I’ve been reading Sarah Maddox’s new book, Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate, and have been impressed. I enjoy the energy and speed in Sarah’s writing. If you’ve read her blog before, her book has the same tone. This is not a book review, because I’m not yet finished with the book. But it doesn’t take too many pages to come to some realizations worth noting. My … more »

Giovanni from Italy asks the following about SharePoint: I am assisting a colleague with a complete overhaul of an existing Help system. It is in RoboHelp, but has legacy topics that have to be maintained in Word. The Help is for call center and business office employees regarding the proprietary, in-house computer program. We recently got SharePoint, and I would like to know your thoughts … more »

The other day a developer approached me at work to ask how he could quickly capture and upload video to explain database processes he was documenting. He said he downloaded a trial version of Camtasia Studio, but wasn’t sure if it was the best solution. Of course I had an answer: Jing, I told him. I showed him how he could use Jing to quickly … more »

Customizing a SharePoint site is not necessary — you can use the default theme or related themes straight from the box. And this is really how SharePoint was intended to be used by the mainstream. But if you don’t want your SharePoint site to look like the hundred other SharePoint sites at your company, you can customize the look and feel. This is something I’ve … more »

In this poll, I’m trying to find out what blogging software is available to technical communicators in the workplace (for publishing product information, building user communities, and doing other work-related tasks — not personal publishing). It’s a short, one-question poll. If you have any additional comments to add, please add them in the comments section below the post. Thanks. Online Surveys & Market Research

In a previous post, I mentioned my desire to use SharePoint as a help authoring platform because it provides a Web 2.0 experience that is company-sanctioned. SharePoint not only has blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, but also integrates with Active Directory, Outlook 2007, and has integrated search across all content. However, the more I tried to use SharePoint as a help authoring tool, the more problems I ran … more »

Preface: I wrote this post after spending a month digging deeply into SharePoint, attempting to customize and brand the site as well as migrate all my help content to it. If you’re totally unfamiliar with SharePoint, this post will not get you up to speed. But for those embarking on a SharePoint customization challenge, most likely you’re already familiar with SharePoint. Reading these ten concepts … more »

I sometimes feel that my life online varies drastically from my life at work. Online, I blog and publish podcasts and write about wikis and Web 2.0. But at work, I used Flare, InDesign, Word, and other tools to create standard help deliverables, such as the User Guide, the Quick Reference Guide, and the Video Tutorial. For a long time, I’ve wanted to take my … more »

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 … more »

Here’s my list of the Top 10 Workspace Configurations for technical writers. (By “workspace configuration,” I mean the characteristics of your work environment that make you most productive and happy.) Dual Monitors. Allows you to put the application you’re documenting on one screen, your authoring tool on the other. No more scrunched windows or frustrations with constantly maximizing and minimizing your screens. Laptop with docking … more »

Many of us want to integrate innovative Web 2.0 practices into our online help. But if we create blogs, wikis, or other interactive features outside the help file, users may never use them. I’ve been using SharePoint 2007 as a file repository for my online help mainly because of the publishing control it gives me. And since I was already using SharePoint as my file … more »