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Dragon-Slaying Is Not A Sideline: Earley As Protector Of Content

When a large insurance company looked at organizing tens of millions of documents, stored in multiple repositories, they knew they had one monster project on their hands. With 260 million documents in one repository alone - everything from customer relationship data, to policies, to underwriting processes, to claims handling documents - entering this project would be akin to going deep into a dragon’s den and getting driven back by the intense heat.

Enter Seth Earley, dragon slayer. He didn’t set out to battle any dragons, actually. As Seth put it, they wrote “one of those RFPs from hell,” thinking they had no chance of actually winning the bid. They donned their armor, heralded the benefits of a sound taxonomy, and waited. And win the bid they did. Seth recalls that when they were notified, they had the typical reaction of a small band of dragon-slayers finding themselves face-to-face with a fire-breathing dragon: a moment of abject panic at realizing the massive task ahead. Once they began to dig into the content, however, they realized that knowing the system and processes made the project seem just like any other project … just bigger, more complex, and a lot scarier.

Seth confesses that this particular dragon has been easier to slay because of the excellent example set by management. It’s not often that an executive team comes forward with the term “taxonomy governance,” much less understands the importance of it. He admits that the project would have been very difficult to succeed at, had they not had full executive support and a level of project management that covered critical details and resources.

Seth Early presents Building a Search Strategy and Developing a Content Management Strategy at DocTrain West 2009.

Language Is Never Simple: Braster Drives Consistency Message Home

Berry Braster is a little lonely these days, and it’s no wonder. He gets on the road for weeks at a time, bouncing between the various coasts of the US and every point between, Canada, Europe, and Australia. And it’s hard for a lover of language, when he wakes up asking himself, “Where am I?” and there’s no one to answer. But for Berry, it’s worth it to bring the message about simplified technical language to the world. He’s passionate about his work and his business. He recognizes that the increase in cultural slang, combined with an increase in global business, is putting us on a linguistic collision course. Did he tell you about the police officer who warned a middle aged woman about “blowing a light?” She envisioned replacing a burnt-out tail light; the officer envisioned issuing a ticket for going through a red light.

Between cultural differences, regional differences, generational differences, and other population segmentation, getting some sort of standardization is becoming critical. Berry sees the need to communicate as justification enough, but when he extends that justification to include the substantial savings in costs and cultural misunderstandings, the implications are enormous. And if the savings in translations costs drives the savings in communication clarity, that’s alright with Berry. In fact, Tedopres has published booklets on that very topic, which they distribute free of charge.

The aerospace and defense industries have worked in Simplified English for a while now, but when Berry makes presentations outside of those industries, he still sees “the big aha” amongst members of his audiences. And that, he says, is why he’ll have to wait a long while before he can stay home long enough to justify having a pet to talk to.

Berry Braster presents Controlled Authoring Workshop: Learn How Standardizing Content Will Improve Quality and Reduce Content Creation and Translation Cost at DocTrain West 2009.

Winning Techniques Mean No Exinction For This Rare Bird

The Rare Bird Award, established in 2004 by the Center for Information-Development Management, is awarded for distinguished contributions to best practices in the management of information development. It is awarded annually to managers or teams to recognize the achievement of managers and their teams in developing best practices in areas related to innovation, efficiency, productivity, customer benefit, and leadership, and in the process transforms the organization from ordinary to extraordinary.

When ILOG prepared to adopt and implement their content management strategy, they garnered the coveted award for their organized way of preparing and migrating content from a desktop publishing platform to and XML DITA solution. They joined the ranks of award winners such as IBM, Raymond Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft.

ILOG’s Lucinda Croft presents the case study behind the award, in her presentation, The Journey From FrameMaker to XML: A Story About Migration and a Rare Bird, at DocTrain West 2009.

Projecting Content Needs Leads To DITA For An Electronics Firm

When you read refer to the user guide that goes with consumer electronics, such as a phone, printer, or camera, you’re likely focused on solving a problem. What’s probably not foremost in your mind is how many user guides get created by the vendor, or how many variations of the same needed to be created to accommodate the differences in a product line?

A company such as IKEA may be able to create a universal set of directions by eliminating words, by showing amorphous people assembling furniture. That wouldn’t be so practical for a product like a camera with complex functions spread of a multitude of buttons and action patterns. Even trying to have a universal manual would be confusing - by the time users are shunted between instructions for various models, they would be frustrated - and cost-prohibitive - the language variations alone would cause the cost of a manual to skyrocket.

So when Epson wanted to streamline the content production for their printers, projectors, and LCD monitors, they looked for a single-sourcing solution that allowed for content re-use in a way that allowed for real-time updates. Burt Courtier, Manager of Documentation/Software Integration at Epson America, Inc, shares his experience at DocTrain West 2009 with his presentation, Moving from Silos to a Collective Farm: Developing Epson America’s Hosted CMS with DocZone DITA.

