Never let it be said that MadCap Software is out of touch with the Technical Communication world in these tough times. Sharon Burton posts about MadCap’s soup kitchen for Technical Communicators. This menu’s got it going on with all the trimmings and none of the cost.

If anyone has an ounce of sense and thinks they remotely might have to swat around theories, buzzwords, or best practices across the desk from a hiring manager within the next eighteen months, you really need to hit up these free webinars.That means just about everyone, including freelancers.

Come in out of the cold, pull up a chair, and listen to industry experts like Sarah O’Keefe talk about killer concepts like DITA. And listen to Neil Perlin talk about HATs to do CMS.

For FREE.

By the way, all but one are technology agnostic. For those of you not already using MadCap Flare you won’t be left out in the cold. I promise people won’t point and snicker.

Categories, times and dates below the fold. Seats are limited I’m sure, so register early.

Topic Based-authoring: Doing more with less

15 January 2009 9am Pacific

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/961665594

In this tool-independent webinar, you learn about topic-based authoring and how it can help you.

Advanced Publishing Techniques in Flare V4 or Blaze V1

29 January 2009 9am Pacific

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812049597

This webinar focuses on producing high quality, high value documents for your customers using Flare V4 or Blaze V1. Learn ways to efficiently assemble and deliver your content.

DITA 101 — Why the Buzz?

5 February 2009 9am Pacific

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/598015341

In this tool-independent webinar, Sarah O’Keefe discusses DITA concepts, the business case, and typical scenarios where DITA is used to evaluate whether DITA makes sense for you.

Moving to Topic-based Authoring: Making the Business Case

12 February 2009 9am Pacific

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/706899386

In this tool-independent webinar, Bonni Graham explains how to make the business case for topic-based authoring to your management. You know the savings, now you can show your boss!

Planning for Content Reuse: Best Practices for Legacy and New Content

24 February 9am Pacific

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/647207434

In this tool-independent webinar, Eddie VanArsdall discusses Best Practices when planning the move to topic-based authoring.

Can your HAT be a Content Management System?

12 March 9am Pacific

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/187845873

In this tool-independent webinar, Neil Perlin discusses how you might use the hidden features in your existing HAT tools as a Content Management System.

Theories about where MSFT wants to go? Check this out for a bit of convergence…

Could Microsoft out-Apple Adobe?

Let’s examine a few trends and remember that Apple beat its competitors in the education market twenty years ago by having a rabid fan base along with compelling intuitive software.  Microsoft Live’s community had 60 million users last time I checked. Working within the existing Live framework will be critical for any Learning Management Systems (LMS) play that Microsoft chooses to do in the future.

The eLearning potential with Microsoft’s (NASD: MSFT) current portfolio of hardware and software, part of which is the XBox brand, is gaining momentum. I’ve been discussing current instructional design trends with instructional designers, consumer media analysts, military training officers, and gamers. We’ve reached current consensus:

There are a lot of benefits to using the XBox 360 as a training / eLearning platform, primarily because of the XBox Live community.

Having solid revenue generating Intellectual Property (IP) in both hardware and software gives a strong advantage to MSFT in this space. Windows Live Mesh is self descriptive; it meshes all the services together.

How Does Live Mesh Work?

From Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Live Mesh builds on the cloud storage, management, service and provisioning and computational fabric that other Microsoft Live services use. On top of that, Live Mesh uses the same identity, synchronized storage and connectivity services that Microsoft uses for other Live offerings.

The “platform” services (a k a the “developer stack”) include the new Mesh Framework, as well as both a cloud and a client software run-time Mesh Operating Environment (MOE).

Live Mesh “experiences” from Microsoft and third-party providers will build on top of these layers.

Windows Live Mesh will make use of Silverlight as Michael Cote explained in People Over Process » Market Context for Silverlight – A Brief Q&A:

Q: What is your overall feeling about Silverlight at this time?

