Using MadCap Flare Training

This course will be delivered later this month by Cherryleaf's Carol Johnston, who is now a MadCap Flare accredited instructor. There's 8 delegates - some familiar faces, plus a few people we've never trained before.

MadCap Echo

We've been making a few tweaks to our Web site, and as part of that, looking at MadCap Software's new application, Echo. We've added an audio button to our Home page, for those that prefer aural to visual information.

Echo is simple and straightforward to use, and it was easy to drop the files into our AuthorIT-generated Web site.

We've also been looking at Ajax portals, and might incorporate that into the site at some stage in the future.

I should probably mention there's three new positions for technical authors in our Web site's Recruitment section too.

Information Development

I've just finished reading JoAnn Hackos's book, "Information Development". It's very good - probably the first book that a technical author should buy. Indeed, we're making sure all our in-house authors have access to a copy of it.

At 624 pages, it covers a lot. However, I felt it could have done with covering in depth: (a) the behaviours and motivations of team members, and (b) real-life advice when you're faced with a organisations that are at Capability Maturity Model levels 0 (Oblivious), 1 (Ad hoc) and 2 (Rudimentary).

Whilst we'd all like to deal with stable, well organised organisations, it's a fact of life that there are many start-ups who are at levels 0-2.

There's mention of XML, but little of Web 2.0, which is in some ways understandable.

The importance of documentation in business

Ian Boyd Livingston, someone I know who specialises in helping organisations around the world that are facing recruitment difficulties, sent me an email yesterday:

"I've been reading Michael Gerber's "The E-Myth Revisited"...It's a great book! In it Gerber talks about the importance of documentation and, though you may be tired of hearing this, I immediately thought of you and Cherryleaf."

He then sent me another message:

"On the basis of "pay it forward" I have just ordered you a copy".

It arrived today.

I look forward to reading it and returning the favour.

DITA XML training course

Our DITA XML training course went live late this afternoon.

You'll get 80mb of course notes, presentations, exercises and examples, so you'll need a broadband connection to download the course. The course takes approximately half a day to complete, although, of course, you can go through it at your own pace.

We have clients who have paid over £900 for us to deliver the classroom version of this course to their writers. By modifying this course to online format we've been able to slash the cost, to make it affordable to individual technical writers who see training as vital to their career. The cost of the course is, currently, £74 ex VAT ($146) per delegate, although we may revise this upwards in the future.

The problem of finding people with expertise

We're currently working, as part of a consortium, on a proposal for a project to make finding people with expertise easier. Finding expertise inside and outside (i.e. people you might want to hire) an organisation is a huge and interesting challenge.

Let me illustrate. Nowadays, information on a person's expertise isn't in just one place. Typically, it's distributed in different places across the Internet:

- Different versions of their CV may be posted on job boards and portals. What's more, each version of the CV might emphasise different aspects of their expertise and experience, and some versions could be out of date.
- Their personal Web site may contain detailed descriptions of current work and research interests.
- Their publications and presentations may be published on-line.
- Social networks may define their relationships within a professional, social, special interest or research community.
- Contributions to sites such as Blogs, online forums and mailing lists may mark them as a a person actively engaged in the latest developments in their discipline.

It's equally as bad within an organisation. Indeed, many organisations still rely on "word of mouth" systems to find internal experts.

The problem of searching for and describing people with expertise is likely to grow in the future.

The problem is hard to solve:

- Experience and capability has many sides.
- You need to describe the skill areas and topics in a way that works internationally.
- Valuable information about expertise is often hidden in social interactions (such as participation in online communities).

The proposed solution looks good: people-focused, scaleable and conforming to open standards.