Performance Reviews and Their Effect on Motivation

The performance review is part of those ubiquitous employee evaluation systems that virtually every company of any size uses to rank employees. Deeply flawed and as a result, often unfair, the obsession to categorize, quantify, and rank staff against their peers perpetuates the notion that there is a way to make empirical decisions about what is “better” or “worse” on the employee scale.

Complicating this situation is the not-quite-as-ubiquitous incentive program that rewards employees for contributions deemed of significant value to the company. Outwardly, this seems like a simple, straightforward idea, but turns out to create larger quandries about managing the intrinsic and extrinsic human motivations that get manipulated along the way.

Richard Hamilton, author of Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, discusses finding the right balance to rewards and performance evaluations, and much more, on his Managing Writers blog. At DocTrain West 2009, Richard will share a different type of knowledge, that of Managing the Move to Structured Content.

An Alternative To The Conundrum of The Good-Fast-Cheap Triangle?

In the quality triangle, where the three sides read “Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two,” the idea that there is a way to do all three seems incongruous. The art of Information Quality Management lies in a discipline that tries to balance factors such as efficiency, effectiveness, confidentiality, integrity, availability, compliance, and reliability. These factors are to manage the competing needs of the business in terms of internal resources, business processes, accuracy, risk management, and - not to be forgotten - the need to delivery quality information in usable form to end users. While recognizing that it may be impractical, even impossible, to achieve 100% on all three sides of the triangle, the goal is to adjust the controls to the optimal delivery balance for a particular organization.

Marc Asturias, an author, editor, and technologist with Cisco Systems, understands that adopting and pursuing a quality management program for content can yield a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. He shares his knowledge on his Marc Asturias blog, and shares a case study, Information Quality Management at Cisco Provides Benefits Beyond Improved Quality at DocTrain West 2009.

Better Content Through Better Understanding of Audience

When creating information with a purpose, it’s important to gain an understanding of your users. To do this you need to know what information they need and how they will use it. Once this is understood you must build user profiles that will speak to different audience groups.

By following some simple steps, you can build the right user profiles to make the exercise successful:

Develop personas for all audience groups by looking beyond geographic boundaries and across functional areas.
Upon completion of the personas, conduct a task analysis.
Map each task to the various users groups.
Merge the persona and the task analysis to create user scenarios for each audience group.

Learn more about the user-centered design process, particularly user personas and ethnographies, in this podcast with Joan Lasselle. Joan presents Using a Balanced Scorecard to Measure the Value of Content at DocTrain West 2009.

Getting Content To Perform At Its Peak

Whether it’s flamenco dancing, fine food, or content management, when Pamela Kostur gets passionate about something, it’s readily apparent. In addition to being an accomplished cook, Pamela is also an avid flamenco dancer, studying and performing with the Arte Flamenco school in Toronto. Pamela’s passion is clear in her work, as well. After all, she muses, how did the “content” in content management get left out of the loop? If the purpose is to manage content, why do so many projects focus on the technology around the content, and not on the content itself? Anyone who has heard Pamela speak over the past few years is very clear on where she stands on that issue.

She absolutely loves working with content, particularly when content is being restructured as part of a content management implementation. She loves cleaning it up, rewriting it, re-structuring it, and creating guidelines so that others can continue to write the content consistently. Pamela always begins with analysis and finds that in most cases, similar types of documents and information products are written inconsistently. The first task is to bring structure to the general chaos, defining structures for similar types of documents and information products, and defining writing guidelines to support those structures. Kostur explains that structure still doesn’t tell authors how to write the content that goes into the structure. That’s where the writing guidelines come in. Whether starting from scratch or working with existing content, defining the structure - and how to write to the structure - are critical. It’s a lot like choreography, she says. She’s getting the content ready to dance on the stage of the World Wide Web, or wherever else it may be asked to perform.

Pamela has presented on topics in this realm, which she shares on the Parallax Communications site.

Pamela presents Writing Modular Content: Making Content Behave and Building Content Models: Constructing with Content at DocTrain West 2009.

Practical DITA Author Offers Practical Advice

The difference between unstructured and structured content is way more than a few tags. It can mean a huge difference in process power when it comes to leveraging the power of multi-channel publishing. It’s not the content itself, but the structure that allows applications to take advantage of the possibilities. One of the most exciting technologies on the scene is DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), which allows you to distinguish between information types and analyze the content within.

Julio Vazquez, author of Practical DITA, is a fierce proponent of using structured content, particularly DITA, to improve the content architecture. His article on single-sourcing is a fine example of how content needs to be analyzed during its creation cycle to ensure that its full potential can be realized. Julio presents Structured Authoring and DITA at DocTrain West 2009.

A SaaSy Twist On Getting Shoes For The Shoemaker’s Children

You may lust after a CCMS (component content management system) with the same intensity that you really want that new pair of Fleuvog shoes, but if the budget and infrastructure isn’t there to support the implementation and maintenance, are you destined to stand outside the shoe store, barefoot, waiting for better times? Groups needing to implement a CCMS to manage their technical documentation often find themselves in that very position.

