Industry insights

WritersUA: Overview

Attendance seemed to be up a little from last year with approximately 450 people at the show.

Great energy as usual, people were excited to be at the venue.

I got a chance to catch up with many of the Usual Suspects including Char James-Tanny, Alan Houser, Neil Perlin, Paul O’Rear, Dave Gash, Brian Walker, Tony Self, and many others. (If I left you out, it’s because my brain has turned to mush.)

Our booth was extremely busy, and we had great conversations with many attendees. In past years, we would tell people what we do (“XML blah blah structured authoring blah blah FrameMaker blah blah training consulting blah blah”), and some percentage would respond with, “Oh, I use [some help authoring tool] and I don’t need that stuff.” This year, there were two types of responses:

• “We’re working on an XML implementation.”
• “We’re thinking about XML.”

The percentage of attendees who do not need to care about XML was extremely low.

Our “Yellow Thingies” were very popular — in addition to chocolate (of course), we were giving away a printed, bound version of three of our white papers (with a yellow cover). You can get the white papers through our online store (free with registration), but attendees really seemed to appreciate the printed version.

Gunfight at the WritersUA Corral

In one corner:guys in black Adobe shirts.
In the other corner: guys in black MadCap shirts.

In the crossfire: attendees rushing through the gap between the two booths, trying to make sure we wouldn’t get caught when the brawl began.

WritersUA: Rumors

From Char James-Tanny’s helpstuff blog:

Speaking of new features…RoboHelp will support both Windows Vista and Office 2007 in their next release, due out before the end of the year. I also heard today that Frame 8 will go to beta sometime in the next several months, and that a new product (kinda-sorta similar to RoboHelp for Frame) is under development. No news yet on the feature set, but that’s OK…I can wait until it’s released. (Given that I don’t use Frame, I obviously won’t be a beta tester!)

As you probably know, Scriptorium has a long-standing relationship with Adobe. We are an Adobe Authorized Training Center and have also done work for Adobe as a vendor (writing white papers and the like). As a result, we often have pre-release access to software under non-disclosure agreements.

This can make life quite difficult when people ask us about Adobe’s future plans. We aren’t allowed to say anything! You’ll notice, however, that it is possible to get information. My advice? If you want to know about upcoming features, corner the right Adobe person (don’t bug the RoboHelp guy about FrameMaker and vice versa), in private, and ask nicely.

Need a challenge in your life?

We’re hiring…

I didn’t realize I was a lemming

Over at The Content Wrangler, you’ll find a critique of Larry Kollar’s XML Heresy article. I provided some feedback to the critique article, but it occurs to me that if Mr. Kollar describes himself as an XML heretic, then that makes me…an XML lemming?

Excuse me, I see a lovely cliff ahead.

“Perception is reality”

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a wise manager told me this in response to some whining from me. Things were happening, life was unfair, and I couldn’t understand why my wonderful contributions weren’t being appreciated.

“Perception is reality.”

The perception was wrong, and reality was irrelevant. Never mind whether I was doing a fantastic job — upper management didn’t see it that way, and their evaluations are based on their perception.

It seems that RoboHelp has a similar problem. Ellis Pratt writes on the Cherryleaf Technical Authors’ Blog: “The challenge for Adobe, I believe, is to develop a better product and to try and rebuild relationships that haven’t been nurtured properly for the past four or five years. Maybe it’s time they read ‘The Tipping Point’.”

Oh, this is not a good idea

[Update: According to Aseem, comments are back on and turning them off was unintentional.]

In an earlier post, I linked to a blog posting from the Adobe Product Manager for FrameMaker, who requested product suggestions via meetings and email. But, unsurprisingly, the requests went into the comments. And most of the commenters are asking for a Mac version. And now we have this (from a comment on my post):

It appears the ability to comment on that post has been turned off. If I had been allowed to comment, here is what I would have written.
[another request for Mac support with a detailed recommendation on how to do it]

I suppose that it’s possible that Adobe’s blog system limits each entry to 16 comments?

<crickets>

Probably not.

I don’t think that a flood of “gimme back my Mac” was what Aseem was looking for. (Hi, Aseem!)

Blogs are a two-way conversation. Sometimes, the person you’re talking with changes the subject. And hitting the mute button is really not the best way to deal with that.

