It’s easy to postpone organization. We begin writing discrete help topics, hundreds of them, and then try to group them together in a logical way. But here’s where the problem starts. What does it mean for a system of organization to be “logical”? And how does the user navigate this logic we create? Our system of organization partly determines the findability of the content. Without … more »

Let’s fast forward a year. Assume you have explored Swordfish and have hammered out a lot of help topics — nearly 200 help topics, in fact. You have met with subject matter experts and extracted critical information from them for many months. You have explored Swordfish inside and out, documenting every possible task and setting, and now you have a ton of content. The help … more »

Story Now I have a confession to make. I really didn’t want to talk about roles and hats and value. I wanted to talk about story. But I didn’t want to talk about story directly. Instead, I wanted to illustrate it by structuring my entire presentation as a story. You’ve seen that with each of the headings, I labeled a component of the story. I … more »

A few years ago, I wanted to better understand content management, so I picked up Managing Enterprise Content, by Ann Rockley, and read it through. It opened my eyes to a lot of new concepts. Ann is one of our field’s leading experts in content management. She’s now expanding in to something she calls “intelligent content.” Intelligent content is a concept that builds on other … more »