Reinforcing the Change in Philosophy

While the purpose of this post is to encourage customers to purchase their services, this article - Using Product Documentation as PDFs? Say Goodbye to Your Customers! - has some merit. When we were thinking about the documentation for PearsonAccess Next, we ultimately chose to use Confluence instead of the author in Word / distribute PDFs like we had done for PearsonAccess. Perhaps no other decision in my career as a technical writer had the greatest impact on my technical writing philosophy. The ability to implement reusable content was instrumental in being hired where I work now and, just yesterday during my ITIL class, the instructor stated that there needed to be a single place for documentation and not to copy and paste as it introduces significant overheard.

Three cheers for content reuse!