A: At the moment, Silverlight feels like it’s going to be on a full-on contender with Flash and Flex in a short time. Silverlight 2.0 is supposed to bring in the more “hard core” GUI programming features that Flex has.

Perhaps Microsoft’s Mesh project will address the offline synch tick-list of AIR. Then, the battle will be over ubiquity, developer hearts and minds, and control of the web.

Through the PC Silverlight allows some scary-good functionality.

Think about having Instructional Design teams building applications that can reach outside and into the web page itself: From More about Silverlight – Microsoft’s Flex / Flash Competitor

Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.

This is important. We are now looking at two-way communication with Silverlight.

Available Silverlight eLearning Tools

I’ve seen a growing demand in Google hits on my site for how to take Captivate content and put it into Silverlight. People are asking about how to take the output from this market dominating tool and repurpose it into Silverlight and this is only the beginning.

Imagine having software tutorials buildable by instructional design staff that can be quickly hashed into something usable for the XBox 360, through XBox Live, or through Windows Live Mesh…

La Jolla-based MadCap Software’s Mimic (Adobe Captivate and TechSmith Camtasia competitor) outputs in Silverlight format. I haven’t heard whether TechSmith or Adobe are intending to put this into their products within the next release cycle.

Where is eLearning in all of this?

There are some other very significant benefits aside from Silverlight; meshing all of these services together adds Windows Live Writer and Instant Messaging in as well.

One benefit is in reaching people through advertising as well as explaining the process: Simple Instructions Work Best and Sell Products

Finding your audience is something that every Marketing person desires to do. Explaining a process so that an audience gets the point is what every Technical Communicator desires to do.

With Microsoft’s Live platform they’ve integrated both of these within their Instant Messaging client.

Regarding Windows Live Writer from Web 2.0 – Windows Live Writer reviewed for blogging:

Yet another entry from MSFT into the Web 2.0 space such as with the Silverlight framework which allows two-way communication from a website, and oh yes… this is for free. That’s pretty disruptive.

Adding to the chaos is the mash of what has occurred within the current eLearning space. Market analysis of eLearning from 2008 Corporate Learning Factbook Values U.S. Training Market at $58.5B:

* E-learning has grown dramatically. The use of self-study e-learning now accounts for 20% of student hours, up from last year’s figure of 15%.

This growth is driven largely by an increase in online training among small organizations (100-999 employees), which are acquiring the skills and technology to make online training a reality.

Analysis: Adobe Media Player, my @%$

The shaky economy plays into this. Re-education of adults is becoming a critical factor in economic restructuring. If industry is closing down, concessions from the unions force retraining. Cost efficient training is a growth industry.

While Adobe (NASD: ADBE)is repositioning itself and firing divisions, Microsoft has an advantage into the eLearning market and can leverage their existing Rich Internet Applications. If MSFT can duplicate what Apple did in the 1980s and entrench themselves into education, it will mean long term success in a disrupted market which has $58.5 billion in potential.

This model could effectively work even with a poor economy and would build an OS-free eLearning model built on IP within hardware and software which could be used globally.

FLOSS Manuals: The OTHER FM for PDFs

Some writers truly hate Adobe Acrobat and any tool that can do the job better is worth a shot, particularly if it’s open source and easily navigated. Flossmanuals.net introduces FLOSS which does a lot of the single desktop Acrobat Pro’s job – collaboratively and open source.

Could FLOSS be the new Acrobat Pro killer?

FLOSS could bridge the gaps between Subject Matter Expert (SME) authoring of content and true documentation. For the specific purpose of supporting open source collaborative efforts this is heaven sent. Most open-source dev teams are simply not able to have those wonderful team meetings for doc review either for financial or time management purposes.

Update: Anne Gentle’s site talks about an event called a Booksprint that FlossManuals.net is doing for technical writers in support of open source programs.

I’ve been reading Janet Swisher’s review of FLOSS Manuals. She examines the pros and cons of Wiki briefly and explains the problem / solution of FLOSS definitively:

You can write documentation using an open source word processor like OpenOffice.org Writer, but you still need a content management system of some kind to handle versioning of drafts and communication within a project community, and CMSs are complex to set up and maintain.

