Yes! Expect or Write an “Agile” Requirements Document

March 29, 2008 Blog 8 Comments

By Eric Kuhnen, Focal Partners, special to The Content Wrangler Mike Wethington, Certified Scrum Practioner, runs the Agile Development and Technical Communications forum inside The Content Wrangler Community. One poster in that group recently expressed the following regret: “I think the Agile, iterative approach is great, but I miss the up-front, fleshed-out spec that gave me the full picture early in the project.” The quoted poster (above) hints at a truism: documentation managers cannot guide their teams effectively when product management is in anarchy. When documentation managers have a complete …

Defining Policies & Procedures – Three Perspectives

March 28, 2008 Blog No Comments

By Raymond E. Urgo, Urgo & Associates When a professional organization conducted an informal survey to find out how P&P practitioners define policies and procedures (P&P), more than 90 percent of practitioners define two terms–”policy” and “procedure”–and the relationship of one to the other. While the definitions provided for each were similar, the survey indicates the limited view that most P&P practitioners have about the policies and procedures specialty. With more than 25 years’ experience working with P&P in organizations, Urgo & Associates defines P&P with a micro, macro, and …

Adobe Captivate 3 Receives Industry Accolades

March 27, 2008 Blog No Comments

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that Adobe Captivate 3 was named the market leading rapid eLearning, courseware authoring and simulation tool by the eLearning Guild Research 360º Report on Authoring and Development Tools. The eLearning Guild surveyed more than 1,440 of its more than 27,000 members for insight into and direction for navigating the massive eLearning landscape. The survey entailed five parts, including rapid eLearning tools, courseware authoring tools, simulation tools, media tools, as well as the processes for combining and deploying authoring tools. “Our research highlighted the strides Adobe …

SharePoint Has Become the New Lotus Notes: CMS Watch Cites Collaboration Pros, Proliferation Cons

March 27, 2008 Blog No Comments

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is repeating history as it mimics the allure and pitfalls of Lotus Notes, according to research released today by CMS Watch, an independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies. SharePoint exploits traditionally underserved collaboration needs for information workers laboring within Office tools, and fulfills a common desire to easily create disposable workspaces, CMS Watch found. Like Notes in a previous decade, IT often embraces SharePoint as a simple answer to myriad business information problems. But the platform can easily morph into a technical and operational …

How To Write Content For Reuse

March 25, 2008 Blog No Comments

More than just discussing the value of reuse, in this DCL News article, Pamela Kostur shows you how to do it. Read her advice on how to convert unstructured (or loosely-structured) legacy documentation and make it suitable for reuse.

Current Topics in Medical Localization

March 25, 2008 Blog No Comments

By Richard Sikes, special to The Content Wrangler; Reprinted with permission, MultiLingual magazine, Copyright March 2006, issue #78 If two localization professionals begin to chat about the special problems that their work entails, a fair amount of energy is developed. Get five or six on the phone in a conference call, and the energy abounds. Multiply that by six or seven in a round table setting, and a synergistic “wow factor” really sets in. Professionals responsible for localization work in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries deal with a special set …

New Hosted Solution for Technical Documentation: LiveTechDocs.com

March 24, 2008 Blog No Comments

Read our interview with Teresa Mulvihill to learn more about LiveTechDocs.com, an online collaboration service that makes it easy to share, browse, and review XML-based documentation projects before publishing to PDF or any other format. The service is targeted at small-to-medium sized companies desiring to produce XML single-source documentation.

Case Study in Controlling Documentation Quality with acrocheck: Assisted Writing and Editing at SAS

March 22, 2008 Blog No Comments

By John Kohl, SAS Institute (reprinted with permission from Client Side News) In a previous article, Uwe Muegge speculated about why we don’t hear about more companies using controlled languages. According to Muegge, “anyone new to the field may have a hard time finding reliable, vendor-independent information on what [controlled-language] solutions are available and what the costs and benefits of deploying those solutions are.” We found that to be true in our investigations at SAS Institute as well, but at least part of the problem is in the interpretation of …

Style Guides: Which Ones Do You Find Useful?

March 22, 2008 Blog No Comments

If you know of a useful style guide (especially those available online), post them here—in the new social network for content pros, The Content Wrangler Community. We’re looking for mainstream style guides as well as specialty guides. If you find them useful, chances are, someone else will, too.

DITA for Publishing: DITA2InDesign and Project Gutenberg

March 21, 2008 Blog No Comments

From the Really Strategies blog, XML guru Eliot Kimber explores how DITA can be used to create content that’s not technical documentation. Kimber explains the basic idea behind the DITA2InDesign project and provides links to DITA Project Gutenberg.