[I will now await a flood of comments that will make me eat my words.]

Pod people and RoboHelp

The RoboHelp reviews keep coming, and they’re getting ugly. DMN Communications says in their podcast that the new release of RoboHelp shows “almost contempt” for RoboHelp users (approximately 12:30 into the podcast).

On a more constructive note, the podcasters speculate about the lack of integration of RoboHelp with FrameMaker. They point out that RoboHelp’s competitor, Flare, imports native FrameMaker files, whereas RoboHelp requires use of the intermediate MIF (Maker Interchange Format) files. One of the speakers then muses, “Does Adobe’s agreement with Quadralay [to include WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition in the box with FrameMaker] preclude them from integrating RoboHelp?” (11:40)

I don’t know the answer to this question. Random guesses are so much more fun than the generally mundane truth (whatever that might be).

Notorious

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, or so the saying goes.

But RoboHelp is trying.

MonkeyPi weighs in with his, er, unique style. In a lengthy discussion of a recent Adobe webinar on RoboHelp, he says this:

But the kicker comes when [Adobe product evangelist] Jacquez says, “…the closest [online help tool] to RH is Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop.” The clear implication is that RoboHelp is teh awesome, and teh other toolz are teh suxors. Why even Micro$oft’s crappy free tool places higher then our pathetic competitors!!

Adobe says that their competitors’ claims were misleading:

Jacquez says, “…competitors telling people that [RH] is dead… one has to wonder what the competition is going to say when their customers begin to return their product because they bought it under the pretense that RH was dead.”

Let’s get something very clear here. After Macromedia bought eHelp, they killed RoboHelp. RoboHelp was dead — Macromedia was interested in RoboDemo (now Captivate) and not in any other component of eHelp’s product line. So, they laid off most of the RoboHelp team.

Enter MadCap. Many of the ex-RoboHelp people thought that there was still a market for a help authoring tool, so they formed the new MadCap Software and built Flare. And much of Flare’s marketing was based on the idea that 1) RoboHelp is not going to have any updates and 2) Flare is the natural successor to RoboHelp.

Fine. But then Adobe bought Macromedia. And Adobe does have a significant presence in the technical writing market, so suddenly the strategy changes. Adobe decides to resurrect RoboHelp.

All of this makes perfect sense. And there’s nothing particularly nefarious about what happened. RoboHelp didn’t make sense in Macromedia’s web-heavy product line-up. RoboHelp can make sense for Adobe, especially if they market RoboHelp, Captivate, Acrobat, and FrameMaker as a core set of technical writing tools, along with Photoshop, Illustrator, DreamWeaver, Flash, Acrobat 3D, and others for more specialized requirements. You can see some of this positioning beginning to happening in the Adobe webinar.

Meanwhile, though, response to RoboHelp 6 has been, at best, mixed. One day after MonkeyPi’s dissection of the webinar, we have 10 Reasons Not to Upgrade to RoboHelp 6 at I’d Rather Be Writing. They include the following (read Tom’s blog for an explanation of each item):

1. Communication from Adobe is bleak.
4. Not compatible with Word 2007.
5. Requires at least 15 macros to clean up [print] output
9. Interface is 1996.
10. Its apparent ease of use is only because you’ve been using it for 10 years.

The writer seems particular offended by Adobe’s lack of response to questions and comments during the webinar and on their new TechComm blog:

[…] Adobe’s RoboHelp blogger either is totally clueless about responding to comments, or he doesn’t understand that a blog is not a PR marketing vehicle. […] Sorry Adobe, but you really get a D when it comes to communication.

This is interesting. Five years ago this would have been a non-issue — obviously Adobe gets to control the content of marketing communications on their web site. No more.

As I use RoboHelp about once every five years, I don’t really have an opinion on the merits of the tool. But I am watching the blog-kerfluffle with some interest, especially as I wonder what reaction to FrameMaker will look like, when they release their next version, probably in mid-2007 (according to public statements from RJ Jacquez).

VC pitch template

This week, I attended the Southeast Venture conference, held at the new Umstead Hotel in Cary, North Carolina. The conference was only about two miles from our office and the opportunity to see this brand-new, five-star aspiring hotel was too good to pass up. (Hard to justify staying there when home is less than 20 minutes away…)

The conference included a series of 10-minute pitches from various companies looking for funding.

