SlideShare: Understanding Simplified Technical English

February 28, 2007 Blog No Comments

The folks at Tedopres International have made available this slide presentation desk on Simplified Technical English (STE) available for your review. Simplified Technical English standardizes vocabulary and style, aiming to improve consistency, eliminate ambiguity and reduce complexity. It also provides objective criteria for quality control. Simplified Technical English includes a general dictionary and a set of writing rules. It’s a hot topic among technical communication professionals and a good starting point for those hoping to adopt content management.

Doing Today’s Jobs WIth Yesterday’s Tools

February 27, 2007 Blog No Comments

If you’ve ever felt trapped by technology—limited by the information management capabilities of software products—you’re not alone. Patrick Dubroy can feel your pain. “While the amount of information that the average person deals with has increased dramatically in the last 20 years,” Dubroy says, “file systems have hardly changed at all.” What we need, he says, is “a system that will make it easier to manage and navigate the large amounts of rich and diverse information that people deal with every day.” In an article for Boxes and Arrows, Dubroy Read the full article…

How To Create A FAQ Page Your Customers Will Love (And Might Even Use)

February 26, 2007 Blog 1 Comment

By Rahel Anne Bailie, special to TheContentWrangler.com If you think a FAQ page is where customers find handy information about their needs, a place where customers go to look for answers to frequently asked questions, think again. In an informal survey of infrequent to always-on computer users, respondents unanimously agreed that FAQ pages were generally of little to no use in actually answering their questions. The feedback included frank comments: The information isn’t organized so I can find anything. I keep going around in circles. It’s just recycled information from Read the full article…

New DITA Users Organization Aims To Help Writers Author DITA Content

February 24, 2007 Blog No Comments

DITA Users, a new individual membership organization for folks interested in the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), has been announced. For $100 US you can become a member. According to the organizers, the value of membership includes: Your own DITA workspace folder and the ability to create DITA documents using the built-in DITA Storm web-based editor or your choice of desktop editor Access to and collaboration with other DITA Users with similar interests Access to working demos of software that supports DITA Discounts on DITA conferences, workshops, and seminars The Read the full article…

Web Content Management: Is Your Data SaaSafe?

February 23, 2007 Blog 13 Comments

By Diane Wieland, special to TheContentWrangler.com Shopping for a content management system (CMS) can be challenging. With hundreds of self-defined CMS vendors offering myriad solutions to choose from, it’s safe to say that selecting the right system for the job can be fraught with obstacles. Attempting to decipher and understand the CMS marketplace means mastering terminology and industry jargon used by software marketers, consultants and other industry insiders. One concept that is increasingly associated with content management is Software as a Service (SaaS), sometimes referred to as “hosted” or “on-demand” Read the full article…

The Content Wrangler On The Malcontents Podcast

February 22, 2007 Blog No Comments

Rahel Bailie of Intentional Design and Scott Abel of TheContentWrangler.com were recently featured guests on the Malcontents podcast series, hosted by Content Management Professionals members Seth Gottlieb and Bryant Shea. The topic of discussion: XML Publishing. Listen to the podcast. Previous shows of interest: Web 2.0 and Content Management Strategy, How to select a Content Management System, and Taxonomy versus Folksonomy.

Presentations, Proclamations, & Predictions: FrameMaker 8, RoboHelp & Technical Communication Tools

February 21, 2007 Blog 5 Comments

Friday, February 9, 2007, we hosted a double-header Adobe product demonstration for Indianapolis-area help developers and technical publications teams. Our featured presenter was Senior Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez, whose demonstrations covered both Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and RoboHelp 6. RJ discussed the new features present in both products today and discussed (albeit at a very high level) the much-anticipated FrameMaker 8.0 release, which, according to the grapevine, is expected to be delivered later this year. RJ also focused in on what appears to be Adobe’s acknowledgment of the dramatic changes impacting Read the full article…

New “Component Content Management” Report Coming Soon From CMS Watch and The Rockley Group