And so a divide has emerged, with open source programmers on one side, wishing somebody would come help write the docs, and potential writers on the other side, too intimidated or too busy to learn the tools to work on open source projects.

FLOSS Manuals bridges that divide, and does so in a way that is deeply rooted in the open source ethos of community and collaboration.

FLOSS and Wikis for Documentation

The implementation and administration of the wiki model always seems to be the insurmountable challenge, if one is to be found. Janet has a solid point regarding Stewart Mader’s viewpoint on wikis for documentation:

I’ve generally been skeptical of wiki advocates who say, “Oh yeah, and you can create documentation in a wiki, too”, because I’ve seen very few actual examples.

Janet’s link refers to an article by Stewart Mader regarding the specific issue of documentation within a wiki. This happens to be an area where Stewart Mader and I disagreed earlier this year. I haven’t heard of many live wikis truly impacting technical writing and Janet confirms this from her perspective as well.

I’m happy to report that Stewart, Janet, and I technically all win on this point.

FLOSS Manuals IS a wiki, but it’s purpose-built for creating documentation. Its founders have created an open-source standard of documentation that blends reading, writing, plus allowing output and redistribution of content, all efficiently administrated for the open-source community.

However, each manual must be managed separately and that’s where technical writing and document content management skills shine.

Flossmanuals: A Help Authoring Tool Killer?

This bears examining because there’s a lot to be said about context-sensitive help within applications as well as the authoring platform for help. Tom Johnson’s recent poll and the ensuing HATT debate shows a passionate user base for tools.

Janet states:

Flossmanuals.net is heavily oriented towards book-style manuals; you could use it for topic-oriented online help, but it might be a stretch—a HAT it is not. But now that there is FLOSS Manuals, there simply is no longer a technological reason for any open source project not to have documentation.

I agree with this. There’s a method to the madness when you’re writing online help files and formatting is a critical element which a formal HAT tool is designed for.

For now, FLOSS is free*, with a minor amount of techie magic necessary. I envision beginning tech writers using this to support their early projects for open source software and quickly learning the basics of the technical communication trade.

*From the Flossmanuals site:

Our principle aim is not to be a publisher but to create as many tools and outlets for quality free documentation as possible. If that means you wish to use the FM tool set but host or ‘publish’ under your own banner, then that’s excellent. We are very happy to offer you a documentation platform to meet all your documentation needs.

Of course, all this is for free software / open source software projects only. If you create proprietary software then…

Clearly this means that you need to talk to them before boldly profiting from this community.

Workflow Focused Help Authoring Tools

Figuring out the fastest and best workflow is something the MadCap and Adobe teams are each wrangling, however they have markedly different approaches.

MadCap’s Team Server solution is in development. Along with the expected release of the publication centered form of Flare, Blaze, this is their collaborative workflow answer.  

Adobe seems to be several generations behind MadCap. Adobe’s answer to innovation seems to be to continue bundling new product lines into their Technical Communications Suite, plus to integrate what MadCap introduces as quickly as possible. If they can’t directly compete with innovation, bundling secondary products is another way to add value.

I can see that both are working towards collaboration tools – MadCap with X-Edit, Adobe with Acrobat and their newly acquired web-based collaborative tool, Buzzword.

My Opinion:

FLOSSManuals.net is a great place to start writing content for developers if you’re just starting out or would like to support a friend’s really cool application. I know of several for-profit companies that put out free widgets of one sort or another that don’t have tech writing staff. This would be perfect for that as well.

The other side of the coin is that it gives a good measure of what’s actually effective. While wiki implementation is challenging, on a cost scale when someone like FLOSSManuals is administrating it, it’s definitely worth exploring.

While not a HAT replacement, this model may work well to supplement a workflow.