After seeing a couple dozen of these sessions, I have put together a helpful template for anyone looking to do a demo pitch.

First, be sure to use the following phrases:

• “addressable market is over $X billion”
• “unique value proposition”
• “sustainable advantage”
• “barriers to entry”
• “strong intellectual property assets”

Then, you’ll need two charts. The first one shows revenue and looks like this:

The second one shows profits and looks like this:

So. Hockey stick and check mark. It’s all very simple.

Adobe blogs get interesting

Adobe has a lot of bloggers, posting on everything from Photoshop to LiveCycle to Lightroom to Captivate. (You can check them all out at blogs.adobe.com.)

Today, I saw an introductory post for a new blog from Vivek Jain, the Group Product Manager for FrameMaker and RoboHelp. I’m pretty sure this is the first sign of life from that group in the blogosphere.

An example of good technical writing

Not too long ago, I took a quick look at XMLMind XML Editor (XXE). I downloaded and installed the software, dropped in a couple of existing XML files, and tried to create some new content.

I didn’t like it. Couldn’t get it to do what I wanted.

This week, I ran across Antonio DaSilva’s article about XXE (hi, Tony!). I read the article, then opened up my copy of XXE (still installed). And suddenly, the product worked just fine.

XXE isn’t my favorite XML editor, for the price, it’s a great tool. (The standard edition that I’m using is free.)

There were a couple of bits of information in the article that really helped me. I think the key insight that Tony provided for me was that XXE does not permit your content to be invalid. Thus, if you try to paste an element into an invalid location, the paste action is blocked. I don’t like it, but at least now I understand why the software is behaving the way it does.

Many thanks to Tony for a great article.

If it’s not Scottish, it’s…

[refresh your memory here]

The Aberdeen Group has released a new report, entitled The Next-Generation Product Documentation Report: Getting Past the ‘Throw-It-over-the-Wall’ Approach. (Could that title be any less, um, Scottish?) Access is free until February 23 when you provide your email address.
The Content Wrangler is not impressed:

The folks at Aberdeen do not truly understand the market, despite many interviews with thought leaders in the documentation arena. […] The survey appeared to be designed to obtain results for each of the sponsors […], instead of questions designed to paint an accurate picture of the documentation industry without regard for the concerns of sponsors.

I lost interest because I think their basic hypothesis is wrong:

Causing a missed product launch because of incomplete product documentation is
the nightmare of every documentation manager.

The vast majority of documentation groups that I’ve worked for/in/with don’t worry about “causing a missed product launch.” If the documentation isn’t ready, the product will still ship. The documentation may be incomplete, inaccurate, unreviewed, or otherwise problematic, but the product will ship.

I know that there are some industries (medical devices come to mind) where documentation is in fact regulated just as the product itself is. But the vast majority of technical writers that I’ve worked with are concerned with triage — how much of the doc can be completed by the (generally ridiculous) deadline?

Am I missing something? Is there a world of documentation managers out there who stress about actual product delays because of documentation?

My First Blog Ethics Challenge

So today, this is all over the various tech comm lists:

If you’ve got a blog that appeals to technical communication professionals, we’d got a special offer for you. Blog about [deleted] and we’ll send you a free [shameless sponsor] T-shirt courtesy of [shameless sponsor].

[boring details snipped]

Supplies are limited. T-shirts XL only.

XL only?!? In that case, forget it.

Now, if they were offering chocolate…

On a completely unrelated note, I’d like to mention that I’ll be presenting at the STC Trans-Alpine Chapter conference on April 18-20. In Switzerland, which as you probably know is famous for watches, banks, and <cough> chocolate.

Anonymous blogging has its benefits

monkeyPi posts a review of RoboHelp 6.

Warning: May be hazardous to keyboards.

RoboHelp 6 finally arrives, and it’s craptastic at monkeyPi

I haven’t looked at RoboHelp in years, so I have no idea whether his issues are valid or not.

[I have this feeling that I know the monkey behind monkeyPi, but I’m not totally sure. Meanwhile, I will continue my demure, unanonymous blogging here.]

