijacking”—borrowing popular terminology and concepts from established subject domains and applying them—often inappropriately—to product and service descriptions in order to boost visibility and sales.
According to announcement in the May 1, 2006 OASIS News, a new email discussion list has been created to determine if there is sufficient interest in creating an OASIS Technical Committee (TC), chartered to develop “a cross-platform standard for application-integrated software user assistance documentation.”
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