Robert Desprez Communications

HOW COULD CLOUD COMPUTING CHANGE OUR JOBS?

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Cloud com­put­ing is one of those terms you hear a lot about. Microsoft recent­ly launched a “To the cloud” adver­tis­ing cam­paign. Google offers Google Docs, a suite of cloud-based office soft­ware. I’m work­ing on con­tract for a com­pa­ny that makes gov­ern­ment soft­ware that runs on Sales­force, anoth­er cloud-based com­pa­ny. So it’s notable that there’s lit­tle dis­cus­sion about cloud-based author­ing soft­ware for tech­ni­cal writers.

Cloud com­put­ing basi­cal­ly means soft­ware than runs on the Inter­net ver­sus soft­ware installed on your com­put­er. Adobe FrameMak­er uses the tra­di­tion­al mod­el: you down­load it from Adobe’s site or insert a DVD into your com­put­er and the soft­ware is installed on your hard dri­ve. In con­trast, Google Docs is acces­si­ble via your web brows­er instead of installing it. Once you log on, it’s instan­ta­neous. No more wait­ing for the instal­la­tion. No more punch­ing in long, com­pli­cat­ed ser­i­al numbers.

Soft­ware like Google Docs is catch­ing on. While it’s cur­rent­ly viewed as a “lite” ver­sion of Microsoft Office, it’s improv­ing all the time. Google is also look­ing at cre­at­ing an offline mod­el in case you’re work­ing at a loca­tion that does not have Inter­net access.

For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, there’s not a lot of dis­cus­sion about writ­ing using cloud-based author­ing tools. Think about the benefits:

  • Your soft­ware would be avail­able imme­di­ate­ly. No more waits for a large and some­times slow down­load from a vendor’s web site. I recent­ly down­loaded Adobe’s Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Suite and the process took more than two hours.
  • Your upfront costs are low­er. Cloud-based soft­ware is fre­quent­ly priced on a sub­scrip­tion mod­el. So instead of pay­ing $2,000 for Adobe Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Suite, you would pay a month­ly fee to access Adobe’s soft­ware on the Inter­net. I’d read­i­ly agree to a month­ly fee of say $55 ver­sus $2,000 for a suite of software.
  • Your soft­ware sub­scrip­tion would ide­al­ly pro­vide you with the lat­est ver­sion of the soft­ware. Instead of pon­der­ing whether I should upgrade to FrameMak­er 10, which was just released, my sub­scrip­tion would imme­di­ate­ly give me access to the lat­est features.
  • Col­lab­o­ra­tion could be eas­i­er among writ­ers. As the soft­ware resides on a remote serv­er, you could prob­a­bly store your source files there too. If done secure­ly, this could make col­lab­o­ra­tion eas­i­er. Imag­ine if you need­ed to share your files with a team in India. No more e‑mailing large files.
  • Tech­ni­cal reviews could also be done via the cloud. So instead of crank­ing up Word or Acro­bat on a com­put­er, review­ers could read your mate­r­i­al by review­ing a doc­u­ment that is avail­able on a web site.

Of course the mod­el isn’t per­fect. Per­for­mance, for exam­ple, could be an issue. But if soft­ware ven­dors can ensure a secure envi­ron­ment and offer decent per­for­mance, I think the idea has a lot of merit.

FRAMEMAKER 10 ADDS SOME SIZZLE

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I start­ed using FrameMak­er 6.0 back in the late 1990s. For many years, the new ver­sions of Frame seemed, well, bor­ing. Espe­cial­ly when you com­pared it to oth­er tools like Dreamweaver.

FrameMak­er 10 is dif­fer­ent. Released a cou­ple of weeks ago, I found the pre­view video almost excit­ing. With more and more peo­ple watch­ing online videos (think YouTube) and few­er peo­ple read­ing, Adobe appears to have rec­og­nized that even tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could use some pizzazz.

The lat­est ver­sion of FrameMak­er enables writ­ers to embed online videos or online demon­stra­tions dur­ing author­ing. This dynam­ic con­tent will then play in the final PDF.

