A First-Hand Report from DocTrain West

by Beth Peisic

The DocTrain conference series, now in its 10th year, brings together industry professionals, management, vendors, standards bodies, and others interested in learning about the latest tools, processes, and technologies for technical communicators.

The conferences are held on both coasts, and this year DocTrain West was held for the first time in Palm Springs – making it quite convenient for us San Diegans!

The theme of the four-day event, which included pre-and post-conference workshops, was
“Moving from Unstructured to Structured Content.” The presenters emphasized the virtues of structure, and discussed and demonstrated how structure ensures consistency, enables content reuse, provides guidance in creating content, reduces localization costs, enables publishing in multiple output formats, increases productivity, and enables writers to focus on the content itself.

Note also that the theme was structured content, and that includes all sorts of corporate written assets and records, not just technical documentation. A number of the presenters work with large companies to help them convert millions of pages worth of corporate records and data to preserve them and make them easily accessible. In fact, a number of them pointed out that the background and experience that technical communicators bring is very beneficial for these large-scale projects.

Here is a sampler of several of the sessions I attended.

Don Bridges of Data Conversion Laboratory spoke on “How to Get the Most out of Content Migration to DITA.” He sees DITA as pre-packaged ready-to-use XML that includes a robust infrastructure with lots of tools, and that is extensible for specialized applications as your needs expand. He pointed out that, though conversion to DITA cannot be justified for all organizations, it is likely to offer a significant return on investment for those that have multiple output requirements, similar product lines, and the need to translate into multiple different languages. Don reviewed some of the constraints of DITA, and what you should review and revise in your legacy content to enhance the migration process and maximize the potential for content reuse.

Neil Perlin of Hyper/Word Services pointed out that, while you might have trouble getting your company to agree to buy another license for, say, FrameMaker, many companies pay six-figure price tags for Content Management Systems without doing a lot of upfront analysis. In his presentation “Watch Me Pull a CMS Out of This HAT,” he looked at the major elements of a content management system and the equivalent elements in two popular help authoring tools, Flare and RoboHelp. He pointed out that many features of expensive CMS, such as support for single sourcing and multi-channel publishing, version control, workflow and change alarms, content personalization, and plugins for desktop applications, are offered by the much cheaper alternative of common help authoring tools.

Nicky Bleiel of ComponentOne discussed “Using Journalistic Principles to Improve User Assistance.”  He pointed out how help authors can apply many of the practices of journalism, such as writing with the “inverted pyramid” in mind, ensuring that the key important information is “above the fold” (or scroll, on computer screens), research, interviewing and gathering corroborative information, and knowing your audience. He also pointed out the convergence between user assistance and Web 2.0, with their multiple modes of delivery, user participation, and a continuous publishing model.

In addition to the formal presentations, FLOSS Manuals organized a two-day “book sprint” that took place during the conference. FLOSS Manuals Foundation is a Dutch-based non-profit organization whose motto is “Free Manuals for Free Software.” They provide a completely web-based tool that enables writers  around the world to work in a collaborative authoring environment to produce user manuals for free, open source software. During the conference a team of writers both at the conference and working remotely produced a manual for Mozilla Firebox. The organizers gathered documentation wants and needs from the Firefox team beforehand, and produced a book from scratch in just two days. The manual is posted at http://en.flossmanuals.net/firefox and can also be downloaded or printed to order in paperback form from www.lulu.com.