Adobe is never going to live down the naming convention issue with RoboHelp. Maybe after they pass the new/old RoboHelp 9… I think of the naming SNAFU  like the Sierra Club thinks about a spotted owl. You know, the indicator species for an entire ecosystem.

If Adobe couldn’t get the name right, how much could they have cared for the entire ecosystem?

As for the reason that RoboHelp’s naming convention became a SNAFU, I’m just as much on the outside of that as the rest of you are. There has never been an official reason given by an Adobe employee.

So it comes down to Occam’s Razor between two theories. First, the Emperor’s new clothes weren’t worth someone losing their job over or second, the Product Manager didn’t see fit to ask.

From one poor soul on the HATT:

I was looking in Amazon.com for a book on RoboHelp 7. They listed a used copy of RoboHelp 7 for Dummies from the year 1999. Is this an error?

Rick Stone answered. I responded, not without a little tongue in cheek and a link to the RoboHelp Dead-again post. Please understand that I totally dig Rick Stone’s RoboHelp experience and his site is the best resource for RH users anywhere. He asked me to change the subject and talk about my time with eHelp…

I believe you used to be an official eHelp employee at one point didn’t you? Seems I recall you worked in the support center. Why was it you left?

Of course you can read that here on my About page… The rest of the conversation is on the HATT list…

Rick why not ask RJ Jacquez why he never brought up the name change; he’s been with eHelp, MACR, MadCap, and ADBE plus he is the RoboHelp Product Evangelist. If anyone should have been in the loop it should have been him.

Maybe he was working for MadCap at the time and wasn’t around. You know, before he went back to Adobe.

Updating Any Content Effectively Requires Feedback Data

Wiki strength is that anyone can provide feedback or edit content. The passive feedback of viewed pages falls under another product’s reporting (AWStats or WebTrends to name a couple).

Let’s examine the potential benefits that usage statistics and feedback could make to eDMS and/or wiki content. The two we’ll look at are Adobe RoboServer and MadCap’s Feedback Server.

Both provide feedback about page usage and search terms. This allows content creators and technical writers to evaluate which areas to focus their attention on, sort of like a triage, but MadCap’s goes a step or two farther and adds a Web 2.0 aspect with the addition of Comments pages within the web interface.

Understanding the origins of the RoboServer and Feedback Server comes in handy when comparing their technologies.

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Cousin Derek doesn’t blog?!? Say it ain’t so…

…Jeter updated his [mlb.com] journal four times in 2007, and Rodriguez once.

Jeter smiled when asked if he had thought about maintaining a true blog. “That’s too much for me to worry about,” said Jeter, who was in sixth grade when Hughes was born. Maybe, he [Phil Hughes] mused, there was a generation gap.

It would be hard to picture most players holding a contest for fans to guess a favorite quote from “The Office.” Hughes did, and more than 300 people replied before a reader named giambino0522 guessed correctly.

For the contest winner, Hughes sent a game-used, autographed ball from his victory in Game 3 of the division series. Hughes had two other balls from the game, so he apparently did not mind giving up a memento worth hundreds of dollars.

“The fans are very important to me,” Hughes said. “Without them, I wouldn’t have a job, basically. I try to give back as much as I can. It’s almost a no-brainer.”

Derek, you need to step up and get with the technology! Hook up with Twitter or something, do it from your cell phone… ’cause you’re just as old as my brother, and that’s not young in baseball! Those fans are fickle as well.

As for generation gap - meh!

Getting to the gut-check level of hard truth of whether all our TechComm lives will be forever changed - Is India (Outsourcing) Winning?

Recently I’ve been examining the outsourcing market in India. Part of this came out of my extremely detailed analysis of Adobe, however I also investigated innovation in India. One further study I recently did was analyzing the STC India earnings comparison between US / North American technical communicators and India-based technical communicators. 

J Schwan, Managing Partner of Solstice Consulting just returned from a meet and greet trip overseas to India.

I visited four different potential partners yesterday. One was a smaller startup of really smart software engineers, one was essentially a sweat shop (20 programmers packed in a 12×12 room, a very hot room) and the other two were large publicly traded companies.

I’m really glad I came because on paper, the first two firms looked the same and visiting their development center proved they were very, very different.

Here’s a sketchy SWOT analysis based on my research:

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Continued from eDMS Roshambo Part 2: Wikis vs eDMS posted a couple months ago. Sorry for the delay.

…And now you understand my RoShamBo comparison. Wiki, according to the authors I quoted in eDMS Roshambo Part 2 beats plain desktop publishing. In fact, Stewart Mader has an excellent book out that’s on my next-to-read-list.

Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader Read more about this book…

And as we remember from my eDMS Roshambo Part 2 quote from Dan’s blog, Dan Ortega feels that with the proper corporate restraint wikis can work well within a corporation.

This is with caveats, and not all of them are limited to technology. There are significant conflicting social elements regarding wiki implementation as well which is a point that Stewart Mader and I both agree upon.

Sacha Chua from The Orange Chair discusses this dilemma in It’s the culture, not the technology:

Corporate culture isn’t something you can change in a few months. You can’t install goodwill. You can’t enable cooperation.

In short, if you work in a hostile corporate environment, wikis might not be the best method to collaborate. Then again, in such an environment there’s probably zero collaboration going on at all.

Wiki Strength: Wiki Usage Resolves Siloed Content Challenge

No more of that developed content (.doc, .pdf, .fm) shoved somewhere on the eDMS or intranet with only desktop tools to edit it with. A wiki provides a single authoring framework that all can use.

Wiki Weaknesses: Homogenizing, Updating, and Repurposing Content

The primary objection / weakness that I have of a wiki integration is in single-sourcing and repurposing the resulting content.

