RE: What would you do?

["Yvette, Denoga" <Yvettedenoga -at- crimsonlogic -dot- com>]

Hi Kevin,

This is all too familiar for me. I am the lone writer of a large
government-owned IT firm. Until I came along, they had NO in-house
technical writer. For many years, they hired students or freelancers. In
many cases, developers were even asked to write the documentation.

So, I am seeing about at least 10 format variations of our user guides,
and they have no processes in place whatsoever. Crappy doesn't even come
close :) Talk about a complete utter mess!

Unlike you, I do not think my company is ready to move to XML. We are
still in the stone age (which I hope to change in a year or so), so my
tasks have been mostly putting processes in place, publishing a style
guide and enforcing a word template. 

I suggest (and I may not know all the details from your message) that
with all the crappy documentation you have to rewrite, work on cleaning
them up first, then enforce a standard template just in case some other
team wants to write their own documentation. It will take time.
Processes, templates and a style guide should be there to keep everyone
in line first. Those things alone are a challenge. A state-of-the-art
XML system will have to wait, but having it in your to-do list is
definitely sensible. I hope you can convince management of the
challenges that lay ahead before such a move to XML can be attained.

Good luck. 


Yvette

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+yvettedenoga=crimsonlogic -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+yvettedenoga=crimsonlogic -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- co
m] On Behalf Of Kevin McGowan
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 4:30 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: What would you do?

Hi everyone...

I'm in a bit of a bind, and I'd love to hear what y'all think I should
do. 
:)

I started this tech writing job last week. The company has several 
documents, all giant Word files. They want to move into an XML
environment, 
so we can 1) maintain XML modules of information, and create printable
user 
guides at will, 2) include some of these XML files as online help,
clickable 
from the UI.

Translation is also a concern...as they want to maintain multiple
languages 
(English, French, German, Dutch, etc...).

So, here I am...with a bunch of crappy and poorly-maintained Word files,
and 
I need to create a state-of-the-art XML system. They keep talking about 
DITA...but I'm not convinced that the DITA format is the perfect way to
go. 
Frankly, I'm not sure about much at the moment.

Please share any advice/experience...

Cheers,
Kevin

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