I did notice a couple of things about the RoboHelp release. First, based on the feature set, Adobe has clearly decided that XML is not a priority for RoboHelp users. This is in contrast to MadCap Flare, which touts their tool as being “XML-based” at every opportunity. Second, the press release announcing RoboHelp 6 has a quote from the former eHelp VP of Engineering, who is now with an unrelated company (Unwired Software). A lot of MadCap’s marketing effort is built around their identity:

“MadCap Software is just a new name for a group of familiar faces that have been leading the technical writing community for over a decade. MadCap is home to some of the most experienced software architects and product experts in the industry, including many former core members of eHelp Corporation, creators of RoboHelp.”

One gets the impression that Adobe has been paying attention to Flare’s marketing, and that Adobe marketing is just a tad ticked off.

Ten for ten: training discounts until January 31

In 2007, we’re celebrating our tenth anniversary at Scriptorium. As part of this milestone, we’re going to offer discounts and giveaways throughout the year.

Our first special is 10 percent off any public training class on FrameMaker, XML, XSL, InDesign, or Photoshop. To get the discount, use the following coupon code during the checkout process in our online store:

10for10training

The code is valid through January 31, so register soon! For class dates, go to our online calendar.

Fine print on the discount: You can use the discount code only one time, so if you want to take multiple classes, register for all of them in one order.

Gimme, gimme, gimme….NOW!!

At Macworld 2007, Steve Jobs announces the Apple iPhone. I want one. NOW. Engadget has a blow-by-blow discussion of the keynote and lots of pictures:

Live from Macworld 2007: Steve Jobs keynote – Engadget

XML 2006: Not the takeaway I was expecting

A conference presentation is a specialized form of technical communication — in addition to basic technical writing skills, a presenter needs the ability communicate effectively in a conference session. The presenters here are technical experts, but many of them are really terrible at the front of a room!

For example, they are making the following mistakes (some presenters are doing all of these):

• Reading slides
• Slides with too much text in too small a font (the vast majority of the presentations)
• Mumbling
• Poor microphone management (not talking into the microphone, moving back and forth so that the volume goes up and down)
• Poor time management — spending too much time on introductory material and not enough time on the important bits of the presentation
• Speaking in extreme monotones
• Sentences trailing off in volume

I don’t know exactly how conference proposals were evaluated, but it looks very much as though content is king (sounds good, right?) Proposals were evaluated on technical merit and little or no consideration was given to presentation skills.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. If you have great knowledge, but are unable to communicate that verbally, then putting you at the front of a room full of people is not helpful.

And worst of all, there are NO EVALUATIONS! That means that there’s little or no chance that the situation will be addressed next year. (There is an overall conference evaluation form, but you have to remember to go get it at the registration desk.)

Joe Welinske of WritersUA does the best of job of speaker assessment I’ve seen:

• He asks participants to fill out evaluations for each speaker. There are just a few questions, and each evaluation is an entry for a door prize. In other words, he bribes participants to fill out the evaluations.
• Speakers who suck with poor evaluations aren’t invited back the next year.
• He rarely allows panels or group presentations (too much diffusion of responsibility).
• Speakers who were rated highly in the past get stars on their bios, so attendees have some additional information to help them choose a session.
• Joe attends many conferences each year to evaluate prospective speakers and to gauge which topics are getting the most interest from attendees. He builds his program based on this research.

The contrast between the presentation quality here and at WritersUA is really quite stunning.

XML 2006: Content Management APIs

How Google and wireless access have changed the world: I’m sitting in this session, and the presenter’s approach isn’t working for me. So, I google jsr 170 and I find this article at CMS Watch that explains it quite nicely.

Having skimmed that, I return my attention to the presenter, and find that he’s making a lot more sense.

The CMS Watch article has an excellent definition of JSR 170:

JSR-170 promises the Java world, and possibly beyond, a unified API that allows accessing any compliant repository in a vendor- or implementation-neutral fashion, leading to the kind of clean separation of concerns that characterizes modern IT architectures. Some people call JSR-170 the “JDBC [Java Database Connectivity] of Content Repositories.”

Now, we have Michael Wechner presenting on what is theoretically the same topic. Only not. He leads with this: “Today, every CMS is producing its own user interface, which is just kind of silly.” And then this analogy: mail servers are standardized, but you’re free to use your own client/front end. Similarly, CMSes need a common backend and you can do whatever on the front end.

