There’s a lot going on at Author-it in the near future. We have webinars and are attending conferences. These events provide you an opportunity to learn, ask questions, and meet people.

Product webinars

We have several webinars coming up, some product-specific and some tools-independant.

If you’d like to see what’s coming in Author-it 5.5, we have several webinars available for you over the next several weeks. We also have a webinar in May about importing your legacy content into Author-it.

To sign up for any of these webinars, click here. Remember, we record these webinars and make them available the day after so if the scheduled date or time don’t work for you, sign up anyway and you’ll automatically get a link to the recording the next day.

General webinars

We’re also hosting several tools-independant webinars. If you want to learn more about Component Content Management, we’re offering a webinar on that topic April 28th, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern.

Paul Trotter is sharing his vision for content development April 25 at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. This is also a good webinar if you’re boss doesn’t quite understand what content development is about and why it’s important in this century.

And May 11 at 1pm Pac, 4pm Eastern, we have the Content Trends Survey Results webinar where we look at the data from the survey and what it means to content development professionals.

To sign up for these webinars, click here. We also record these, so again, sign up even if the time and date don’t work for you to automatically get the recording the next day.

Conferences

Author-it is attending the STC Summit May15-18 in Sacramento CA. We’ll have a booth and several of our staff will be there (including me), ready to meet you and talk about how our products can help your organization. Additionally, Kirsty Taylor is presenting tips and tricks in Author-it Localization Manager at the Summit. This is a good way to see how a real user works in Localization Manager.

If you’re not at the STC Summit in Sacramento, then maybe you’ll be at the STC India Summit May 7-8 in Bangalore, India. This exciting event includes Saurabh Kudesia talking about Planning, Managing and Implementing Content Variations using Author-it.

We’ll see you soon!

Sarah O’Keefe has written a great blog post that made me think about tech comm professionals and perfection. I have to admit, I’m in the over 40 crowd that Sarah mentions but I’m not one to hold onto a deliverable output for the sake of a deliverable output. Her main point, however, stands.

Often, technical communication professionals fall in love with a deliverable format because it pleases the tech comm professional in some earthy happy way. Additionally, a lot of work may have gone into making that deliverable format look really nice. In a way, it becomes our child – fussed over, groomed, fed.

Then time marches on

And it’s hard to leave that child and move on to another child. If we do move to another deliverable, we want the new child to be as pretty and happy as the previous child, if not prettier.

But is this drive for perfection in the deliverables really helping anything? Do our customers really care if the entire deliverable is lovely to the eye?

Maybe. If you’re writing for a high end layout product, then I think your users care how lovely the docs look. But if you’re developing content for mining equipment or industrial automation, then I think the perfect layout delivery is probably not such an issue.

Close enough is good enough for most markets

I also don’t think we add value (generally) to the deliverable by tweaking and polishing the look  past a certain point. Yes, your content should be branded and legible. But making sure every line breaks with a certain elegance is overkill.

Worse, the time you spend to make the baby its most pretty is time you could have spent making the content useful.

Useful content or pretty content? I think our users will take useful every time.

All things being equal, our users care that they have the information that helps them do what they need to do. While the look of the content certainly adds to the usability of the content, making it look “perfect” is probably not needed. Nor can you or your users afford to have the look be perfect.

Consider letting go a little and making the value of your content be the content. That’s the value we add as professionals.

I was talking to a friend whose employer has merged with another company. My friend’s company spent the last 5 years clawing its way to supportable and repeatable processes throughout the company as they build software products. If you are familiar with the 5 levels of the Capability Maturity Model, they had finally reached something close to a level 4.

It was hard and they struggled but development, testing, and documentation had stable processes that supported consistently developing products.

Then the merger happened.

Post merger

As they bring the 2 companies together, they are also breaking the company into 2 parts, based on markets. The split is not based on previous company affiliation, but rather on the needs of each vertical market both companies sell into. It makes sense to break it up this way, because the products are related but the needs of each vertical are very different.

This could all be very good, except for one thing: the company they merged with has no actual product development processes.