Bringing exported content out into XML or another form is possible in some wikis but the end product still requires some sort of editing tool such as Microsoft Word, Adobe FrameMaker, or MadCap Blaze. Now you run into some issues.

The content’s single sourcing is critical, and if it’s updated in the wiki getting the changes into the technical communicator’s source working files could become a devastating bottleneck. 

The second weakness of a wiki is in the editing tool itself. The integration of concepts such as snippets and variables doesn’t currently existi in wiki editing. 

I would also add that the snippet suggestions and many other ‘homogenizing’ methods that MadCap’s Analyzer offers allow significant time savings in structuring content. This is a capability that the wikis I’ve seen don’t have and I consider this to be a particular weakness when overall content structure is considered due to the time required to get ‘er done.

Wiki content needs to be cleaned up if it’s going to see the outside world. I think behind the firewall a wiki gives everyone something to work with but there’s still considerable work to be done prior to integrating raw text into a corporate presence.

So even with a wiki there is still a workflow requiring a tool, and usage feedback can still be examined within the published online resources.

With RoboHelp or Flare the WYSIWYG is very sophisticated, the result of both product’s design team experience with help authoring. With a better editing tool for XML Flare tends to overrule both RoboHelp and straight wiki collaboration with the MadPak suite which has that killer app Capture, which takes the image variables into consideration so graphic inclusion isn’t such a chore.

I came across a few letters authored in Word 2.0 from my final cruise in 1995 and it got me thinking about my roots in TechComm. Have you had any experiences which led you towards TechComm which stand out?

Yep… Everyone Has a Story…

The initial knowledge management / content wrangling that I learned prior to using specific software tools was through my time in the service in the 1990s. I would have loved tools that MadCap, Articulate and Adobe now make for that. This was even before Microsoft Word and PowerPoint were adopted!

When looking at the time spent in communication simply in my collateral, non-aircrew duties, it seems that my “part-time job” of about 40 hours a week was a Technical Communicator. Somehow I managed to fit flying into this, probably due to the seven day work week that we military folks enjoyed while being deployed.

Workflow of a Typical Aircrew Technical Communicator

While I was in the military, we didn’t have a job description of Technical Communicator however once I was out of training and ‘in the fleet’ we were required to:

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eContent Magazine reports the shifting change in the Help Authoring Tool / content authoring market:

In 18 months, use of Flare has grown to 25% of the content authoring market, according to the 2007 WritersUA Skills and Technologies Survey, while usage of RoboHelp declined from 63% in November 2006 to 56% a year later. The company [MadCap] reports being profitable since its first month shipping the Flare product.

There are some graphs from the 2007 WritersUA conference which confirm this. Mike Hamilton and I discussed their growth in the December Podcast as well.

Sustainability? Innovation!

We’ve discussed their Web 2.0 Tech Support as a major competitive edge. Now they have the office space to expand, they have the budget to expand… What’s going to be next?

I’ve seen the new announcement for an upcoming workflow process that looks like it encompasses even more than Blaze by itself.

If MadCap is profitable now and still launching new products by the crateload does that itself qualify as a competitive edge?

I think that MadCap’s core focus on software development rather than expanding cubicles and their tight control of middle management has been key to the past two years of success. There’s one competitive edge.

Anthony Olivier, CEO, at one time was the eHelp CFO prior to his eHelp CEO position. He knows how to flip a dime about four times. The relocation to the 7777 Fay office was a coup as well; I’ve never heard of someone being able to MAKE money on an office move.

Where do you see the tipping point coming? Or will Adobe (NASD: ADBE) reverse the defections and keep selling its product in increasing volume?

After all, according to Vivek Jain, TCS Group Product Manager, Quality IS Innovation. :p

What do you need to get started?

The Federal government requires that all applicants for Federal grants and cooperative agreements with the exception of individuals other than sole proprietors, have a DUNS number.

That means that if you’re an S Corporation or a C Corporation, or in any way shape or form NOT working as a d/b/a sole proprietorship you will need your DUNS number. 

Great… What is a @#@# DUNS Number

Sounds difficult, doesn’t it? Let me shortcut this for you: Before you can bid on anything as a small business, you must have a DUNS number.

Getting a DUNS number is free and takes only a few minutes. Just click beneath the fold…

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Wait, shhhhhh….

Don’t tell anyone about this report until I get a chance to build my duplex in NorCal and then buy another duplex here in San Diego!

So, instead of citing 17-year lows, the better statistic for the press to report would have been the 11.0 month supply of new homes on the market.  Because it’s up from 9.8 in February, buyers may now have additional negotiating leverage with developers that want (or need) to get their unsold, newly-built homes off the books pronto.

Just because the headlines read like bad news doesn’t mean that the story is bad news, too.  Dig a little deeper for the real story,

I’ve been waiting for five years for the market to correct like this so I could make a common sense investment, and now that it does, everyone wants to say we’re doing fine.

So I have to say - just listen to your televisions, pay no attention to this chart…

Here’s a small but simple tip to speed up your workflow for those who must capture custom window sizes without the browser address bar.

From Microsoft Windows | Customizing the Links bar

To enable the Links bar in Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista

Right-click on the Windows Taskbar. Click on Toolbars, and then click Links to select it (a checkmark will be displayed beside it)

You will now see “Links” added just to the left of the system tray on the taskbar.

My addition to this is to hyperlink all your working windows within this small box, then just page through them capturing the screens you need. I found it worked well when reviewing a process with the SME.

Hope this helps reduce some time readjusting windows and pasting addresses into screen capture target browser windows.