Survey into improving the status of technical authors

Cherryleaf has initiated a survey into the issue of improving the status of technical writers/technical authors. You can participate in our questionnaire here:

Survey into the issue of improving the status of technical authors.

DITA XML Training Course

Just a quick update on our An Introduction to DITA XML - An e-learning training course. We're now in the user acceptance phase. The course, exercises and installation notes have been completed and a guinea pig will be completing the course to check we haven't missed anything. So we're almost there.

New - DVD on writing a book

Weve added the first DVD to our online shop - a home study writing course, call WriteNow! This workshop is presented by Mindy Gibbins-Klein, the "Book Midwife". Mindy is an expert in helping people publish the book inside them. Cherryleaf has worked with her on "BusinessWise", a book which will be released in March 2007.

Learn everything you need to know about writing and publishing a successful book and actually start your book in the right way today. You can now access all of the essential information and motivation from this DVD.

Web 2.0 research

We've been contacted by a team that is doing a research project with the business school at one of the London Universities. They are looking to do in-depth interviews with people who as "early adopters" use the tools of web 2.0 to market their business. They'll be interviewing us about this and about our business IT systems.

FrameMaker Training courses

This week , we've also added some new FrameMaker training courses (for the UK only, I'm afraid). These include: FrameMaker Basic/Intermediate, FrameMaker Advanced, Structured FrameMaker,Creating EDDs and Importing and Exporting SGML/XML.

MadCap Flare Training courses

Today, we've updated details on our MadCap flare training courses. These are offered as either a Web-based or classroom based course. Ginny and Carol will be attending the upcoming course being run by Madcap's Mike Hamilton, as part of their MadCap Flare Instructor certification.

New AuthorIT Training courses

We've added two new AuthorIT training courses this week. These are self-paced courses that allow you to master AuthorIT at your own pace. One course is AuthorIT training for users, the other is AuthorIT training for Administrators.

STC Spring Event Feedback

From http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry20:

"Yesterday I attended the STC (Society for Technical Communication) spring event, where I was invited to give a talk on uses of Wikis and Blogs in industry. There was a great deal of interest in the way wikis can help enable collaborative authoring, especially in reducing the length of the revision cycle, and in engaging SMEs in the writing process.
I shared the platform with Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf who was speaking about the impact of Web 2.0 on technical communicators; not a small subject, it emerges. Ellis drew a lot of examples of new and existing sites that either claim, or actually do, implement Web 2-ness. Ellis had an interesting way of breaking down Web 2 so that it is more comprehensible to the layman."

RoboHelp and the Tipping Point

On Saturday, I was speaking at the STC regional conference in Birmingham, where I was told that Adobe's RoboHelp team members were planning to come the UK. They want to meet the "movers and shakers", and that the person organising the UK end (who is not an Adobe employee) thought we should be at that meeting. Apparently, the RoboHelp team has been surprised by the "mixed" comments regarding RoboHelp 6, and it wants to get some feedback regarding the future direction for the tool. It's a good move. For a long time, the various owners of RoboHelp have, in many ways, ignored its community.

In Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" he talks about connectors, mavens and salesman as types of people that can cause the rapid adoption or dropping of a product, fashion or idea. Seth Godwin talks about these people too, calling them "sneezers".

In the Blue Sky Software era, the company nurtured these influencers. For example, it provided a directory of authorised trainers and consultants on the RoboHelp Web site. This changed around the time the company rebranded to eHelp, where they took training sales in-house and required any authorised trainers and consultants to (a) pay a certification fee and (b) sign a contract forbidding them to publicly criticise the products or the company. This led to a number of key influencers dropping out of the RoboHelp inner circle and start to look at AuthorIT instead.

When MacroMedia took over, it decided only authorised training centres could deliver RoboHelp training. This lead to the virtual end of RoboHelp public training courses in the UK, as these centres didn't have the contacts with the authoring community, didn't have the trainers to deliver the course and didn't understand the product.

As RoboHelp was left to stagnate under MacroMedia's ownership, we would talk within Cherryleaf and our inner circle about when and if someone in the authoring community would say "it's time to drop RoboHelp", and whether the power of The Tipping Point would be proven.

It hasn't happened (yet), because I think people still want RoboHelp to succeed, us included. Joe Welinske's announcement in 2005 that MacroMedia had put RoboHelp into "sunset" and that it would fade from common use certainly did have an impact. More recently, reviews of RoboHelp 6 ("RoboHelp 6 finally arrives, and it’s craptastic"), have, I would guess, shaken the RoboHelp team.

AuthorIT and MadCap, meanwhile, have been putting the hours into the community, working with the key influencers. Today, they have, in many ways, better products than RoboHelp 6. This strength, combined with a better relationship with the "connectors, mavens and salesmen", could lead to a big switch away from RoboHelp.

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".

The BusinessWise book

I've just been sent the final draft of a book we've contributed to, entitled "BusinessWise". The book provides advice to small businesses, both those just starting out or well established. It still needs the addition of title pages, imprint page and contents plus section dividing pages. The text of each chapter is, however, all there.

The publishers plan to publish officially on 7th April, when the book will also be available on Amazon. It will be also featured on a stand at the London Book Fair 16th - 18th April at Earls Court.

A nice email we received today

"I just want to say how much I enjoy the Cherryleaf newsletter. I find it consistently informative and useful. I attended an interview yesterday during which the subject of the future of RoboHelp came up. I was able to hold my own in this conversation, all from reading your newsletter and following the links. Ditto for DITA, Tech Writing 2.0, etc.

Many thanks.
Laura"

"Ditto with DITA" is a good phrase. Try saying it quickly 5 times :-P