And that could all work if Company A (my friend’s employer) consumed Company B. But that’s not what’s happening. As they break the companies apart and regroup into 2 separate business units, the processes of each company are staying in place. Those people who are moving into the business unit that was Company A get the existing and stable processes of Company A. Those who are moving into the business unit of what was Company B get all the processes of Company B, which is to say, none.

6 levels of the CMM

My friend and I have thought for years there are actually 6 levels of the CMM. We both discovered this level when we ran our own consulting companies. We also learned to identify and then run away when we first met with these potential clients because nothing good ever happened.

The 6th level is negative 1. Working with a negative 1 level will destroy your processes if you are a contracting company providing outsourcing services, like product documentation. Think of it as entropy.

There is a place for the negative 1 level – three people creating some wild new technology in a garage somewhere can actually benefit from this level because it strongly encourages crazy mad ideas that then get tried. These ideas would be shot down any other place because they are crazy mad ideas. But for these people in that garage, it’s a creative environment that works.

The moment these people move into any level of developing the crazy mad ideas into some actual products, level negative 1 will kill them. Perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, but entropy will have it’s due.

And how do tools fit in here?

Very often, companies with few to no processes decide the problems they’re having are because they don’t have the right tools. If they got the right tools, they reason, this would all be better.

So they build a feature list.

And they buy new tools.

They don’t bother to train anyone, or set up any Best Practices for using the tools. They just buy them, install them, and then continue on the way they’ve been. And nothing changes, except some vendor somewhere got a nice fat check.

New tools are not feature lists

If you (or your company) are thinking about improving how you do the business of what you do, new tools can help a lot. But new tools also require that you look at your existing processes and be brave enough to change what isn’t working. And something isn’t working if you’re looking to get new tools.

Think of purchasing new tools as a time of reflection for your company. Identify what’s not working in your processes and then find tools that support your efforts to make it work better.

Don’t look for new tools based on a feature list – look for new tools based on the business problems you have and the business solutions you need. When you identify the business issues you need to solve, you’re going to be looking at processes as well. You can’t help it.

For most companies, the content they create is critical to the running of the business. Consider for a moment:

• Policies and procedures – state how the business is to be run, who does what and how. In industries with oversight, such as finance or medical, the business also must show auditors how the company has been running since the last audit. Failure to show this content can result in heavy fines or other bad things.
• Internal product documents – describe how products should work, the thought processes, the solutions, and so on for developing the products sold. Without these documents, a business has no idea how it builds what it builds. It also don’t know why decisions were made to do X rather than Y.
• External product documents – explain how to use the products to the people who purchase the products. If the external documents are not helpful, the business (at best) incurs an unreasonable support cost or (at worst) has a high return rate. Both impact available capital in the business. If the business functions in a regulated industry, it must keep the history of the external documents to show potential auditors how the product was described to work or potentially face large fines.
• Customer support documents – help internal support teams and external customers find a solution to their problems. For expensive internal support teams, quickly finding and understanding how to help a customer gets the customer off the phone and able to move forward. External customers who find a solution on the support site and never call is the ideal, as it costs the company less than pennies per customer.
• Training materials – few staff arrive knowing how the company works, what safety information they need to know, or how the products work. Training is how a company shares it’s tribal knowledge with the new tribe members. Many companies save a great deal of money on their insurance by making sure all new employees are trained in the required safety protocols. If the business needs to train customers on how the products work, the training center is a profit center.
• Marketing collateral – positions the products to the appropriate sales market. Few companies have a product so needed that no advertising is needed to sell the product. Failure to attract customers to the products negatively impacts the business.

Content as a business asset

The groupings above just touch on the broad types of content a business needs to manage. Even a small mom-and-pop store has some of the types of content listed above. For large international companies, the sheer amount of content assets, just as with hardware assets, for example, can be overwhelming.

Best of Breed companies know their business content is an asset that needs to be managed, just like the other assets in the company. Most companies track the computers and cell phones they use, for example. Annually, all the equipment is inventoried to make sure they have what they think they have.

Many companies never think about the business content as a business asset. The content that’s critical to the business is in Word or Powerpoint files or who knows, saved everywhere: on people’s local computers, somewhere on the network, maybe on a Sharepoint site. No one has any idea how much content they have, much less where it all is or what the most recent version might be.

