Call for Web 2.0–Friendly Authoring Tools
June 4th, 2008One of the topics the panel addressed—however briefly—in the opening session of the 2008 Summit of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) was the need for us to have user participation in and feedback on our content. This was of interest because our team at work has been looking into doing this.
The irony of the situation lay in the fact that adjacent to the hall where this session was held, a number of vendors were waiting to catch society members’ interest and corporate dollars. In his presentation on using user-generated content in documentation, Scott Abel of The Content Wrangler referred to the lack of Web 2.0 software. An STC member I talked to on Monday after one of the education sessions said that she had asked one of the Adobe Systems representatives about Web 2.0 capabilities in technical communication software.
“We don’t do that yet,” the representative told her.
Fundamental problem.
Personally, due to my current experience using WordPress to blog, I’ve been exploring the possibility of using it to provide a help community for the projects I work on. Because it’s a blogging platform, conversation is part of its definition.
Right now, the big push—and therefore the big race among vendors—is single sourcing and structured content. That’s what they’re providing, but that’s only part of the puzzle at this point.
If STC has any clout, I would like to see it influence the tech comm software companies to provide us easy ways to encourage, receive, and store user feedback and contributions. Right now, we have to resort to JavaScript-driven links or forms to get feedback. I see it on the RoboHelp forums: If someone decides halfway into a 5,000-topic project to incorporate something like this, he’s got to use a find and replace tool or—some of us have resorted to this—manually going through each topic and pasting the chunk of code in the code view of each topic. Not all technical communicators are members of STC, but the society could advocate for the profession at large for this kind of software.
Our software has to make it easy for us to do what we’re being called upon to do in our profession. It doesn’t matter if all the software suites provide it, as long as the ability is there so we can make use of it. If they don’t provide it, our organizations may have to keep our money and choose tools that are both free and accommodating.
Related entries (auto-generated):
Help Authoring Woes: Index As You Go
A Climate of Fear among Technical Communicators?
The STC 2008 Summit from a First-Timer’s Perspective
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June 9th, 2008 at 12:19 am
Hi Ben..i followed This blog from http://www.idratherbewriting.com..
Pretty nice Article …Keep up the gud work..
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June 19th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
I am not sure if you have looked at RoboHelp Packager for Adobe AIR. It enables end users to add comments on online help, export that as an XML file and share it with others. You can use the same functionality for enabling a review with your developers or SMEs.
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Ben Reply:
June 20th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Vivek, thanks for your suggestion. It has gotten me thinking about AIR again. I read about the RH Packager when beta 1 was announced. Originally, the biggest hang-up for me was the fact that users have to install something in order to view AIR help. If I convert my existing help systems to AIR, then what happens when users of those systems suddenly have to install something? I expect that some people, having to install AIR in order to view a help system, are going to ask themselves, “Am I going to have to do this every time?” (I’m told that the AIR install message does not tell the user that this is the only time he’ll ever have to install it on his computer.) Being the pessimistic creatures that many of us are, I imagine that many of the people who wonder if they’ll always have to install an application before viewing the help will convince themselves that the answer is “Yes.” So they’ll be that much more reluctant to view help.
Many of the users of the projects I work on fall into the baby boomer category, and a lot of those use a computer because it’s necessary to get their jobs done. An extra step like installing something in order to view help will discourage people further from viewing help. They aren’t going to intuitively understand that it’s a one-time, easy-as-pie installation. And it would be difficult to get the word out to people using our systems (or who will use them in the future) that they have to install AIR just once.
On the Adobe Labs site, AIR is compared to Flash Player. My suggestion is that Adobe could talk to Microsoft and other companies about shipping AIR with their operating systems like they do Flash Player. Then people won’t have to worry about an extra installation.
I have some questions that perhaps you could clear up for me:
1. When will CSH be included? This is a deal-breaker for me because half the help systems I do are context-sensitive. And if I’m going to go with AIR help, I want to use it for all my projects, not half.
2. From what I’ve read, it’s not clear to me whether the AIR-packaged help is installed on or saved to a user’s hard drive. The description of the auto-update feature talks about going out to a central location and getting updates. What happens if your help system goes with a Web application and doesn’t need to be installed on users’ machines like a CHM is? Is it enough to have the AIR help file stored on a server only? Could the version on the server be configured to access a computer for updates?
3. In order to share comments, do reviewers have to email them? Are comments not saved as part of the AIR help so that I could open up my production help system and see people’s comments?
I hope you can answer here for reference of any readers wondering about RH Packager. If not, I’ll try the forum on the Labs. Thanks!
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June 23rd, 2008 at 1:34 am
Hi Ben
Thanks for your insightful questions. It gives me an opportunity to clarify. Please click here for details –
http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2008/06/online_help_as_adobe_air_overcoming_the_adoption_barrier.html
regards
Vivek
[Reply]
Ben Reply:
June 27th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Thanks, Vivek, for posting your answers. I believe I’ll have some time to do some experimentation with the packager next week, and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it works.
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