I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Lately I’ve been converting my documentation over to a SharePoint wiki and have had days where I felt totally liberated and others where I wanted to go into my Control Panel and remove every Microsoft product I have installed on my computer.

Liberating

Here’s what I find liberating. Most wikis can easily degenerate into a chaotic disaster, with links nested on pages pointing to other links on other pages, with no clear sense of where you are or how deep the wiki goes. One writer at Doc Train told me her company’s wiki was an “unmitigated disaster.”

With SharePoint, you can get around this chaos by adding columns on wiki pages. The columns are similar to metadata fields for the page. You can add a drop-down box requiring the user to select a category for the wiki page, and the role, and any other ways you want to classify the wiki page.

Then you use SharePoint’s sorting and grouping functions to create various views for your wiki. These views use the columns/metadata fields to sort your pages by category, by role, or other methods. This is liberating because it allows you to impose order on what might otherwise become chaotic.

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I’m giving a virtual presentation to the STC-Phoenix chapter tomorrow at 6:15 pm Arizona Time (which right now is the same as PST). The topic of my virtual presentation is “Combining Social Media with Help Authoring.” See more details here. It costs $10 and should last about an hour. Even though it’s coordinated by STC Phoenix, anyone interested can sign up.

May 15, 2008 Update: View the PowerPoint for this presentation (.ppt).

Doc Train has ended, and I’m sitting at the Vancouver airport waiting for my airplane. Lots of thoughts are coming to my head, in no particular order.

I interviewed about 12 people this year. I seem to have a knack for this — tracking people down, asking if I can interview them, getting them talking, etc.

Actually, it has taken me three conferences to get this right. Last year, at Doc Train West 2007, I didn’t have the right setup. I tried using a lavalier mic attached to the mic port of a Mac I borrowed. But I didn’t realize the Mac wasn’t reading the lavalier; it was using a built-in mic.

Then at the STC Summit in Minneapolis, I had the right equipment (a portal Zoom H4 recorder), but by and large I interviewed the wrong people in the wrong places. I did interview some presenters, but I spent too much time interviewing attendees.

This year at Doc Train West 2008, I had the right equipment and I talked to the right people in the right spaces. And it worked extremely well. I give you this advice if you ever try recording live interviews at conferences:

• Buy an H4 Zoom recorder.
• Use the built-in mics rather than an external mic.
• Interview people who are giving presentations.
• Find a quiet room where you can sit down with them.

Really the key is to interview presenters, because they automatically have something to say. They have a message they’ve been cramming and practicing. Conversations flow naturally, and they give you great content. In contrast, attendees have much less to say. Read the rest of this entry »

Download MP3
Duration: 15 min.

In this podcast, Noz Urbina talks about how Web 2.0 is changing the role of the technical communicator into one who drives product R&D and interaction design. My discussion with Noz was a light-bulb moment for me at the Doc Train West conference. Read the rest of this entry »

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Duration: 18 min.

Stewart Mader was one of the coolest people I met at Doc Train West 2008. He is a person driven by his enthusiasm for wikis. Read the rest of this entry »

Presenter: Joe Sokohl (http://sokohl.com)
Conference: Doc Train West 2008

In this presentation, Joe Sokohl talks about gathering user research prior to designing and implementing your help deliverables.

Breaking the Rules

First you have to get to know the user by talking directly to real users doing real work in actual contexts. Interview real people doing real activities. “Don’t speculate, don’t argue. Observe” (Don Norman). Everything starts with user research.

Joe interviewed actual users in their cubicles and offices, asking them how often they used the product and how often they did various tasks.

He also said, “By the way, could you show me the user manual for this software?” Hardly anyone could produce the manual. One lady finally dug it out at the bottom of a cluttered drawer.

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Download MP3
Duration: 5 min.

In this short podcast, David Holmes talks about how he and his team migrated 50,000 unstructured pages to DITA. (DITA is an XML architecture that allows you to better single source your content.)
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Guy Kawasaki writes, “A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points” (The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint). I wish everyone who prepares a presentation would follow this advice. Long PowerPoints disrupt any kind of narrative flow and dynamic energy that can build up when you deliver your message.

Download MP3 (right-click, select Save As)
Duration: 43 min.

In this podcast, I talk with Alan Porter, vice president of Operations at WebWorks, about the Web 2.0 technologies they’re using to reach out to their customer base. In addition to using blogs, wikis, and social networks to connect with customers, WebWorks also uses wikis to facilitate communication and collaboration within their company.

Alan says they consider themselves a “wiki-driven company” because the wiki drives the way they do business. WebWorks has an internal wiki (which replaced their old intranet), a projects wiki (used to communicate with their customers on project work), an external wiki for their help center (where customers can interact directly with developers and support), and a wiki for organizing their upcoming user conference.

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One of the things I like about WordPress is its versatility. WordPress isn’t just blogging software. With the right theme, you can build a website that doesn’t resemble a blog at all. Essentially, writers who become familiar with WordPress become empowered as web designers as well.

A few weeks ago, I made a website for a client who was launching a green building business (see or click the image below).

It’s a predesigned theme that I purchased from ithemes.com, customized a bit and configured. I also wrote the content. I like WordPress because you don’t have to start from scratch with the theme design. If you get a system down and are familiar with the theme you’re implementing, you can create a professional site fairly quickly.

However, if you undertake such a project, triple the time you estimate for your first project, because it just works out that way. (Also, as always, the writing of the content is often more difficult than the actual site creation.)

My point is basically that WordPress doesn’t just have to look like a blog. It’s a micro-CMS that also empowers less technical users to control and manage the text on the pages without using Notepad or Dreamweaver.