As a follow-up to my earlier India study I thought we could discuss BusinessWeek’s article summarizing innovation in India:

Not all analysts are convinced Indian R&D operations are ready to assume the lead in innovation, however.

Martin Kenney, a University of California at Davis economist who has studied offshore R&D in India and China, agrees the trend is still growing in India and that its workforce is becoming more experienced and innovative. Since 2000, he notes, U.S. patents awarded to inventors filing from India rose more than fivefold, to around 550 a year.

But the number of India patents remains very small in the scheme of things: Last year the U.S. issued nearly 94,000 patents. And Kenney suspects the vast bulk of India’s engineering hordes still is far too green to do complex design and innovation work.

“Bangalore is not like Silicon Valley, where in a couple of weeks you can round up 10 people who have already designed chips at three different startups,” he says. “We don’t really yet know much about the true quality of the work done there. There are company anecdotes going both ways. Some of it may not be what it is cracked up to be.”

A ratio of 550 : 94,000 is pretty compelling. Development of those 94k patents is another issue altogether. It still seems that there’s not enough competition within India to create that stress that true innovation requires. Stress is good; it makes for the best environment for change and that means innovation.

There is, notably, plenty of stress within Pakistan.

Pakistan: The New India?

Personally I think that the India outsourcing model is going to move eastward in the next decade or so. Just like Korea did to Japan, like China did to Japan and Korea, Pakistan is close enough to benefit from India’s success if it’s sharp on timing and coherent enough to grasp the advantages.

From BusinessWeek: What Now for Pakistan? – Pakistanis Ready for Change

Lost in the chaos of Monday’s [Musharraf] resignation was the fact that Pakistan’s economy has the right fundamentals to mirror the kind of growth that neighboring India has enjoyed.

With a large, English-speaking population, vast pools of engineering students, and a youthful population, Pakistan could become an economic powerhouse under the right conditions, says Agha Imran Hamid, a development consultant with the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Channeled correctly, the innovation within Pakistan could easily displace India as a top seated outsourcing destination. Should this be encouraged over the next twenty years, Afghanistan and Pakistan could jointly provide the equivalent of India’s developing 1990s era prosperity and knowledge management.

Additionally, the ‘stan pipeline (originating in Turkmenistan) bringing natural gas down through Afghanistan and Pakistan for end use in India provides well needed and consistent hard currency to both the Afghan and Pakistan.

With India now a valuable trading partner to Pakistan, things should calm down with that whole Kashmir region dispute.  While Afghanistan still has challenges, following a template from Pakistan could be just what it needs. That and distributed power sourced from natural gas. 

Didn’t know about the pipeline?

Funny how you don’t hear about things like that often in the media these days, and yes, positive things are still being done even with the current disruptive situation.

Related Articles

Is India (Outsourcing) Winning?

The State of Innovation in India | STC India’s Salary Surveys | Adobe’s India Investment

How much money do you need to pay to make quality PDFs? According to Tom Johnson, the I’d Rather Be Writing author, zero.

Free PDF Generation

Tom opens by talking about that irritating little release updater that Adobe runs in the background. Speaking about PDF functionality that exists in Word 2007 Tom states:

…you can download the Save as PDF or XPS add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 for free. It’s less than 1 megabyte to download, and it quickly and flawlessly converts Word docs to PDF, even with hyperlinks. If you have non-Word documents to convert, Primo PDF (another free PDF alternative) will do it absolutely free.

I keep wondering why Microsoft wasn’t able to package this add-in with their updates, or initially with the product.

After reading my PDF summary from January you’ll know my position on this necessary but often overused documentation format. Yes, I use it. Yes, it is a standard. But not worth $700 if you don’t have to spend it.

Help Authoring Tool War – Now Led By MadCap?

What brought me to the IRBW site this evening was the poll that Sharon mentioned. Surfing over to IRBW I checked it out – here’s the Authoring Tool voting stats listed as of today.

I’m not surprised. This is what happens when you lose confidence in the software manufacturer who takes over a popular product such as RoboHelp and loses touch with the market.

