Collaborative Authoring and Communication Tools Help Writers, Editors, SMEs Work Together

February 7, 2012 Blog, Featured 2 Comments

By David Kowalsky, Guest Editor Do you ever find yourself overwhelmed with trying to keep track of all the versions of a document that are being sent back-and-forth by you and your work colleagues by email? When opening a document to edit, have you ever had the experience of being frustrated by immediately seeing a message pop up telling you that the document is locked? Many companies have introduced features to their products to alleviate these types of issues, making collaborative authoring– projects where written works are created by multiple …

Results of the 2009 Technical Writers Training Needs Survey

April 13, 2009 Blog 9 Comments

The results are in. Despite the economic challenges facing the global marketplace today, technical communication professionals are in need of training. The problem is finding the money for the classes (and more often than not, the travel), as well as finding and the right class (see below), at the right (low) price, in the right (nearby) location, from the right (trusted) provider. Based on the responses of more than 500 technical communications professionals who answered The Content Wrangler Technical Communication Training Needs Survey, the top five hot training topics for …

Making The Move To Creating Structured XML: An Interview with Thomas Aldous

March 1, 2009 Blog 1 Comment

Scott: Thomas, thanks for agreeing to chat with us a little today about making the move to structured XML. For those readers who don’t yet know who you are, tell us a little about yourself and your experience in the content industry. Thomas: Thanks, Scott. I am a principal owner of a company called Integrated Technologies, better known as InTech. We began as a UNIX training company back in 1989. Within a few years, we made major inroads in the Engineering, Financial and Telecom industries. One of our first financial …

PowerXEditor Eases Online Collaborative Authoring and Workflow

December 2, 2008 Blog 17 Comments

By Rahel Bailie, special to The Content Wrangler As the market develops for XML tools that work for a growing number of user types in a variety of industries, we are starting to see creative products come on the market. One need that is becoming more common is for the average business author – that is, someone who is not a technical writer and hasn’t studied the craft of writing – to create documents that validate to an XML DTD. The difference between the needs of the typical business user …

MadCap Flare Selected as Top Authoring Application in Two Technical Writer Surveys

December 2, 2008 Blog No Comments

MadCap Flare has been selected as the top authoring application in two surveys of technical writers. Flare was identified as the authoring application of choice by more than 39 percent of respondents to the surveys conducted on behalf of the HAT-Matrix.com and I’d Rather Be Writing technical communications blogs. The surveys represent the first time that Flare, which debuted in March 2006, has seen “higher customer use than any other competing solution–including legacy applications that have been on the market for more than a decade,” according to a press release …

[Member Profile] Meet Tami Groth

October 13, 2008 Blog No Comments

Meet Tami Groth a lone technical writer at ECi La Crosse, and a member of The Content Wrangler Community. “I am passionate about working smarter and finding the best tool for a job,” Tammy says. “I currently find that as a lone writer Author-it meets my needs for content management and single sourcing my various types of documentation.

Making the Case for DITA, The Unlikely Demise of Adobe FrameMaker, and Finally, XSLT for MS Word

August 6, 2008 Blog No Comments

The Content Wrangler has the dish on structured writing. Is DITA dead? Is FrameMaker defunct? Has MS Word actually survived the XML wars and emerged as a user-friendly XML authoring tool? It all started with an article by Scott Abel calling on all DITA evangelists to promote use cases and real-world examples designed to help folks understand the DITA value proposition. The article sparked an interesting conversation about whether DITA will–or should–survive, while at the same time the demise of FrameMaker is still being discussed. We should remind you that …

Quark Purchases In.vision Research: Now They’re Really In The XML Authoring Business

July 24, 2008 Blog No Comments

Earlier this year, Quark announced it’s dynamic publishing solution, one of the smartest moves in the industry, if you ask us. This month, Quark announced that it has acquired the assets of In.vision Research Corporation, a Florida-based software company that develops a popular add-in to Microsoft Word (XPress Author) that facilitates XML authoring. The acquisition is a smart one for Quark as they will now be in close partnership with Microsoft, providing support for Microsoft Word users, the largest group of content creators on the planet. Quark also gains products …

CCM Takes Center Stage: Report Evaluates Component Content Management Systems and XML Editors

May 15, 2008 Blog 1 Comment

Component Content Management (CCM) technology allows enterprises to manage text content as componentized chunks of information rather than whole documents or web pages. It has become increasingly important to modern enterprises, especially given the rapid emergence of the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. However, CCM technology remains largely the domain of a wide collection of smaller software vendors targeting narrower use cases, according to research from CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies. These findings come from the XML and Component Content Management Report 2008, a …

MadCap and Translations.com Announce Partnership

May 6, 2008 Blog No Comments

MadCap Software and Translations.com have announced a strategic partnership. Under terms of the agreement, the companies will promote the combined benefits of using MadCap Flare with Translations.com localization services to streamline the process of delivering best-in-class content and documentation in multiple languages.