How checklists can save your life

Dr Atul Gawande is currently in London, touring the radio stations to promote his book “The Checklist Manifesto“. Dr Gawande is a surgeon in Boston Mass., who has been looking at how to deal with complexity in surgery and elsewhere. He has discovered that complex systems work, mostly through people using checklists. Furthermore, no matter… Read more »

The business case for SaaS (Software as a Service)

Intellect’s SaaS group has published recently a paper called “The business case for Software as a Service“. The paper lays out the technical and cost benefits of SaaS, together with checklists covering selection criteria, legal considerations and comparisons of SaaS applications to traditional in-house systems. Cherryleaf made some minor contributions to this paper – so minor we… Read more »

Questions to ask a Documentation Manager

We’re starting to conduct a series of interviews with Documentation Managers; our goal is to provide case studies of best practice and innovative ideas. We’ll be publishing edited versions of these interviews on Cherryleaf’s YouTube channel. So: What questions do you think should we ask? What would you like to know from Documentation Managers? Email… Read more »

Where does technical documentation fit into a “Freemium” business model?

This short video by Penny Power explains the Freemium model and how it applies to her business: So where does the Technical Publications department fit into this model? Traditionally, the user documentation has been given away free with a chargeable product. It’s not been chargeable in itself, but people have been required to buy a… Read more »

So you want to publish your user manuals on the Web, but don’t want everyone to see them

We often hear from Technical Authors who say they (or their bosses) have concerns about publishing their user guides on the Web. They are worried their competitors might read them, the manuals might stop a prospect from buying the product, or that a client might not buy a support contract. On the other hand, there are… Read more »