Adobe, Adobe… Is AIR going to ‘Help’ you?

AIR seems to get some traction for ADBE however. The stock is still trading near 52-week high levels and has been climbing since it’s low around March of this year.

I’ll have to do a follow-up to my 2007 prediction of stock value for Adobe (NASD: ADBE) dropping this year. After all, Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) isn’t releasing Vista and ADBE’s forced upgrade tactic isn’t as relevant.

We’ll have to see how things go at the end of the fiscal year… They could prove me wrong.

Am I First to Coin The Term AIRHelp?

Then again, last month Ben Minson’s two part review of the RoboHelp Packager for AIR public beta raised some solid questions about the functionality of the software for the end user.

I’m not sold on .air taking over the world of WWW just yet. I agree with most of this take from Ben Minson on ADBE AIR:

Adobe seems to be following a good line of thinking here with AIR help. But remember, users want simplicity. Having to install each help system as an application is asking too much of everyday users.

This use case for AIRHelp would tend to put us back to the .chm days with a distributable file that needed to be on every system running it. eHelp introduced WebHelp as a way to get away from that back in 2002. 

ADBE’s RoboHelp… Innovative A Year Too Late To Be Innovative

Doing something like Web 2.0 two release cycles behind your competition is not innovative. It’s keeping up with the market that’s trying to leave you behind. AuthorIT and MadCap Flare been-there and done-that already.

I reviewed MadCap’s Web 2.0 functionality last year as the Feedback Service. It doesn’t require installation on the client side of anything special and works cross-platform. It’s been pointed out that it can run on any IIS server on your network, even your desktop in your office.

From MadCap Mike’s Musings – Comparing Documentation Server Software – MadCap Feedback Server and RoboHelp Server:

Web 2.0 – The MadCap Feedback Server support for Web 2.0 community technologies is a complete turnkey system. Once installed there is nothing that your developers or programmers need to do to make this work. All that is required is for you to select the appropriate options while publishing your Flare projects to turn these capabilities on.

In contrast, the few similar options that Adobe has introduced are limited to the Air output only (not available in the more popular WebHelp) and even then require either programmer/developer hours or Rube Goldberg-esque scenarios where data files have to be emailed back and forth between users.

Ben’s review points out the obvious flaw; why make end users download and install something special rather than transparently do the Web 2.0 on the server side? Additionally, having an attachment-based data output for the actual server doesn’t make much sense either.

Related Posts:

• Friday Comments Review: RoboHelp vs. Flare
• Ten Faces of Innovation
• Technical Communication – Teamwork and Workflow as a Disruptive Technology
• PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• RoboHelp 6 finally arrives, and it’s craptastic
• Adobe & MadCap’s Cold War: Market Share
• Web 2.0 – MadCap Feedback Review Part 2
• Web 2.0 – MadCap Feedback is the KISS principle at work…
• Comparing Documentation Server Software – MadCap Feedback Server and RoboHelp Server

Well, here we go again… Acording to the zedia flash blog, we’re not seeing what we should through Google:

It’s a pretty shocking title with all the fuss about the new flash player for Google and Yahoo, but I will try to explain why I came to this conclusion. I suggest you read about the seven test cases I did because that’s mostly what my reasoning is built on. I am going to explain point by point what happened in the experiment.

From another reputable blogging source comes this: SWF indexing is a red herring, and you should all know that by now

So, here we go again, Google has annonced that they will index SWF files with a new algorithm and the whole Flash blogosphere echobox is ringing with the words of the clueless. The announcement shows how little Google understands about Flash websites and needlessly diverts the attention away from developing a real solution to Flash website search engine optimization. The reaction to Google’s announcement also shows how little the Flash bloggers understand about the problem. I’m not sure which of these two is the most annoying.

The bottom line is that SWF indexing is a lost cause, it will not make a difference, and the only thing that has changed is that now Google is even better at finding nothing.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you about this coming up… Clearly IE8 and Silverlight is a triple threat when looking towards adoption of RIA.

