RE: XML book

["Brierley, Sean" <Sean -at- Quodata -dot- Com>]

I admit it. I am enamoured by the promise of XML-based documentation. I am
also one of the guys who thinks it is not here yet, for small to
medium-sized companies. Curiosity prevents me from letting you escape
without sharing all you know. Prepare for the mind-meld.

I work for a small company, perhaps 200 employees now. (The following is an
extrapolation because my company was 50 employees but got bought, so I am
framing this as though my workflow is the one that is used by the company as
a whole. In truth, it is not, but I digress.

Using Adobe FrameMaker and Quadralay WebWorks pro, 6 seats of FrameMaker and
3 seats of WWP pro plus 6 copies of Paint Shop Pro and six copies of SnagIT
32 represent an investment of about $6250 in software, for which upgrades
are purchased every two years at, say, a cost of $3,500. The hardware is
Wintel P3 700s costing $2,000 and upgraded every four years at a cost of
$2,000. Six technical writers cost the company, let's say $300,000 plus
benes. Let's say startup costs include $6,000 for FrameMaker training and
$3,000 for WebWorks training, and it takes 4 weeks to get up and running
live with templates and workflows in place. 

It takes about 4 weeks to write a user guide for a software product and
single-sourcing lets us write a user manual in four weeks, create online
help in four hours, and produce training materials in five days--because the
training stuff is customized for each trainer.

I know I hit a broad spectrum of issues, shotgun-style, but what costs and
issues are you looking at with your XML solutions? How long to get up and
running live, what software and hardware costs, spread over how many
writers? Tell me more!!!!!

Cheers,

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com

Adobe Certified Expert FrameMaker 6 
Quadralay WebWorks "Wizard"

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Shelton, Jan [SMTP:JShelton -at- metasolv -dot- com]
> 
> After reading all the posts on XML, I think there's a lot of confusion out
> there as to what XML really is (Michael Priestley is excluded from this
> generalization). I found a book that greatly helped me: XML, A Manager's
> Guide by Kevin Dick. Because it is targeted to managers (whom, we all
> know,
> know little about technology - that's a joke guys) it is concise, easy to
> read, and has no techspeak. I heartily endorse it as an initiation into
> the
> XML world.
> 
> BTW - it WILL affect us as technical communicators. I've seen several
> posts
> that dismiss it summarily as only being targeted to large companies. My
> company is a small one just starting to single source our documentation.
> Although up front costs are high, we expect to realize a fairly quick ROI
> in
> saving translation costs.

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