Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
December 2006/January 2007
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter December 2006/January 2007 |
Hello Friends and Members of STC-SF,
I have to confess this is my first letter to you as your president -- and this is one of the duties I looked forward to the most.
Let me first say thank you to a departing member of our membership team -- David Hulbert has done a great job developing our programs for almost 18 months now and it's been a very good run. Just this fall we were lucky to have Jim Bisso with us to discuss API-writing, Yas Etessam from the OASIS DITA technical committee discussion authoring with XML, Michael Wu presenting Adobe's palette of technical communications products, and Mike Hamilton demonstrating Madcap Flare. I don't know about you, but I have felt exhilarated and excited after these meetings.
Thanks, David! It's been a great ride!
I was lucky enough to be a speaker at the LavaCon conference in Kauai in October. From there I was able to gain a high level view of industry trends I'd like to share with you. For this column, I'm going to focus on XML authoring as the biggest and most significant trend in our industry.
For those of you wanting more information than I can provide here, I urge you to consider visiting the LavaCon website and looking at the program at www.lavacon.org. You'll find industry leaders who presented on this and other subjects. They are a great resource you shouldn't overlook. Most of them are available to speak at your chapters.
And, while you're at it, make plans to consider attending LavaCon if you can. This was an extremely rewarding experience and I learned a great deal during the three-day conference. I also met a bunch of wonderful colleagues who are industry leaders, fun to be with, and extremely skilled in their work. I'm glad I went and hope to attend next year.
As you may already know, the push to move to XML-based authoring tools leads the list of industry trends. The advantages of this approach have been explained in better detail than I can reproduce here, but the basic argument is that reusing content in multiple places can lead to substantial savings in developing technical documentation, especially when you begin to factor in the cost of localizing documentation. XML also provides more authoring power and flexibility than HTML.
Migrating to this paradigm isn't as simple as it sounds, and there are some pretty significant barriers. Most significantly, there is no end-to-end tool that will take you from developing and managing content to producing your final output. Instead, you'll need to choose authoring tools, content management tools, and have tools in place to produce output. The DITA standard and products like AuthorIT, Adobe FrameMaker+XML, and XMetal can take you a long way in this process, especially if they can accept their standard output templates. My guess, however, is that the need to meet branding and design standards will force a high level of customization.
Making the case for this migration, developing and implementing a plan, and getting buy-in from your writing team will take a lot of effort outside of your day-to-day work. And it may require expertise you don't have on your teams, forcing you to hire contractors and consultants to help out. Your business case will have to address these costs and benefits carefully and your project plan needs to be rock solid as well.
I don't want to sound like I'm preaching gloom and doom, however. If you take the time to educate yourself, talk to the experts who are available to you, and make your plans, you can make the transition to single-source authoring with XML for less money and effort than you think. The rewards to your company can be significant; the rewards to your career lucrative.
There's also an opportunity for the adventurous soul. If you find yourself to be a tool maven, your skills will be highly prized as a consultant or contractor. You may be able to find a role on staff with a large portion of your job dedicated to tool implementation and support. If you know or are willing to develop XSLT skills, you can make your skills available for a good price to people who need to move in this direction.
I've seen compelling products in the area of XML authoring tools and content management systems, but I've not seen any tools to allow you to develop XSLT transforms that don't require significant programming skills. If you are aware of such products, let me know! Otherwise -- here's a great business opportunity.
Next edition: documentation, localization, and globalization.