From The Register:

TechEd 2008 Bill Gates has announced the next betas of Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 2 while outlining plans from Microsoft on development services…

The second beta of Microsoft Silverlight cross-browser media player and development platform will be released by the end of this week under a Go Live license. 

A Go Live license lets developers use pre-release code in real-world applications, but without the safety net of Microsoft support.

The second beta had been promised for the second half of 2008, so it’s… early!

As for Bill Gates’ last day, this YouTube video is pretty good with some great celeb cameos.

FWIW, GoLive is pretty cool. I’ve been working on a review for some time updating us on Silverlight and GoLive. With all the hubbub going on for me we’ll see how that looks for later this week.

Related Articles:

Rich Internet Applications War Is Brewing

Adobe FLEX vs Microsoft Silverlight Part 1

More about Silverlight – Microsoft’s Flex / Flash Competitor

How to convert 60 million users to Silverlight quickly

My LMS / eLearning Disruptive Technology Concept

Halo 3, XBox and Technical Communication? (Part 5)

Microsoft Releases Silverlight, Extends Support to Linux

CharlesJeter.com Category: Rich Internet Applications

Great roundup of Rich Internet Application authoring technologies from Emerging Technologies – Application Development – RIA War Is Brewing

There’s a war brewing on the Web today–a war to decide how Web applications and content will be developed and how users will consume the content of the future Web.

But this isn’t the latest round in the browser wars. No, the war I’m talking about is over the RIA (rich Internet application), a type of Web application that can run independently of browsers, can run on any operating system and, in many ways, works like a traditional desktop application.

Of course, RIAs aren’t new. They can be traced back to earlier efforts such as Macromedia’s Shockwave, Java applets and the ubiquitous Flash format.

Analysis of RIA and Wireless Data

When I was in the wireless data game, one of the main questions that people were trying to answer back in 2000 and 2001 was, how do we earn revenue streams from the broadband wireless market we’re about to implement?

The hierarchy for web and internet usage at the time was:

1) email

2) search

Since email and search were text-based, attracting rich internet users across the bandwidth was difficult to make a business case for.

As Yoram Baltinester, NVTL’s Business Development guru stated in a meeting back then, people look towards their desktops for the rich experience for a lot of reasons. They didn’t look at their mobile devices for the same rich content, primarily due to battery life and the form factor of the screen size.

As the Apple iPhone has demonstrated, there’s a good platform for display. Slingbox and other content middleware distribution hardware shows that there’s a need for content to be pushed out.

RIA Content Delivery

What’s known as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) plays a part in this as well.

One blogpost, Full-length shows, even movies, growing on cellular challenges the validity of providing multiple content for multiple viewing platforms:

The question I have is, are we ready to take it to this level? It doesn’t change what’s required much on the CDN side. In fact, it probably increases our capacity since we’re dealing with smaller files of lower resolution. Now we have to maintain separate environments though for HD and mobile.

So this is a valid point. Are we ready? I think the overall answer remains can profit be made on this? Here we are eight years later, and it’s not really a significant portion of the market. You’re stuck with obtaining either rich, HD-ready content or low-resolution mobile deliverable content.

The cellular carriers have now developed the bandwidth, but everyone’s not so sold on the money to be made. And the bandwidth is sketchy at best for full capacity voice and data. I could care less what the marketing people say, there’s a point of saturation that nobody likes to talk about, where you’re not going to be able to keep a call because there’s too many bits dropping off.

That means wireless data is scalable only to a certain point. Let’s face it, providers don’t make more money putting up more towers. They make more money by cutting operating costs. Whether it’s in powering down the towers during offpeak hours or through chopping bandwidth hogs who have all you can eat accounts (like yours truly) they have to save time and bandwidth on the digital phone networks. Who gets priority reads like a conspiracy theory since that’s a tightly guarded secret.

