Is there a difference between a Content Strategist and a Technical Author?

What’s in a name – at this week’s Content Strategy Meetup, which unfortunately I missed due to illness, a number of the attendees and speakers came from the technical communications community. They were Technical Authors/Documentation Managers or had a background as a Technical Author. So are Technical Authors and Content Strategists one and the same… Read more »

Cherryleaf featured in Data Quality Pro Journal – improving Healthcare data quality through policy and procedure management

In Data Quality Pro Journal, Dylan Jones interviews Ellis Pratt, Director at Cherryleaf, about how to improve Healthcare data quality through policy and procedure management. According to Dylan, “One of the single most common root-causes of poor information quality is outdated documentation and a lack of governance in the way policies and procedures are managed. Nowhere… Read more »

The DITA XML authoring barrier for non-Technical Authors

One of the challenges for organisations moving to a new content management system for their user documentation is selecting an authoring tool that is: powerful enough, and can be used by non-Technical Authors as well as the professional Technical Authors. Many organisations want staff, such as developers, to be able to add content to the… Read more »

Is re-using content a good or a bad thing to do?

Today’s BBC News Web site has a piece on Ofsted re-using sentences in more than one school inspection report: An investigation has begun into claims that Ofsted approved “cut and paste” inspection reports using identical sentences and phrases…both reports say: “Some teachers do not plan learning for pupils at their different levels of ability and… Read more »

Testing the Scaffolding (drop down list) plug-in for Confluence 4

One of the attractions of using Confluence to create reports is the ability to enter some of the content quickly by selecting items from drop down lists. This technique has been the key ways that one of our clients has been able to reduce the time they need to write reports from 1.5 days to… Read more »