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Beat the post-holiday blahs
Wednesday, December 03, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
It's never too early to start thinking about fun things to do in February.On Thursday, February 5, 2009, at 9 a.m. Pacific Time (noon Eastern time/5 p.m. London time/etc.), I'll be offering a webinar in conjunction with Madcap Software. Not sure this qualifies as "fun," but it's better than complaining about the weather, which is our major activity here in late winter.
DITA 101: Why the Buzz? DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is the new buzzword in technical communication. But why? In this webinar, you'll learn about DITA concepts, business case, and typical scenarios where DITA is used.If you are not at all familiar with DITA and want some introductory information, join me for this session.
You can then evaluate for yourself whether DITA makes sense for your content. Best of all, the webinar is free, which is the right price in this economic climate.
The webinar is free, but registration is required here.
Labels: dita, madcap, presentations, xml
8:00 AM Permalink | |
Publishing DITA without the DITA Open Toolkit: A Trend or a Temporary Detour?
Monday, December 01, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
I estimate that about 80 percent of our consulting work is XML implementation. And about 80 percent of our XML implementation work is based on DITA. So we spend a lot of time with DITA and the DITA Open Toolkit.I'm starting to wonder, though, whether the adoption rate of DITA and the DITA Open Toolkit is going to diverge.
For DITA, what we hear most often is that it's "good enough." DITA may not be a perfect fit for a customer's content, but our customer doesn't see a compelling reason to build the perfect structure. In other words, they are willing to compromise on document structure. DITA structure, even without specialization, offers a reasonable topic-based solution.
But for output, the requirements tend to be much more exacting. Customers want any output to match their established look and feel requirements precisely.
Widespread adoption of DITA leads to a a sort of herd effect with safety in numbers. Not so for the Open Toolkit -- output requirements vary widely and people are reluctant to contribute back to the Open Toolkit, perhaps because look and feel is considered proprietary.
The pattern we're seeing is that customers adopt the Open Toolkit when:
- They intend to deploy onto multiple servers, and open source avoids licensing headaches.
- The Open Toolkit provides a useful starting point for their output format.
- They need attractive PDF. Getting this result from the Open Toolkit isn't quite impossible, but it's hard. There are other options that are faster, cheaper, and easier.
- They need a format that the Open Toolkit doesn't provide. The most common requirement here is web-based help. Getting from the XHTML output in the Open Toolkit over to a sophisticated tri-pane help system with table of contents, index, and search....well, let's just say that it keeps me gainfully employed. AIR is another platform that we need to support.
- Adobe FrameMaker can output lovely PDF from DITA content through FrameMaker (no Open Toolkit). You can also use the Open Toolkit to generate formats such as HTML.
- ePublisher Pro uses the Open Toolkit under the covers, but provides a GUI that attempts to hide the complexities.
- MadCap's software will support DITA (initially) by importing DITA content and letting you publish through MadCap's existing publishing engine.
- Several other vendors provide support for publishing DITA, but do not use the Open Toolkit at all.
- Set up an XML-based authoring workflow
- Manage XML content
To me, the interesting question is this: Will the use of proprietary publishing engines be a temporary phenomenon, or will the Open Toolkit eventually displace them in the same way that DITA is displacing custom XML structure?
Labels: analysis, dita, ePublisher Pro, madcap
9:00 AM Permalink | |
Surveying the landscape
Friday, October 17, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
Surveys are on my mind this week.
The HAT Matrix (Char James-Tanny) recently conducted a survey on help authoring tools. The raw results are available at their blog, the Mad Hatter. On the HATT list, a debate immediately erupted over whether the survey was skewed by MadCap Software.
"Intentionally skewed" is a rather loaded phrase. Let's just stipulate that the survey was mentioned by MadCap to their customers. Since Char made the raw survey results available, you can see that a little over 10 percent of the responses indicated a MadCap origin. One might assume that these participants will be heavy MadCap Software users.
If you attempt to adjust the numbers to account for this potential bias, you end up with RoboHelp and Flare basically neck and neck, whereas in the raw numbers, Flare is quite a bit higher.
