Many software companies, when they start out, provide user documentation as downloadable PDFs or as web pages. As they develop more products and versions, and as they expand into countries that use different English spellings, the amount of documents can grow until it becomes hard to keep all of these documents up to date. It’s at… Read more »
Tag: single sourcing
Assessing the potential savings from single sourcing
One of the main benefits from single sourcing is the ability to reuse existing content. Different departments can avoid duplicating work, which means they can save time and money. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to quantify these savings before you move to an authoring or content management system that enables you to single source. Analysing… Read more »
Different world views of content and content strategy
There’s a wonderful German word, die Weltanschauung, which roughly translates as a view of the world. It suggests there is a framework of ideas and beliefs behind people’s descriptions of various things in the world. I was reminded of Weltanschauung at this week’s London Agile Content Meetup, where Rahel Bailie neatly summed up some of the different views of… Read more »
Book review: Every Page is Page One
There’s a joke in education along the lines that students are taught the notes their teachers wrote down at university 20 years earlier…without going through the heads of either. I mention this because there have been a number of technical communicators who have started to question the technical writing best practices that have been taught… Read more »
How much content can you actually re-use when you move to single sourcing?
One of the challenges when considering moving to a single sourcing authoring environment, such as DITA, is determining the Return on Investment. This often boils down to a key question: how much content can you actually re-use? Organisations typically attempt to answer this question in a number of ways: Conducting a semi-manual information audit of the… Read more »