XBox Live customers can download HD content relatively easily from their home network, but it’s currently trapped in the device.

Analysis of RIA and Technical Communication

TechComm is not always tailored for instruction, however breaking down the modules of a device or software program can make instructional content which could be repurposed.

I would think that dropping in a spinning 3D picture of a component might help identify it conceptually, however the time and expense of placing that picture in from scratch is prohibitive. 

eLearning – tremendous advantages with a native RIA developed application. Here are a couple related articles, mainly about the Silverlight entry into RIA:

How to convert 60 million users to Silverlight quickly

My LMS / eLearning Disruptive Technology Concept

Halo 3, XBox and Technical Communication? (Part 5)

Microsoft Releases Silverlight, Extends Support to Linux

Technical Writing – Adobe has added Acrobat 3D to their Technical Communication Suite for a reason; a picture is worth a thousand words, as long as the picture is understood well enough.

However, it’s not been enough to impress industry power users: Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite Panned By TechComm Bloggers 

I’m still searching for where exactly RIA will fit within the future of Technical Communication. Adobe’s had some product evangelists segue into Technical Communication being rich media, less written word, more universally understood documentation.

I’m not so sure I’m buying that though.

Are we really going to want our instructions in podcast or YouTube format?

From what I recall from the 1990s and NT, SP3′s the charm it seems… From Foul Writers World | Windows XP Service Pack 3 goes GOLD:

Earlier today Microsoft confirmed that the source code has been released to manufacturers for testing and implementation.

It has been almost 4 years in the making, and Microsoft has taken their time to ensure that end users don’t have the same problems as the previous SP.

Testing for the SP has revealed a streamlined and greatly reduced install process. A big improvement on the install process comes in the form that the actual download package is a lot smaller than the previous SP and installation took a measly 15 minutes.

I’ll be checking it out this week. It’s supposed to have some cool security updates.

Continuing from eDMS Roshambo Part 4 | Feedback with the wiki versus the MadPak with Feedback Service.

Wikis clobber eDMS when it comes to collaboration. Wikis are great but getting the end result into a user manual format still requires an external tool.

Rock Paper Scissors (RoShamBo): Wiki vs the MadPak, Analyzer, and Feedback Service

There are strengths to not having a Wiki model introduced right away into a corporation. Dan Ortega mentions corporate policy holding back the anarchy, however it helps considerably when there is a gradual move towards the Wiki model. 

MadCap is halfway through the Wiki model already with just the MadPak. Add to that the Analyzer and Feedback Server/Service’s Web 2.0 features, you’ve got yourself a good step past Wiki as far as maintaining positive control over the content.

With Analyzer you’re looking at a Documentation Manager’s dream package.

I think the key element is… how much time would this all save each role a Technical Communicator has. Let alone the workflow’s editing search and correction time.

Cost – $1200 for the MadPak and $400/quarter for the Feedback Service ($1600/year) so you don’t even need to host a server and stress the IIS configuration. No pricing on Analyzer is yet available. I really should get some sort of Amazon Buy-now button for this stuff.

As far as the industry tools are currently set, MadCap Analyzer could save upwards of $50k – $80k a year in tech writer time and other software. That’s pretty hefty, although at the time I’m writing this MadCap hasn’t set a price for the Analyzer.

Note: Pricing for Analyzer is pretty cheap, as I edit this article I find that it’s only about $200 or so to upgrade.

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.

History Lesson: From DynaHelp to RoboEngine to RoboServer & Feedback Server

Eight years ago the current RoboServer was known as Dynahelp. The RoboHelp Enterprise component RoboEngine was derived from DynaHelp, a Blue Sky Software (BSS) / eHelp product that launched in 2000. Dynahelp was used by companies such as American Airlines and was an enterprise solution.

From destinationCRM’s July 2000 article DynaHelp’s Smart Web-Site Improvement Tool:

DynaHelp, [is] a server-based help tool that not only steers users through a site, gently assisting them when they become stuck or confused, but also gathers data on particularly troublesome interface and usability problems and reports the problems back to webmasters.