Technical communication groups find they desperately need a tool that will help them meet the demands being made on their content, yet they are prevented from moving to content management because of steep adoption costs. These costs range from the obvious one, of the application itself, to customization costs, and ongoing infrastructure and maintenance costs.

One way that these groups manage to get to “go shopping” is to move to the Software-as-a-Service model. Small businesses are finding that this way of “leasing” software applications levels allows them to think big and move faster toward their goals. Someone who has been through the SaaS experience is Nancy Thompson, who shares her story in her session, Moving from Silos to a Collective Farm: Developing Epson America’s Hosted CMS with DocZone DITA, at DocTrain West 2009.

A New Twist on Measure Twice, Cut Once

There’s a saying in the marketing profession: if you can’t measure the results, it’s not worth doing. In other words, if you can’t tell whether painting your URL on the side of a truck nets you the desired results, why bother? The effort spent painting, and maintaining the paint job, on the truck could be spent on other activities that could be proven to be effective.

Often, in the world of content production, proving the effectiveness of moving to structured content is a little tougher. The anecdotal stories are plentiful, but actual metrics are harder to come by. If you find yourself in a position where you want to gather metrics, you may want to study an article by Mark Lewis on developing cost metrics for DITA. By using standard ROI calculations, he provides a concrete set of tools that you can use to compare your traditional content development methods to those in a DITA world. Mark also shares his knowledge in his session, DITA Cost and Reuse Metrics, at DocTrain West 2009.

Technology Is What You Didn’t Grow Up With: Going Native In A Digital World

The largest generational gap today may very well be between digital natives and digital immigrants. When faced with a technology malfunction, digital immigrants blame themselves; digital natives blame the technology. The differences in expectations for learning is also quite different between these two groups. Digital natives expect learning to be fun. They grew up with the edutainment of television shows such as Sesame Street, and continued with video games that teach everything from reading to math and beyond. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that when teachers flipped the classroom paradigm, providing take-home lectures while using the classroom to do homework, students’ performance improved.

So with a move to structured content, how can we reconcile the need to provide digital media such as audio and video content? Sean Healy presents some answers with his DocTrain West 2009 session, DITA, Coming to its Senses: Better Communication through Video.

Got Content? Got Content Strategy?

In the discussion of structured content, there is much discussion about paying attention to the tags, and what’s between the tags. There is even some discussion about maintaining the quality of the content. What doesn’t often get discussed is whether the content being migrated to the new system - and there always is a system - is really needed at all. The temptation to do a wholesale move of content on the assumption that if it was needed before, it will still be needed. Or, on a website, that keeping all the old content is necessary, because of the idea that it helps with SEO, ignoring the loss in trust that outdated and no-longer-correct content has on potential and existing customers.

With the ever-increasing amount of content to be handled by organizations of all sizes, having a good content strategy is no longer a luxury. As we enter an age where content needs to be able to integrate with other content, be syndicated in appropriate ways, and converge with other content types, having a strategy is now a critical aspect of planning useful and usable content. Rahel Anne Bailie has been discussing some of the ways that content can converge and integrate.

Rahel demonstrates the impact of content strategies and its contribution to good user experience at DocTrain West 2009, with her presentation, The Sound of Music 2.0: The Making of a Rich M(use)ical Experience, along with the workshop, Before You Touch the Tool: Techniques for Development of Structured Content.

Engineering Content For Re-use Needs Content Engineers

The beauty of topic-based content, particularly structured content, is the ability to re-use it. The idea of being able to combine and recombine content for multiple contexts has become a reality, when the content has been created to support that purpose.

Content is a little like a super-hero. It is a resource whose usefulness is being able to spring into action and come to the rescue of the user who needs information. But, as any comic-book afficienado knows, for the hero to spring into action, a super-power is needed. For content, these super-powers come in the forms of metadata and attributes, which allow the content to be transformed from a little piece of data into a contextualized message that is delivered up in the knick of time to save the day.

It’s not easy orchestrating content to perform in the super-hero leagues. That’s where content engineers come in. The engineering of content is much like the engineering of software. The patterns used in developing object-oriented software are good conceptual tools to understand the combining of content to create a powerful story. Lisa Woods, a consultant specializing in collaborative technologies, speaks to this topic in an article for Innovativ Sessions. At DocTrain West 2009, Lisa presents Collaborate to Elaborate: Using Collaboration Tools to Elicit and Manage Project Requirements and Teams.

Making Content Smarter and Finding Smarter Uses

Ann Rockley is an evangelist for the idea of structured authoring. She has a deep understanding of the business benefits of having content that is portable, interchangeable between systems, and highly adaptive to new business requirements. Rockley makes it her business to listens closely to both business executives and end users, and to bring together the two sets of needs into a single, elegant solution. In some circles, she would be called a matchmaker; in the content management world, she’s called an industry leader.

With a highly successful book under her belt, as well as the first-ever event on Intelligent Content and how it can deliver on the promise of the semantic Web, Rockley doesn’t wait for the industry to catch up. Instead, she works to make the next step happen, as with DITA for Enterprise Business Documents, a standards proposal by Ann Rockley and co-author Michael Boses.