If you ever wondered what Author-it products do, this is what we do. Our products help you manage your business content as the business asset it is.

In other news

We have a new line-up of free webinars coming your way in April and May. We’re really pleased with the offerings and hope you are too.

High on the list of must attends are 2 in particular:

Content Development: Future Trends, Future Solutions
Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corporation shares his vision of the future in this hour long event. You’ll leave knowing what trends are and what you need to prepare for now.
April 25 at 4pm Eastern time.  To sign up for this tools-neutral webinar, click here.

What’s New in Author-it 5.5
Additionally, we have several webinars scheduled to show you what’s coming in Author-it 5.5. To see the times and dates, click here.

If you’re interested in joining a really great group of people who actually work together as a team, then we have the place for you. We work hard, but have heaps of fun and there are some great perks to being part of the Author-it team!

Technical Writer – Immediate Start – Head Office, Albany, Auckland, NZ

Author-it is hiring a Technical Writer for their Albany office. This needs to be someone who can really hit the ground running.

Do you have 2+ years experience using Author-it and 4+ years practical experience in writing user documentation for a commercial software product? If this describes you and you can say ‘yes’ to the required skills, knowledge and experience requirements below then, send your CV along with a covering brief on how you think you can make a difference at Author-it.

Skills, Knowledge and Experience

• Requires the ability to communicate effectively across different levels of understanding (strong interviewing, listening and documentation skills).
• Strong business and technical acumen with the ability to plan, multi-task and prioritize as well as work flexibly to a deadline.
• Must have strong user documentation, design and presentation skills.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced work and cross-functional team environment.
• Passionate, work smart attitude.
• Must be detail orientated, can follow directions and established documentation guidelines as well as show a talent for new ideas and continuous improvement.

Technical Requirements

Required:

• Degree or certification in IT, technical documentation or relevant experience.
• 2+ years experience using Author-it software products
• 4+ years practical experience in writing user documentation for a commercial software product.
  • 1+ years experience in writing user documentation for web-based software applications.
  • 1+ years experience using SQL and relational databases (e.g. SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle).
  • 1+ years experience in using Active Directory and working with Microsoft server software.
  • + years experience working with images and graphics, including design and manipulation.
  • 3+ years practical experience using Microsoft Word, Help systems (e.g., HLP, CHM, WebHelp, JavaHelp) and web technologies (e.g. HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML).
  • 1+ years practical experience in quality assurance.
  • Expert command of English spelling and grammar.
  • Experience with Agile development methodologies and SCRUM.
  • Full understanding of the SDLC.

Preferable:

• Familiarity with Ext JS or other rich web application frameworks.
• 1+ years’ experience in writing user documentation for content management software applications.

Not a lot of blogging this week, as we’re at WritersUA in Long Beach.

Sunday, we did the Author-it Morning and had a great time. People got a lot of value out of the 4 or so hours we were together and it was fun.

Today, the booth is very busy and the show attendees are full of excitement.

Watch Twitter for the #writersua keyword to find out what’s going on.

And if you’re at the show, stop by the booth and see what the buzz is all about.

If you’re working in a typical document-centric content development environment, you probably manage versions of product documents by copying the entire previous document(s), renaming to the next version and go from there. While this seems like a good way to manage versions, problems can arise, including how to find and manage all the copies floating around your source control or internal network.

And if you need to compare what content applies to what version, life gets really complicated. You can use the built-in document compare but for some products, variables and cross references count as changed text, not really giving you the picture you need.

You could always print out the compared document and do a line by line manual highlight of the actual changes. Unless the document is more than about 100 pages because who has time to do that for the 30 documents you produced 3 versions ago? And then you’re stuck with paper trails you need to manage. It’s a very cumbersome process.

There has to be a better way

A better way would to be able to assign a version to the content when you create it. That would at least show you somehow that this topic was added for version 3.1 and that content appeared in version 4. You would have some sort of audit trail to see what appeared or changed and when.

