Tackling the challenge of writing sales proposals and RFQs

Standards and processes permeate nearly every area of business today. They enable management to control, direct and delegate, giving people the ability to focus attention on the more difficult issues the business faces. Processes drives predictability, consistency and efficiency. Despite all these benefits, sales departments have been much slower to move down this path. Sales… Read more »

The Social Web for Documentation – Anne Gentle to visit Europe

Matthew Ellison has announced that Anne Gentle, writer of “Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation” will be the keynote speaker at his conference, UA Europe 2010, this September. Here’s a video interview with Anne we carried out last year, to give you a flavour of what to expect:

Your online grammar reference guide

We’ve added a link on our Web site that will take you to the online grammar reference guide offered by Grammar to Go. Built for business, Grammar to Go is your personal grammar specialist, ready to answer your questions wherever and whenever they arise. It is very popular with professionals who spend their valuable time correcting… Read more »

Moving technical authors from institutional thinking to network thinking

In this video clip, Ecademy’s Thomas Power talks about how business leaders will have to switch between “institutional thinking” (closed, selective and controlling) and “network thinking” (open, random and supportive). There’s a similar challenge for technical communicators – between traditional “closed” user documents and collaborative, conversational, “open” online user assistance.  Thomas claims: You have to be very… Read more »

Open source survey reveals the value of community-based Help

Actuate’s August 2009 Open Source Survey reported users see community-based Help as one of the key benefits of adopting open source software. The benefits of adoption for the 1,500 respondents were: Community-based Help (33.2%) Access to source code (72.6%) Built on open platforms (63.9%) Scalability (57.2%) Flexibility (54.3%) Not locked into Microsoft (40.9%) Standards-based technology… Read more »