Ann presents Moving to Structured Content, The Structured Content Technology Landscape, and Making Content Intelligent at DocTrain West 2009.

Scriptorium Publishing Offers Online Style Guide

If you’ve ever been writing in a coffee shop or collaborating in a meeting with subject matter experts, chances are you’ve needed your beloved Chicago Manual of Style (or other style guide) and found yourself without it. Most likely because it was sitting on the shelf back in your office. Many a technical communications professional has felt the cool sweat of anxiety upon this realization. Nine hundred and fifty-six hard-bound pages aren’t exactly portable, after all. Well, take a few nice deep breaths and relax. Scriptorium Publishing has a handy on-line style guide you can log on to from anywhere.

Your company may have its own guide, in which case you should be using it, but many shops haven’t yet had the time or resources to develop one. No worries, this one can help you in a pinch when you need to know how to use affect versus effect on those brain fade days that everyone has. Or you can adopt this guide as your own to assure everyone at your company is using a consistent style.

The guide is divided into two sections:

Mechanics and Usage—useful for solving those annoying en dash/em dash dilemmas
Word Usage—for those times when you aren’t sure if you should use fewer or less.

The guide uses the “rules” outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style, so be cautioned, your colleagues who went to journalism school will want to argue the use of serial commas presented here, but you can always remind them that no one charges for typesetting by the character these days.

You can read more of Sarah’s thoughts on the Palimpsest blog, or when she presents What Gutenberg Can Teach Us about XML and Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing at DocTrain West 2009.

Taking Advantage of WIki Popularity

Wiki evangelist Stewart Mader may love the technology, but what he really loves is the productivity that the technology can bring about when properly implemented. The idea that wikis help organizations share information may be the primary reason that they want to adopt a wiki, but the side benefits - reduction in email and meetings, development of planned and spontaneous communities, and idea hatcheries - can be teased out when the implementation is done with due thought and care.

In addition to Mader’s wiki consulting blog, where he provides a wealth of information on the topic of enterprise wikis, check out these resources:

Stewart Mader presents In With Wiki, Out With Structure (Hint: It’s not what you think it means!) and Learn How To Use a Wiki At Work at Doctrain West 2009.

Technology Is Cool, But What About The Stuff Between The Tags?

From the days of desktop publishing, to multimedia, hypertext, various new tools were have been thrown at writers, who were given those tools with the expectation of making their content better - with a tacit understanding that “better” mainly meant “cheaper to produce.” This was followed by the cumulative starvation programs of “do more with less” and the emphasis on not producing good, but “(barely) good enough.” What resulted, over the span of two decades, was a downward spiral that allowed writers produce more and more substandard content faster and faster, and distribute it in more media, and more languages than ever before. And about the time that content could be automatically marked-up and single-sourced and tagged—with more emphasis on the tags themselves than on the content between the them.

What was missing was a way to objectively measure the quality of “all the pesky stuff between the tags” that the consumers of the content actually see – a QA/QC tool for technical content. Kent Taylor, an Information Quality Management at Cisco Provides Benefits Beyond Improved Quality, at DocTrain 2009.

X-Rated to C-Words Mark a Back-to-Basics Content Campaign

Getting past the X-rated words is hard in a technology setting, but in the end, writers can’t rely on technology to create masterful content, whether it be of the persuasive or instructional variety. In fact, the more comfortable we get with the cool content creation technologies such as XHTML, XML, XSL, and DITA, the less we need to think about them. Effective adoption of these technologies should free writers to concentrate on the craft of wordsmithing, and what used to be the important C-words: clear, complete, correct, and concise.

If anyone is aware of the dependencies on, and tensions between, technology and content, it’s Lisa Calhoun. She shares her insights and expertise on her Business Writing Secrets blog, and in her presentation, Reimagining Writing: Freeing Writing Teams To Deliver More Effective Content, at DocTrain West 2009.

Hard Truths about Content Conversion

When organizations first look at migrating their content from unstructured to structured forms, there appears to be some common patterns that emerge.

Sometimes the people involved don’t believe that adding structure to content is something that automation can provide any assistance with. We can call these people the “skeptics”. Teams operating on this assumption budget time to perform the conversions manually - diligently adding markup to text files exported from their legacy authoring environment or, as a personal favorite, copying and pasting from the legacy tool into a structured editor. Sometimes these people happen upon a feature or two in their legacy authoring environment or in their chosen structured editor that helps to expedite the process in small ways. At the end of the day, however, this conversion pattern entails a massive amount of work and, most heartbreaking of all, the quality of the markup produced is often poor.