February 20, 2007 Blog No Comments

CMS Watch, an important analyst firm and research group in the content management arena, has partnered with The Rockley Group to produce the industry’s first report on component content management systems. The forthcoming report (expected Summer 2007) will help enterprises sort through the complexities of choosing the right tool for managing discrete components of content in a multi-channel world. Component Content Management systems manage content at a granular level (component) of content rather than at the document level. Each component represents a single topic, concept or asset (e.g., image, table). Read the full article…

CM Pros Selects New Board Members

February 15, 2007 Blog No Comments

Content Management Professionals has announced the winners of their annual Board of Directors election. The new board members are: Joan Lasselle, Lasselle Ramsay Linda Burman, LA Burman Associates Travis Wissink, Technology Leadership and Consulting Emma Hamer, E. Hamer Associates The winners replace outgoing Board of Directors members: Scott Abel, Samantha Starmer, Seth Gottlieb, and Erik Hartman. Mary Laplante of The Gilbane Group retains her seat on the board.

Future GUI: Get Ready For Multi-Touch Graphic Interaction Surfaces

February 14, 2007 Blog No Comments

If you thought documenting a “configurable” software product was challenging, take a look at what the future holds for the graphic user interface (GUI). Jefferson Han, Philip Davidson, Casey Muller, and Ilya Rosenberg have taken the desktop to new and exciting heights. In Multi-Touch Interaction Experiments the designers of future GUIs show us what’s possible today—and likely to be part of our arsenal of tools in the near future. Their work goes far beyond the “poking actions you get with a typical touchscreen, or the gross gesturing found in video-based Read the full article…

Tool Tip: PageLabler Synchronizes Print and PDF Page Numbers

February 11, 2007 Blog 1 Comment

Susan Corcoran of Skaneateles Falls, NY writes in to tell us about one of her favorite tools, PageLabeler, an Adobe Framemaker plug-in from Carmen Publishing. PageLabeler is great, says Corcoran, because it solves a common page numbering problem experienced by technical writers and engineers who create documents in Adobe FrameMaker and output them to PDF. PageLabeler assures the page numbers displayed to user in Acrobat’s toolbar match the original page numbers from the source FrameMaker file, thus eliminating a nasty usability problem.

Guru Chat: Rick Stone On The New RoboHelp 6.0

February 9, 2007 Blog 2 Comments

In this Tech Writer Voices podcast interview, Rick Stone, a RoboHelp user and evangelist, chats with Tom Johnson about: New features in RoboHelp 6 Rick’s background with RoboHelp Robohelp’s integration with Captivate Reasons behind inclusion of RoboScreen Capture What Rick likes best about RoboHelp Most often asked question in RoboHelp forums Evaluating whether “new” features are really new RoboHelp’s viability as a single-sourcing tool Adobe’s move to outsource RoboHelp’s development to India Judging whether Adobe will really continue development of RoboHelp Comparing RoboHelp with Flare Command-line compilation in RoboHelp Rewards Read the full article…

Analyst Reports on ECM Don’t Tell The Whole Story – Why You Should Research What’s Not Said

February 8, 2007 Blog No Comments

In Analyst Reports on ECM Don’t Tell The Whole Story – Why You Should Research What’s Not Said, Astoria Software blogger Chip Gettinger starts off his post by pointing to a recent Forrester Wave report that started a heated discussion among some content management professionals. Their gripe? The Forrester report—and subsequently, several reports from other analyst firms—fail to address the granular content challenges many organizations are attempting to tackle when they make the move to content management. Specifically, Gettinger writes about the need for analysts to better understand why organizations Read the full article…

London Calling: X-Pubs Announces Annual Conference

February 7, 2007 Blog No Comments

Well, not quite London … This year the folks at X-Pubs have decided to move Europe’s largest XML publishing conference to a new venue—the Royal Berkshire Conference Centre (at the fantastic Madejski Stadium)—just a train ride from London and home to the Reading Football Club & London Irish Rugby Club. The X-Pubs 2007 conference will take place June 4-5. The theme of the event is How Did We Do It? The event will feature real-world case studies, best practices, and lessons learned from documentation professionals who have made the jump Read the full article…