And therein lies the rub. Look at the coverage that the survey is getting:
At Core Dump:
It seems that MadCap Flare has pulled well ahead of RoboHelp as the dominant help authoring tool, being used by about 40 percent of the respondents.
Madcap is not only a major competitor to RoboHelp, but it now seems to now have an edge on it.
If MadCap had not, um, encouraged their people to participate in the survey, we'd be seeing very different discussion. And these discussions shape perceptions.
People are also drawing the conclusion that DITA isn't happening just yet. This is possible, but the participants on the HATT (help authoring tools and technologies) list are not exactly the poster children for XML usage. We can draw the conclusion that the people who participated in this survey aren't using DITA, but I'm not too sure about anything beyond that.
In a related matter, there was a recent survey asking about structured authoring implementation. In this survey, one of the questions was about vendors/consultants who helped with implementation. It included the following seven options:
- Not Scriptorium
- Another Not-Scriptorium vendor, much smaller than Scriptorium
- A conversion specialist
- Another conversion specialist
- Yet Another Not-Scriptorium
- A Scriptorium competitor
- And finally, you guessed it, not Scriptorium
You may imagine my conniption fit. No, go ahead and double that. Throw in a tantrum and some gutter Italian words and you're slowly getting there.
By any objective measurement, we should have been included on the list.
Perceptions matter. To a prospective client, our absence on this list sends a message. It basically says that we're not relevant enough to be included. Now, it appears that we were left off because of, um, mediocre research, but that doesn't mitigate the potential damage to us.
http://www.google.com/search?q=structured+authoring
So, in conclusion, I'm not feeling too good about surveys this week.Labels: adobe, analysis, dita, madcap
2:14 PM Permalink | |
Tout de Suite...too many suites?
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 — posted by Sarah
You may have missed Madcap's recent announcements of their sundry product upgrades somehow. Perhaps you were on a deep-sea expedition or out in the desert? I fully expect, though, that you would have received an announcement from Madcap via SMS on your satellite phone. But I digress...the topic of this post is not supposed to be the awesome power of the Madcap Marketing Machine™.The Adobe Army has the Tech Comm Suite to face off against the MadCap Minions with their MadPak. Adobe's marketing is a little less...um, aggressive than their competitor. And let's not forget Author-it, which describes Author-it itself as a tightly integrated product suite.
So many suites...so little time. I feel like a kid in a candy shop. (And I'm a bit of an expert on candy shops.)
Except for one problem. Take a look at my top three requirements for authoring software:
- Creates XML content in my preferred structure
- Validates XML content against my preferred structure
- Publishes XML content through XSL and XSL-FO to create HTML, PDF, and other deliverable formats
But as I've said in many publications and presentations
, the current trend is to take away publishing responsibilities from content creators. Instead of authoring books, authors are creating bits of content, which are then assembled into the final deliverables. And the use of a suite seems to go against that trend because authors are once again placed at the center of the publishing effort.
Am I the only one who would like to see a shift in focus?
PS I apologize to the French language. I am well aware that I completely murdered the translation of "tout de suite" -- which actually means "right away." I'm afraid I'm just powerless against the joy of really bad puns, especially really bad multilingual puns.
Labels: adobe, analysis, madcap, xml
3:14 PM Permalink | |
Pass the popcorn...
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 — posted by Sarah
There's a very polite undeclared blog war going on. Adobe fired the latest opening salvo in a post entitled Welcome Back:One of the biggest requests that we heard from a small community was a migration path back from Flare to RoboHelp. This community includes those who were early adopters of MadCap Flare and had made a change of the Authoring tool while there were fears of RoboHelp being “Dead”. [...] We found that this community was not growing as the migration had stopped as we succeeded in establishing faith back in RoboHelp by releasing Adobe RoboHelp 6 back in January 2007.The ostensible point of the blog is to discuss a Flare-to-RoboHelp migration tool developed by John Daigle. But I love the bit about how migration to Flare stopped as soon as Adobe made RoboHelp viable.