Way on the other side of the spectrum, we find quite a different mindset. These people tend to believe that there just has to be a packaged solution out there that will magically convert all of their content with the push of a button. We can call these people the “believers”. Teams operating with this viewpoint will acquire a tool and run it against their legacy content. There are commercial tools that, as in one particular shameless example, claim to be “universal” converters (a claim that is true so long as almost meaningless structuring is going to be acceptable). Disappointment invariably follows as the outputs from these tools will almost always fall short of expectations and needs. The usual response to initial failures is to seek another conversion tool, one that will deliver more fully on what they believe should be an easy undertaking. Sometimes a finger is pointed at the erratic formatting of the legacy content and efforts are initiated to “clean-up” the content before the automated tool is run. It is somewhat ironic to find teams that start out as “believers” and then find themselves working just as hard as the “skeptics” on manual interventions.

Another pattern that comes up is based on the assertion that the simplest thing to do is to bundle up the legacy content and ship it overseas for offshore conversion. While this is a completely credible approach in particular cases, what is frequently underestimated is the level of management and quality assurance overhead that will be associated with this outsourcing effort. Also, if the conversion is challenging, perhaps dealing with erratic formatting or with a particularly complex and semantically ambitious target structure, this model can run into significant problems.

Yet another pattern sees the Information Technology (IT) department leap in and declare that this is just another programming challenge that they were born to solve. Experience that this pattern is in fact the least successful of all possible approaches to content conversion. These programming efforts tend to be expensive, take a significant amount of time before showing any progress, and introduce sometimes comical quality problems in the results. The root of the problem, in this case, is that content conversion is unfamiliar territory for the vast majority of developers and the tools with which they are most commonly familiar often do not handle central issues with processing content at all well.

So the question that forces its way to the surface is this - is there a pattern for migrating content from unstructured to structured forms that has been proven to be consistently effective? The answer to this question, fortunately, is “yes”.

There are a number of components that we find in a genuinely effective conversion pattern. Firstly, there is a responsible reliance on automation which means that automation is used to the maximum extent possible without it being let loose blindly. Secondly, the type of automation that is deployed will include core capabilities that have been designed from the ground up to address the specific problems of converting content. Thirdly, a formal process governs the conversion activities and facilitates the efficient interaction of editors and subject matter experts (who actually understand the meaning of the content) with the conversion process so that the highest level of quality is achieved. Fourthly, automation is aggressively deployed to support content quality assurance with this encompassing structural validation, fidelity confirmation of the converted content with its source, testing of the converted content against planned downstream uses, and facilitating review activities by stakeholders. Finally, the entire conversion process is designed to permit adaptation to deal with the oddities that will inevitably come up and to provide opportunities for the process to be improved as experience builds.

While this may sound like overkill for many circumstances, it is a model that can be tailored to suit even the smallest project provided that team can get access to good automation and to a proven framework within which to conduct their conversion activities.

Stilo International has been building advanced conversion environments for over 20 years and during these years countless millions of pages have been converted by organizations around the world using Stilo’s OmniMark technology. OmniMark is a specialized programming language and execution environment that has been designed to address the unique challenges associated with processing content and converting content in particular. While it is one of the best kept secrets of the content management industry, in fact the largest implementations of content management and publishing solutions tend, to this very day, to rely very heavily upon conversion processes built using OmniMark. Recognizing that many project teams really want the results, to see their content migrated into a structured form they can use, Stilo has worked to embody the core elements of the proven conversion pattern introduced above and to make this capability broadly available to projects large and small. It is for this reason that Stilo has released its newest offering Stilo Migrate, an online service that will help organizations migrate their unstructured FrameMaker and Microsoft Word files into DITA.

See http://www.stilo.com/migrate and migrate.stilo.com for more information about Stilo Migrate. See http://www.stilo.com/omnimark for more background information on the OmniMark Content Processing Platform. Contact info@stilo.com is you would like to arrange a one-on-one meeting with a specialist from Stilo while at DocTrain West 2009.

Cool Things To Do In Palm Springs During DocTrain West 2009

March is the perfect month to visit Palm Springs, and there are many fun things to do there on an additional day off, or in the evening. I’m Maxwell Hoffmann. Since Palm Springs used to be my local weekend trip destination, I’ve been to most of the attractions listed below. Here is just a sampling of what else you can experience there besides the career enriching presentations at Documentation and Training West.