What’s the ben­e­fit to tech­ni­cal writ­ers? It makes it eas­i­er to deliv­er doc­u­men­ta­tion that offers mixed media. For exam­ple, a hard­ware writer can write how to repair a part using the old stand­by: sta­t­ic pro­ce­dur­al con­tent. But he or she can now also add a 3D mod­el of the part that can be zoomed in on, spun around, and even pulled apart by a click of the user’s mouse.

Soft­ware writ­ers can also ben­e­fit from Frame 10. Writ­ers can aug­ment a pro­ce­dure with a relat­ed Cap­ti­vate video on the same page.
For users, this type of tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion could make things clear­er and def­i­nite­ly more engaging.

I know what you might thinking—these online videos and 3D mod­els are not exact­ly easy or quick to pro­duce. True. But if you’re lucky enough to already have online demos and mod­els and you’re upgrad­ing to Frame 10, I think this is def­i­nite­ly worth exploring.

WHY WEB 2.0 IS RELEVANT FOR TECHNICAL WRITERS

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In Decem­ber, I start­ed a dis­cus­sion in a few LinkedIn groups titled, “Most tech­ni­cal writ­ers are not embrac­ing Web 2.0.”

It stirred up a lot of feed­back. Most peo­ple seemed to agree, not­ing that they haven’t had time to research Web 2.0 when wrestling with chal­leng­ing projects, such as set­ting up doc­u­men­ta­tion in XML and DITA.

Some mem­bers, how­ev­er, respond­ed by say­ing that Web 2.0 is just a “mar­ket­ing con­cept,” imply­ing that it has lit­tle val­ue for tech­ni­cal writers.

I strong­ly disagree.

Here’s why I think Web 2.0 is rel­e­vant for us:

  1. Social media is not just a fad and it’s not going away. Quite the opposite—more and peo­ple appear to be using it. Here’s one star­tling fact about Face­book: it has more than 500 mil­lion users and peo­ple spend “700 bil­lion min­utes per month” on the site. In case you’re count­ing, Face­book users out­num­ber the com­bined pop­u­la­tion of Cana­da and the U.S. (Check out Facebook’s sta­tis­tics page.)
  2. We’re no longer the gate­keep­ers of con­tent. In decades past, tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors wrote the tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion for a prod­uct and it was the offi­cial con­tent for a com­pa­ny. These days, we no longer have a monop­oly on sup­port con­tent. Online dis­cus­sions may abound about your prod­uct, and most of it is indexed by Google and is read­i­ly acces­si­ble. It’s not uncom­mon to find that this “unof­fi­cial” sup­port con­tent (i.e. forums) is often dis­played before our offi­cial con­tent in search results. This pos­es a chal­lenge to writers—how do we ensure that our con­tent is eas­i­ly found by all users?
  3. Peo­ple are already shar­ing their thoughts on your prod­ucts. With Web 2.0, online com­mu­ni­ties and dis­cus­sions are some­thing we all take for grant­ed. Online com­mu­ni­ties are rat­ing books on Ama­zon. Vaca­tion­ers are rat­ing hotels on Tri­pAd­vi­sor. And they may be rat­ing your prod­uct and your doc­u­men­ta­tion. In short, dis­cern­ing online users have nev­er had so much con­trol over their pur­chas­ing deci­sions. For writ­ers, we should mon­i­tor if users are writ­ing feed­back on our prod­ucts using tech­nolo­gies like Google Alerts.
  4. Writ­ers are already using Web 2.0. Anne Gentle’s book Con­ver­sa­tion and Com­mu­ni­ty doc­u­ments a few exam­ples in which com­pa­nies are using tech­nol­o­gy like wikis for tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. The Adobe Labs wiki, for exam­ple, tar­gets devel­op­ers using Adobe tech­nol­o­gy and is appar­ent­ly one of the top wikis for daily-use.