And in the MadCap corner, we have Sharon Burton with some corporate history:
3 years ago, MadCap showed at WritersUA. [...] With an old technology base and RoboHELP on its death bed, the demand was there for a new product.And there's some detailed stuff about customer retention that follows. I'm betting that's not a coincidence.
In the last 2 and a smidgen years, we’ve gone from 0% to 25% of the help development tools market. [...]
[P]eople are looking for a way to do more with less. I think our tools do that in a way that no one else’s does. [...]
We also have some product announcements [that will be made at WritersUA]. I’m not saying anything but this is going to upset the competitors in the industry. The stuff we have planned over the next year is going to make your life so much easier.
Anyway, I don't use either product much -- most of my single sourcing is XML-based and neither product -- despite massive positioning to the contrary from both company -- supports XML content. But the boxing match is highly entertaining.
[I have received complimentary software from both Adobe and MadCap. And, in case it matters, Just Systems. Scriptorium is an Adobe Authorized Training Center. I think those are all the disclaimers needed.]
Labels: adobe, flare, madcap, robohelp
10:05 PM Permalink | |
eWeek analysis of TC Suite
Tuesday, September 25, 2007 — posted by Sarah
They misspelled Michael Hu's name, so minus points for sloppiness.Introducing: Adobe's Software for the Technical Writer (eWeek)
I have some issues with this article. For instance:
- The lead-in: "Determined to earn revenues beyond the Web developer market, Adobe Sept. 25 released its Technical Communication Suite [...]." Hmmm. Creative Suite is for web developers? Acrobat?
- "The new suite comes almost as an afterthought to the company's Flash, Flex and the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime, formerly code-named Apollo) Web development technologies, whose futures were discussed Sept. 20 at the FlashForward conference in Boston." That's just a weird editorial comment. Creative Suite 3 was released this spring, so was Flash/Flex/AIR an afterthought to CS3? Different release cycles do not necessarily equal "afterthought." Also, I don't think the audience for FFA and for TC Suite have much (if any) overlap.
"We're going to change the dynamics of this industry and change how people are creating content and change how people consume this content," Wu [sic] said.Here is the unauthorized translation:
This TC Suite is going to hurt our competitors, who are all providing point solutions. Even if you concede that, for example, Flare might be better than RoboHelp, when we put FrameMaker and RoboHelp in a single box with an attractive price point, it makes purchasing FrameMaker and Flare separately less appealing.In short, the losers are going to be:
ePublisher Pro's integration with FrameMaker is probably better than RoboHelp's, at least for now, but licensing RoboHelp as part of the Suite is going to be much easier than justifying two separate purchases.
If we can piggy-back Captivate onto the big authoring tools (FrameMaker and RoboHelp), we'll get incremental revenue from people who might have otherwise not bothered with buying a simulation tool.
- MadCap, which makes Flare (RoboHelp competitor), Mimic (Captivate competitor), and, someday, Blaze (alleged FrameMaker competitor).
- Quadralay, which makes ePublisher Pro (conversion tool for FrameMaker to HTML, sort-of RoboHelp competitor)
- Qarbon, which makes Viewlet Builder (Captivate competitor)
- TechSmith, which makes Camtasia (Captivate competitor)
And one other random note: MadCap already has a suite called MadPak, which includes Flare (help authoring), Mimic (simulation), Capture (screen captures), and Echo (audio). No great print solution, though.
Labels: FrameMaker, madcap, robohelp, TechComm Suite
12:57 PM Permalink | |
How do you say "blunder" in other languages?
Thursday, May 17, 2007 — posted by Sarah
At STC, MadCap Software announced Lingo, their new "help authoring tool and translation memory system."Unfortunately, the MadCap booth was in the same row as these guys.
With my limited understanding of trademark law, I don't think this is going to work. You cannot have two companies using the same term to describe two different things in the same industry.
How did this happen? A cursory Google search on lingo translation immediately reveals Lingo Systems. And once you find that, a search of the (free) trademark database will show you that Lingo Systems is already registered as a word mark in "language translation and localization services.
One interesting note, though. Although first used in 1997, the application wasn't made until 2006 and granted on May 1, 2007.
Exquisite timing.
10:37 AM Permalink | |