The Palm Springs Follies—There is literally nothing else like this, anywhere. Imagine a Radio City, Rockettes extravaganza where the average “show girl” is in her 60s or 70s! The cast is composed of senior citizen singers and dancers. Many in the cast were chorines in Las Vegas for the Rat Pack, or even performed in some MGM musicals. The cast’s energy and talent will astound and humble you. The musical numbers and sets are over the top, great fun. But the best part of all is seeing what you might be physically capable of in your golden years if you stay in shape. The show is as much fun as Beach Blanket Babylon (San Francisco) and life-affirming in many ways.
The Living Desert is about half an hour from downtown Palm Springs in nearby Palm Desert. Not really a zoo or botanical garden, the “LD” is more of an immersive desert experience that surrounds you with animals and plants from nearly all deserts of the world. Although California is famous for its palm trees, only one species is native; find out which one in the Sonoran desert area. Protected by 3” glass, you can view leopards close up, and a mountain lion that is a real teddy bear. (Did you know that mountain lions or cougars are the largest cat species that can purr?) You will see species that you probably weren’t aware of, although the Meerkat village will look familiar if you’re a fan of Animal Planet. If you are there around 10:45 AM, you can actually have a giraffe eat out of your hand! (You haven’t lived until you’ve had this experience.) If you are there around 10:45 AM, you can actually have a giraffe eat out of your hand! (You haven’t lived until you’ve had this experience.) The grounds are beautifully arranged over a huge area. There is even a handicap accessible trail that will lead you to the San Andreas Fault. Hint: allow at least 4 hours, and try to be there about an hour before sunset, when the Cheetahs usually come out on their promontory to view the setting sun. If you wear a bright blue jacket, many of the birds and animals will mistake you for staff, think that it’s feeding time and come up closer.
The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway lifts you more than eight thousand feet above the desert floor onto Mount San Jacinto, where you may find snow. A restaurant in this alpine setting has a killer view. Lots of trails to explore. Another great place to be at sunset when the lights come on below you and you have a classic “Hollywood hills” view of the cities below. The tram itself rotates, guaranteeing all passengers a full view, in the event that you have a full house. Hint: take a jacket or sweater; the summit can be 20 to 40 degrees cooler than the desert floor.
Mid-Century antiques in downtown Palm Springs: if you are into Rat Pack decorating, and you just have to have that Russell Wright celery dish that you saw last week on Mad Men, take a stroll down North Palm Canyon between Tahquitz and Visto Chino. The antique shops have some jaw-droppingly beautiful mid-Century antiques that Honey West would have killed for. An easy walk with many pleasant cafes and bistros as well as dozens of desert-themed art galleries. Some of the antique shops occasionally have items on consignment from movie star estates. Buy a compact owned by Lana Turner or a crystal lamp from Mae West’s bedroom.
View the playground of the stars: you can also take a great 2.5 hour guided bus tour that shows the home of the starts (mostly golden age of Hollywood and the Rat Pack.) Palm Springs Extended City Tour by Bus will give you a great overview of estates and villas that everyone from Jean Harlow to Elvis stayed in. The tour is also a great way to get oriented to neighboring communities of Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert.
The Indian Canyons: Palm Canyon, Murray Canyon, Andreas Canyon and Tahquitz Canyon. If you’re wondering where the name “Palm Springs” came from, visit the original, pristine canyons (with year round springs) for which the city is named at the Indian Canyons. Over 15 miles of trails through virtually untouched land with all native species will expose you to hundreds of California’s native Washingtonian Palm tree. The streams and pools are incredibly calming on the nerves. A beautiful, spiritual place that will stick with you for a long time. The trails range from flat and easy to steep and challenging.
Karaoke: no, I’m not kidding! Palm Springs has a great assortment of bars which feature some terrific Karaoke DJs. What makes it so much fun is that there are so many retired entertainers who still have great “pipes”; you often get a concert quality performance. Past “surprise” guest performers have included Keely Smith and other top chart artists from the 50s and 60s. Pop into any of the downtown bars on Arenas of off Palm Canyon Drive and pick up a copy of Karaoke News for a schedule.
Casinos and big name performers: Palm Springs has a number of world class Casinos in town and nearby that book world class talent (Cher, Aerosmith.) Just contact Ticketmaster to see if your favorite performer has a gig while you’re in town. You will find information about most of them on the following website.
Moorten Botanical Gardens—Hidden away on South Palm Canyon Drive, this local tourist site is a real treasure. It’s a cactus botanical garden (with plenty of specimens for sale) that has been in business since the 1930s. Somewhat rustic, but with a quaint charm that is hard to find in most resort areas, the garden is peppered with hand-painted signs will give you the name of practically every cactus found on the planet. The garden was founded by one of the original Keystone Kops, who later served as a stand-in for Howard Hughes.

Whatever side trip you decide on, you won’t be disappointed. Palm Springs is a world class winter resort destination. And since you’re going to be there on business anyway, why not have some fun? See you at the Living Desert when they feed the giraffes; I’ll be wearing the bright blue jacket.

Gain Without Pain? Gettinger Shows DITA Workout For Fit Docs

When a fitness products corporation looked to reduce the content fat from their documentation frameworks, they looked for a system that would provide optimum re-use opportunities. Nautilus, a manufacturer of fitness equipment, wanted to handle content that needed to cope with multiple configurations and wear multiple brands. What they didn’t want was the bulky overhead of managing siloed content.

Acknowledging that the ongoing pain of search for content replication, updating content in multiple places, and tracking modifications across product lines was way more painful than the alternative: going on a content “diet” to lose the excess bulk, and keeping it trim by regularly working out. The organization chose DITA as their platform, which allowed them some powerful processing options for their content.

Chip Gettinger, VP of XML Solutions for SDL and Trisoft, worked with Nautilus to ensure that the adoption of DITA served their needs, allowing them to run a lean publishing machine for the technical documentation used to support customers, installers, and maintenance technicians.