DynaHelp’s database makes a record of every user request for assistance and sends reports on these problematic areas back to the webmaster, explains Steven Jacobs, a Web-site designer and consultant on usable design. ”

A DynaHelp site gets more usable the more the site is used,” said Jacobs. “But you don’t have to frustrate your customers to find out how not to frustrate them.

DynaHelp was, as I understood the BSS corporate history, one of the main reasons that BSS changed its name to eHelp right around the time of the dotcom/dot-bomb in 2000. In late 2001 eHelp restructured and returned leadership back to Jorgen Lien, the founder after the core DynaHelp project failed during the dotbomb era. I could be wrong about the dates, it was before my time.

Jorgen brought eHelp back to the basics it made money on, and the core DynaHelp technology was adapted into RoboEngine, part of which was sold as the RoboInfo Server, a Policy and Procedure eDMS powerhouse at a market disrupting price point.

RoboInfo Server allowed users to index all their existing documentation, use the RoboHelp GUI and develop intranets with searchable linked content. All this for only a couple thousand dollars made it attractive.

History lesson: Competitive workflow five to seven years ago

RoboServer’s full purpose seven years ago (2001) when they introduced it was to make that existing content searchable. It was a $20,000 search engine that did natural language search (NLS) all packaged and sold for $2000.

That was disruptive on its own two legs, but add to it the online help and reporting, and it got better and better. But now it’s old.

According to Vivek Jain, Group Product Manager, RoboServer’s innovation apparently is in fixing its bugs (See Vivek’s Quality IS Innovation post on Adobe’s TechComm blog) however even that’s not compelling with the botched and blurry Captivate import into RoboHelp. Not to mention the quality of the product’s online help.

RoboHelp X4(?) and X5 (2003) made PDF import along with .doc file import possible so you could repurpose existing archived content. You could get a license for those for about $1000.

You can still get a license for X5 for around $350. OR you can buy the Adobe TechCommSuite for something under $800.

Those solutions will keep you at the same workflow competitive to Wiki. Versus desktop applications and a black hole of an intranet, you’re much better off. But it’s old. It’s not hip, with it, and let’s face it, the ‘innovation’ of RoboServer has been in trying to keep it running through the new Microsoft incarnations of NT server technology and their updates.

Or… Like in Star Wars, now experience the TRUE Power of the Dark Side

Here we are in 2008. It’s a far cry from 2000 and the launch of DynaHelp.

I’m betting on this year’s killer app for workflow being MadCap’s Flare 3.0 equipped with Analyzer and the Feedback Server, which I reviewed a few months ago. So we’ll look at the Magic Box being either Flare or Blaze.

Now, the real power of a true Collaborative Workflow with various forms of content would be:

First, that the Subject Matter Experts could use the tool of their choice, (FrameMaker, Word, etc.) and update the content at any time regardless of where it sits,

…and your magic box would then, on a cron set (for apache users), or IIS script set command line interface (CLI) schedule update your content automatically,

…leaving the Technical Communicator free to do her/his real job; concentrate on structure and form rather than the nuts and bolts behind the structure and form.

It gets better, not only can you search, but with Feedback you’re able to get the results you want passively; you can see what search terms people are using.

The Wiki without wiki anarchy: Feedback’s Comments.

Each topic has the ability to maintain those Comments and the Technical Communicator can see comments as they happen. Which means they can do updates… real time.

Output and feedback options are available both inside and outside the firewall.

See my podcast with Mike Hamilton, MadCap VP for specific details about his recommended workflows and Mike states that he doesn’t rule out a wiki model in the future. He also gives good 411 about what you can do today with his products while minimizing the anarchy that a wiki could become.

And with the Analyzer, bringing all that disparate content under control (content wrangling, as one blogger calls it) is made super simple and cost efficient because you can match up your similar phrases and frequently used terms and homogenize the entire project.

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.

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