Building the output could get complicated, though. If you want just the content that applies to version 4, you would have to somehow include the content that didn’t change since version 2. But you don’t want the version 3.1 content, just the content for version 4 and the content that hasn’t changed since version 2.

You would have to mark content as valid for version 2 and 3 and 4 and 4.1 and… That sounds cumbersome, too.

Maybe an even better way

An even better way would be if you could somehow specify you want version 4 and the publishing system programatically looked for all version 4 content and gathered that up. For content that isn’t marked version 4, but appears in the list of content you want to publish, maybe the system could walk back versions to find content.

That way, the system tracks things down and you don’t have to manually assign multiple versions to the content, which you’re going to forget to do.

Computers are really good at tracking things. Why don’t we let them do that part and we can create the content?

It’s a better way

Environments that are regulated, such as financial or medical, should like this approach. This even better way of versioning let’s you easily create the documents as they were for each point in time so the auditors can easily see what they need.

Environments where your technology has a long life span might also like this versioning method. For example, if your technology is still in the field and still working 20 years later, you may need to create documents for it on request, even though that version is 20 years old. With this even better way of managing versions, it’s not a problem – simply specify the version to start with and the system does the rest.

Sound interesting?

By Sharon Burton

I’ve spent 4 days combing the results, compiling the statistics, analyzing the data and I’m finally done! Now other eyes can check the analysis and the numbers.

Watch our twitter account (@authorit) or our Facebook page for announcements of a webinar where we’ll go over the results in detail. We’ll probably be presenting this webinar near the end of April.

New media stuff

If you follow us on Twitter or on Facebook, we’re trying something new. We’ve combed sources we think are related to our industry and are posting links to stories and other items we think you’ll find of value. The response so far has been good. People are clicking through to the items.

This is something new we’re trying so if you have thoughts about the items we’re posting or think our Twitter posts should be different than our Facebook posts, please comment here. We want to provide value for following us and the right information where you expect it. We can only know if we’re reaching our goal if you tell us what you expect.

Additionally, if you have a blog, or know of a blog, that posts industry-specific (not vendor-specific) content, we’d like to know about it. Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

WritersUA

See you at WritersUA this weekend! I’m so excited about the Author-it Morning.

Since the awful earthquake in New Zealand this week, clients and non-clients all over the world have contacted us, concerned about our staff. This outpouring has moved everyone at Author-it and we’d like to thank all of you.

The Auckland office and all our people in that office are OK. The earthquake was about 400 miles away. All family in the Christchurch area have been accounted for.

Remember, if you want to help the people in Christchurch, contributing to the New Zealand Red Cross is a great way to help.

On a related note

Have you looked at your policies and procedures lately? When a disaster like this happens, it should remind us that we need effective policies and procedures in place. Everyone needs to be trained in what to do.

Make sure yours includes:

• Evacuation plans
• Disaster recovery plans
• Reporting-in plans
• and more

Disasters usually happen suddenly. It’s important for everyone to know what they should do and how to keep the business running (or not) during the disaster.

People at least need to know how to get out of the building and where to meet. If the disaster happens at lunch, do you have a plan in place for people to report in so the missing can be quickly accounted for? Do several people have the cell phone numbers for everyone? Where are those number stored? How is the data in your company being managed for offsite backups? Do you even do offsite backups?

These and more need to be clearly defined so everyone knows what to do. Now might be a very good time to make sure your policies and procedures are up-to-date and people are trained.

Fascinating day. Lots of interesting people came to the booth to talk about the content issues they have and how we can help.

I love meeting people and talking about the common issyes we all face developing, managing, and publishing content. Really, it doesn’t matter what industry we’re in, we face similar issues.

New thought for Tech Comm

A thought that occurred to me about the Technical Communication field. We need to stop thinking about our user assistance content as special and silo-ed. It’s not helping us anymore. We need to start thinking about our content as just more content the organization is trying to manage.

Content is a business asset, just like another other thing the company owns that adds value to the company.

Impact

So if the user assistance is just part of the overall content the company needs to develop, manage, and publish, where does that put us? How do we integrate into the larger corporate picture?

What do you think?

By Sharon Burton