Chip shares a case study on the Nautilus implementation with a white paper on the SDL site. He also presents Migrating to DITA and Component Content Management for Global Customers at DocTrain West 2009.

Party in Your Wiki: Porter Understands Social Nature of Humans

Getting staff members to embrace technological change can be a bit of a chore. System implementation projects are notorious for failing - not because of bad technology, but because of lack of adoption. Of course, having good technology helps adoption rates, but studies have shown that employees with high motivation will actively strive to make a less-than-perfect system work, while without that motivation, employees seem to go out of their way to find work-arounds to avoid learning a new technology.

Getting people engaged is the art that balances the science of technology, and while we don’t all have degrees in cognitive psychology, a basic understanding of human nature can help increase the adoption rate of systems and technologies that are, ultimately, beneficial. We know that the method of issuing an edict, “thou shalt use the new software!” doesn’t work. Instead, tapping into natural motivations is the key.

Alan Porter, a technology evangelist with WebWorks, discovered this while promoting the use of a wiki at the WebWorks office. He used the wiki to organize the office Christmas dinner. To participate in the planning, users went to the wiki to view or add information, and through this, was given a low-pressure, high-reward learning opportunity that demonstrated how wikis work. The outcome - all information in a single place, without the endless contradictory emails inevitable during a mass planning session - proved the benefits of the methodology in a context that was non-threatening and, most important, fun. Porter had tapped into the natural social nature of humans as the impetus to engage with a new technology. Alan shares this story and other insights on his blog, http://blogs.webworks.com/aporter/. Alan presents Why Technical Writers Shouldn’t Be “Writers” at DocTrain West 2009.

Raising the Corporate IQ: Gollner Talks Intelligent Content

Joe Gollner likes solving puzzles. In fact, he often draws on his passion for history and philosophy to help him with the paradigms for modern-day conundrums. “That’s probably why I work so much,” admits Joe, “though it doesn’t feel like work to me. I love to figure out things that initially baffle me.” The push for increasing complex ways of process content is nothing new to Gollner. He has worked on projects with millions of pages of content that have to be manipulated in quite granular and exacting ways. His quest is to help systems process content in “intelligent” ways. This means using content to its full potential, combining contexts to allow users to extract its inherent knowledge. His paper on The Emergence of Intelligent Content is a look inside the nature and history of content technologies that has led us to where we are today.

His pleasure at solving this dilemma is apparent; he isn’t satisfied because of the technological solution, but because it solves a user experience problem and a business problem. “Content is so important that we can no longer afford to treat it like a cottage industry,” says Joe. “Corporations are starting to realize that we need to apply the same care and discipline to them as we do with the rest of our corporate assets.” Gollner presents Knowledge Archaeology: Raiders of the Lost Art at DocTrain West 2009.

Hoffman Visualizes Seamless Content Translation Across Communication Barriers

The temptation to communicate with pictures goes far beyond IKEA furniture assembly instructions. Although the allure of saving translation dollars cannot be denied, as budget-watching managers will tell you, the move to visual communication is a much bigger strategic shift. Users love visuals; the amount of information that a well-drawn illustration or a short video can convey is much richer than what can be conveyed in a similar block of text.

Using a visual form to communicate isn’t as simple as it seems. Effective visual communication has its own localization issues. Whereas localization of text has translation issues between languages, graphics also have specific cultural contexts that have to be taken into consideration. From culture-appropriate colors to culture-specific contexts, graphics and videos are imbued with meta-messages. For example, viewing the instructional videos on YouTube can transmit information about the country, culture, and generation. When the graphics are captioned, the labeling process adds its own complications.

To learn more about communication techniques, visit The Content Wrangler community’s localization and globalization group, moderated by Maxwell Hoffman of Globalization Partners International.

Maxwell Hoffman presents Globalizing a CMS-based Website from the Ground Up: How to Design, Develop and Deploy a Website for an International Audience at DocTrain West 2009.

Getting on the (Clue) Train: Esrati and Authentic Voice

It’s been seven years since the publication of the pivotal book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, where the idea of marketing as pushing a message was replaced by the core hypothesis that markets are now conversations between people wanting to quickly share relevant knowledge. The idea that corporations need to engage in a conversation with their customers and potential customers with an authentic voice became an important concept for online communication, in general, and paved the way for much of the work done since then.

This idea has been developed by others since, notably in the book Naked Conversations, which demonstrates how communicating with an authentic voice is critical to success, whether yours is a micro-business or one of the largest technology corporations in the world. One of the big differences today is the new technology facilitating those conversations, and the variety of applications that are available.

David Esrati of The Next Wave understands the connection between blogging, blogging technology, and authentic voice. His own blog, Websiteology, is wealth of information on about the how to - and how not to - of blogging. Billed as a seminar on Web 2.0 for those still struggling with Web 1.0, it has information for bloggers of all levels.

David presents WordPress Workshop - The Fastest Way To a Community on the Internet: It’s Free, It’s Powerful and It May Be Too Good To Be True and The Content Providers’ Crystal Ball: What Everybody Missed During the Digital Revolution at DocTrain West 2009.

