Thursday, March 29, 2018

In My Pursuit of a Backup Solution

Was reviewing this product - https://www.paragon-software.com/medium-large-business/protect-restore/features.html - and looked at this PDF: http://download.paragon-software.com/doc/PPR-ENG/Protect-and-Restore-full-features.pdf. I noticed it was created in InDesign. It made me wonder if the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa pulled their head out of their bum and started using InDesign like a real technical writing tool. Of course, if I was still there, I'm fairly certain I would have ditched InDesign in favor of RoboHelp to write their user guides for their software. Even the documentation that had to be translated into multiple languages likely would have found a home in RoboHelp.

Did I mention I really like RoboHelp?

Speaking of RoboHelp, I had a great meeting yesterday with a steering committee (with Senior Directors in attendance, including my manager's boss) about Knowledge Management. I spoke about snippets during the meeting and rattled off statistics about 8 sample documents I have been working with which had 121 paragraphs & 62 graphics. Of the paragraphs, 58% of the content existed in multiple documents. Of the graphics, 55% of the screenshots existed in multiple documents. What I need to do, for the next meeting, is to create a proof of concept that I can show to the attendees. I think talking in generalities is not nearly as powerful as showing a demo of how I would use snippets in our Knowledge Articles that will be our Knowledge Repository. I wrote about snippets and Cherwell's lack of support for snippets on the Single Sourcing Rant page, if you want to read more. I walked out of yesterday's meeting pleased with myself, for explaining why snippets are awesome, as well as hopeful about the way I want to create Knowledge Articles for our department could be adopted.

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