CM Pros, the international content management community of practice, has announced the release of a draft poster that serves to document the various stages of the content management life cycle. The poster identifies and defines these six stages: Planning Development Management Deployment Preservation Evaluation The final poster will include be available in both print and electronic formats later this year.
We’ve received numerous requests for copies of slide presentations over the years. Now, with the help of our favorite online slide sharing service, SlideShare, we can share our slides with you via a web browser. SlideShare is like YouTube for presentations. Registered users can upload—and make available for sharing—PowerPoint files at no charge. Visitors to SlideShare can browse featured slide shows, search for archived slideshows by keyword, receive recommendations for related slide shows, and share slides sets with others via email or via the web. Slide Share is currently loaded …
We’ve been traveling this past week in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, scouting a location for an upcoming conference for technical communication professionals with an interest in creating usable, customer-centric content. Just around the corner from our favorite boutique hotel, The Victorian, we attended the monthly meeting of the Vancouver User Expereince Group (VanUE). This month’s meeting took place Wednesday, October 25th at the Vancouver Film School and featured Paul D. Hibbitts, who spoke to a near-capacity crowd about User-Centered Design at a Distance. Kevin Shoesmith offers up a great overview …
OASIS, the international standards consortium, announced that its members have approved DocBook version 4.5 (PDF) as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Widely adopted by technical writers since its introduction in 1991, DocBook provides an XML markup vocabulary for authoring and exchange of prose content, especially technical documentation. “DocBook enables you to author and store documents in a presentation-neutral form that captures the logical structure and semantics of the content,” explained Norman Walsh of Sun Microsystems, chair of the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee. “With …
By Emma Hamer, eHamerAssociates, Ltd., special to TheContentWrangler.com In conversations I’ve had recently with TechComm Managers and Content Management Consultants, as well as with individual technical communicators and instructional designers, one question keeps coming up: How are we going to cope with the changes brought on by the implementation of a content management system? The response to my question: “What changes are you worried about” varies tremendously: Enforcing the discipline of structured authoring Identifying enough reusable content to make it all worth while Repositioning our team to the other departments: …
According to the sharp folks at IT Business Edge, Microsoft has “renewed its plans to submit its XML-based document format — broadly seen as a threat to Adobe’s popular PDF file type — to an open standards body for review.” What does this mean for those who use Microsoft products but need to create PDF files as deliverables? It’s too early to tell. Previously, IT Business Edge reported on a big brouhaha over Microsoft’s plan to prevent PDF export capability from Office 2007.
If you aren’t yet addicted to the Firefox web browser, you should try it out. We’ve been using it for over year now at TheContentWrangler.com and have found it to be a stable, secure, standards-friendly browsing tool. We’re not the only ones who like Firefox. According to Let the Browser Wars Begin, Internet Explorer has continued to lose market share among all Internet users in 2006. And, among those who operate in the Linux world, the Firefox browser dominates with 58.2 percent of the market share.
I recently stumbled across this interesting online resource that leverages the flexibility and power of wiki technology to facilitate publication of a scholarly online journal. It’s called the Encyclopedia of Earth “a new electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other’s work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to …
If you’re in charge of overseeing an online community and are frustrated because you cannot get more folks to participate, get over it! That’s just the way things are. It’s not your fault. In fact, it’s the very nature of communities, online or not. “90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action,” writes international usability superstar Jakob Nielsen in Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute. “On any given user-participation site, you almost always …
In this exclusive interview, Scott Abel of TheContentWrangler.com talks with Melanie Kendell, founder of eMorphus, a fledgling information management consultancy that specialises in helping people achieve XML-based content management for producing technical publications. TCW: Melanie, thanks for agreeing to share your thoughts on technical writers and content management. How did you get involved in technical writing in the first place? MK: As with a lot of people, I kind of fell into it by accident. I had been a trainer and a technical support person, but when I found out …
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