I feel smarter already.

Wechner’s company, Wyona, is an integrator for open source CMS.

He points out that the ability to work offline is important because people aren’t always online. He uses the example of a train ride in Europe — the obvious equivalent in the United States is airplanes. (Side note: If people are permitted to yap on their cell phones in-flight, I’m probably going to stop traveling altogether. It’s bad enough on the ground at the gate.)

OK, and I think he’s proposing that you use existing protocols, such as Atom and WebDAV, to do CMS connections.

XML 2006: XML in Legislation

Timothy Arnold-Moore of SAIC (I think). Good presenter with a sense of humor.

He points out again that legislation has a shelf life of hundreds of years and so a typical word processing format, which lasts about 10 years, is really not an option. Look! A picture of the Magna Carta to illustrate his point. Bonus points for use of graphics. Even if he did (as I just did) pull it from Wikipedia.

Best practices for legislation:

• Updates are made to bills from the floor of the legislative chamber and are thus near-instant.
• Provide information about bill status, proposed amendments, consolidated form of amendments
• Provide the “as made” versions as soon as enacted
• Consolidate amendments unofficially. Side note: The US Code takes more than two years for official updates. (ed: That is pathetic.)

Working with legislative XML requires some heavy lifting in revision tracking. Interesting. They have the proposed act in one document and a separate Change Description Document. They integrate the two to produce the amended version(s).

Nice demo of the Tasmanian EnAct system. This presenter is familiar with the concept of “show, don’t tell.” They use an SAIC product, TeraText, as the foundation.

XML 2006: Vendor PechaKucha

At its best, the PechaKucha was highly entertaining. At its worst, it was painful, but at least the bad presentations were short.

After about an hour, though, the entertainment value started to wear off and tiredness set in. Perhaps, in the future, these mini-presentations could be interleaved among the other stuff.

Highlights:

• Ken Holman of Crane Softwrights instructed the audience to yell “bing” as the slides changed behind him.
• Carlo Minollo (sp?) of DataDirect got up, talked very fast, and was perfectly synchronized with his slides without any apparent effort. (This means, by the way, that he practiced. A lot.)

Lowlights:

• A series of dreary presentations from Oracle. One presenter said, “Don’t look at me.”
• Binary XML? Ugh.

XML 2006: External vs. internal DTDs

The presenter is describing a workflow in which there is an “editorial” DTD and a “delivery” DTD. It makes me cringe on general principle, but I see where they are going with it.

They optimized the editorial DTD for content creators and optimized the delivery DTD for their publishing workflow.

I’d like to see a detailed assessment of why they did this instead of some other approach.

Ah…good question: This decouples the editorial process from the delivery process. Does this buffer the editorial people from what is happening downstream? Answer? Sort of.

In response to a question from me, the major disadvantage to the dual-DTD approach is that the end result XML is extremely loose, so occasionally the output looks weird or search doesn’t work properly. That’s the one thing they’d like to go back and fix, so that the various content contributors have more constraints and better conformance checking.

XML 2006: Day Two Keynote

Darin McBeath of Reed Elsevier spoke on Unleashing the Power of XML. He had a very interesting survey that was conducted across the organization (I think).

The biggest challenges for publishers?

• Migration of existing content
• Training

Main weaknesses of XML?

• Namespaces
• Schema is too complex
• Everyone can do it

He had some data showing that XQuery is gaining in popularity, both at the conference and in general technical discussions.

Finally, a list of why XML is important to publishers:

• Custom publishing. O’Reilly’s Safari is the canonical example.
• Content repurposing
• Fabrication/conversion
• Content management
• Search (Oxford African American Studies Center)
• eLearning
• Mashups

Several of these warrant entire presentations.

Key phrase: mind the gap. Pay attention to the chasm between the programmers and the content creators. (see my previous post)

Great keynote — a nice big-picture overview, which is exactly what a keynote needs to do.

XML 2006: Scribus non grata

When presenters at this conference mentioned content creators, their attitudes ranged from dismissive to contemptuous. “Stupid authors” seems to be the universal undercurrent. Authors complain about XML-based publishing systems, authors whine whenever something minor changes, authors don’t understand the glories of XML, and so on.

Perhaps the presenters have forgotten that without authors, there are no documents?