Marshall Offers Membership in the Very Technical Communication Club

One of the techniques to ensuring job security is to specialize in a niche writing area. Creating SDK (Software Development Kit) documentation is one of those areas with seemingly limitless growth. As the drive for a social experience increases, the need for various software applications to inter-operate also increases. Companies are being asked to release their APIs (Application Programming Interface) so that developers of other applications can develop software for their platforms.

Writing in this area takes more than good writing skills. Before developers allow a writer to have access to their code, they want to be sure that the writer understands the importance of what this access means. Writers who can demonstrate an understanding of the landscape have a distinct advantage; the trust factor that the writer can think like a developer to describe the code, and who will not inadvertently create chaos in the code library ensures ongoing access.

Want to be part of the SDK club? Attend Ed Marshall’s session on APIs and SDKs Workshop, or Using Shareware / Freeware Tools: Increase Your Productivity and Accuracy at DocTrain West 2009.

Technical Communication Recipe: Very Urban Fare

The profession of technical communication continues to morph as the needs of business and the demands of technology push writers to push their envelopes, learn new communication theories, and apply new technologies. With each paradigm shift, a certain number of writers drop off, and writers with the skills to cope with the new reality come aboard.

Yet skills and abilities are not the only aspects that make a good communicator. In an industry filled with introverts, the interaction with one’s peers and colleagues is as much a critical success factor as is being software-savvy. So how does this seeming dichotomy get reconciled? Linda Urban‘s observations have led her to make some analyses and draw some conclusions about some of the tangibles and intangibles that create the winning formula for success.

Urban shares her insights and strategies at with her presentation, Paths to Success: Networking and Contributing and Topic-based Authoring: Getting Your Feet Wet at DocTrain West 2009.

Helping the Help Authors with Flare: Perlin Shows Efficient Uses

Knowing how to enumerate the benefits of training content and knowing how to go about implementing a training project are two very different kettle of fish. As with any project that involves a technology component, there are multiple ways to handle each aspect. Each organization has different needs, and so will want to derive different benefits from their training content. There are different methods of implementing instructional design, often which require different technologies. Understanding the technologies and their implications is critical, as the pitfalls of going down the wrong path may prevent an organization from deriving the very benefits they set out to achieve. Learn more about, and get the lowdown on, new technologies and how you can benefit from them, on Neil Perlin’s technology blog.

Perlin’s background and experience give him a deep knowledge of the implications of various types of training. If you’ve been thinking of moving towards visuals and away from text, catch one of Perlin’s presentations, Using Options Efficiently in MadCap Flare: Setting Up a Flare Project or A Short Introduction to MadCap Flare or Using Help Authoring Tools to Create Test-Bed Content Management Systems at DocTrain West 2009.

Digital Bedouin and The Simple Life: Nesbitt Demonstrates Traveling Light

Scott Nesbitt likes to write. In addition to writing the technical stuff that many of us do for a living, he also likes to turn his hand to other types of writing. He writes technology articles for publication—what better way to capitalize on all those high-tech toys—as well as marketing copy, journalistic writing, and travel articles. So it comes as no surprise when he describes himself as a bit of a digital bedouin.

The idea of traveling between coffee shops, setting up a laptop, and tapping into the free wifi is an acquired taste, but it suits his lifestyle. Balancing work and family, Scott finds his down time—if you can call extra writing time “down time”—where he can. He has even been known to crack open his laptop in a certain pub he likes to frequent, run by a bloke from New Zealand.

What are Nesbitt’s rules for the life of digital roaming? Only a few, it seems. First, there must be free wireless nearby—if not in the immediate coffee shop, then at the establishment next door. Second, stay within the three-beverage rule. Buying beverages is essentially your way of renting a space, so don’t monopolize the table. Give the coffee shop a chance to fill the table and make some money. And third, don’t succumb when you’re with family—even when your Blackberry pings. Living the digital bedouin lifestyle makes it harder to keep work separate from family life, so it’s important to make that effort.

It’s not a surprise, then, that Nesbitt is an aficionado of tools that support his minimalist work style, and he shares his findings freely on the DMN Communications blog. Nesbitt will share his knowledge of open source tools when he presents Think Simple: A Fresh Perspective on User Assistance at DocTrain West 2009.

Escape the Freezing Grip of Winter at DocTrain West in Palm Springs

This year’s Documentation and Training West conference is being held March 17-20, 2009 in majestic Palm Springs, California at the Westin Mission Hills Resort and Spa. Nestled in the heart of the Coachella Valley and set on 360 acres within the Rancho Mirage community, the Westin Mission Hills is surrounded by landscaped courtyards and extensive waterways. The Resort is a premier meeting place with extensive indoor and outdoor venues, two world class golf courses, spas, pools, and is located just moments away from a myriad of famous Palm Springs sights and attractions including shopping, dining and casinos, nature trails, art museums, live entertainment, dancing, and more. And of course, there’s the beautiful weather.

DocTrain West 2009: Moving from unstructured to structured data