Search results

Recording of Open Authoring -- Collaboration Across Disciplines presentation, by Ralph Squillace

by Tom Johnson on Nov 15, 2016
categories: api-doc podcasts

Ralph Squillace, a senior content engineer for the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure team based in San Francisco, California, recently gave a presentation to the STC Silicon Valley chapter (on November 14, 2016) on Open Authoring -- Collaboration Across Disciplines. In the presentation, Ralph talks about Microsoft's approach to scaling their authoring and publishing efforts across the company by embracing Markdown, Github, open source tools, and other processes that allowed everyone in the company to write and contribute to Azure's documentation.

Audio

Here’s the audio from Ralph’s presentation:

Listen to this presentation:

You can download the MP3 file, subscribe in iTunes, or listen with Stitcher.

The slides are here:

Presentation description

Here’s a description of the presentation:

At Microsoft, we are working to make technical content everyone’s responsibility. This presentation will focus on our efforts to increase collaboration across different disciplines at Microsoft by implementing open authoring strategies for areas like Azure using GitHub repos and Markdown. Our shift from a closed to open system enables our engineering, consulting, architecture, and support teams to actively engage and help drive up content satisfaction with customers. We’ll discuss our work to date, tools and best practices that are evolving to allow for collaboration, some of our plans for the future, as well as our lessons learned.

Key takeaways:

  • How collaboration across disciplines drives customer satisfaction
  • Open authoring strategies and tools that allow active collaboration across engineering, consulting, architecture, and support teams
  • Challenges of open authoring and cross-discipline content accountability
  • Best practices for sustainable collaboration

You can read more details from the event on the STC Silicon Valley site.

About Ralph Squillace

Ralph SquillaceRalph Squillace (pronounced "Squillachey") is a senior content engineer for the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure team based in San Francisco, California. He works directly with customers trying and breaking Azure, as well as writing, publishing, and teaching cloud and distributed architecture and devops development mainly on Linux workloads and working with Linux, Mac, and Windows. He’s responsible for much of the Azure CLI documentation, as well as Azure documentation for Docker, CoreOS, and various container orchestration systems such as Deis, Weave, Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker’s machine, swarm, and compose for contained applications.

To learn more about Ralph, you can follow him on Twitter @ralph_squillace and Linkedin profile.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the tech comm, be sure to subscribe to email updates below. You can also learn more about me or contact me. Finally, note that the opinions I express on my blog are my own points of view, not that of my employer.