I believe that Web 2.0 is one of the trends that will for­ev­er change how we do our jobs. Ignor­ing it or sug­gest­ing it’s just for mar­ket­ing folks is seri­ous­ly under­es­ti­mat­ing its importance.

AVOIDING INFOBESITY

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Christ­mas is here and it is a great time to exchange gifts and spend time with friends and family.

Christ­mas is also a time that is syn­ony­mous with over­con­sump­tion and overeat­ing. It seems that every month, I read some alarm­ing sta­tis­tic about North Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing girth. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of us are now clas­si­fied as obese.

Now there’s the term infobesity—the ten­den­cy to gorge one­self on infor­ma­tion. British jour­nal­ist John Naish used the term in his book Enough: Break­ing free from the world of more. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“It involves fighting—and here’s my own new word—infobesity, by restrict­ing one’s data diet. There are com­pelling rea­sons. The glut of infor­ma­tion is not only caus­ing stress and con­fu­sion; it also makes us do irra­tional things such as ignore cru­cial health infor­ma­tion. The British Government’s lat­est sur­vey on our food-buy­ing pat­terns shows that while we are giv­en more infor­ma­tion than ever about healthy eat­ing, our con­sump­tion of fresh food has fallen…We are so wired to gath­er infor­ma­tion that often we no longer do any­thing use­ful with it. Instead of paus­ing to sift our intake for rel­e­vance and qual­i­ty, the dai­ly diet of pruri­ent, pro­found, con­fus­ing and con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion gets chucked on to a men­tal ash-heap of things vague­ly com­pre­hend­ed. Then we rush to try to make sense of it all…by get­ting more.”

Many of us are over­ex­posed to infor­ma­tion. With social media pro­lif­er­at­ing and smart phone adop­tion sky­rock­et­ing, it’s now eas­i­er than ever to read blog posts on the go, see what your vir­tu­al friends are doing, and check out the lat­est videos on YouTube.

As pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tors, I think we should all be mind­ful of not con­tribut­ing to the del­uge of infor­ma­tion. For a relat­ed post, see Why Writ­ing Less Can Offer More.

TECHNICAL WRITING LISTED AS ONE OF THE BEST CAREERS: U.S. WEB SITE

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Last week U.S News list­ed tech­ni­cal writ­ing as one of the 50 best careers of 2011.

Some inter­est­ing high­lights (at least for me):

  • “Future employ­ment for tech­ni­cal writ­ers looks bright, espe­cial­ly for those with strong Web and mul­ti­me­dia skills, accord­ing to esti­mates by the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics. Tech­ni­cal writ­ing posi­tions are expect­ed to grow by more than 18 per­cent, or 8,900 jobs, by 2018.”
  • “It helps if you’re com­fort­able work­ing as a con­trac­tor, since com­pa­nies increas­ing­ly pre­fer to hire that way.”
  • “The low­est-paid tech­ni­cal writ­ers earn less than $37,000, and the high­est-paid posi­tions earn more than $100,000. In some indus­tries, off­shoring may put down­ward pres­sure on pay.”

In Van­cou­ver, I know of two com­pa­nies who have exper­i­ment­ed with off­shoring their tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions depart­ments to coun­tries like India. Although I’m not a fan of los­ing work to oth­er locales, I believe that off­shoring may make sense in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions: for exam­ple, when an estab­lished prod­uct has gone into “main­te­nance mode” and the edits to the doc­u­men­ta­tion are minor.

Anoth­er web site that puts “down­ward pres­sure on pay” is Elance, which enables out­sourc­ing to work­ers around the world.

As any­one on the globe can bid on a job, I’ve seen tech­ni­cal writ­ing assign­ments in which writ­ers are will­ing to work for peanuts (for instance, one writer com­plet­ed 17 jobs and had earned only $475). Hope­ful­ly, sites like Elance will always remain on the periph­ery for the sake of work­ers who are hop­ing to make a com­pet­i­tive, indus­try-stan­dard wage.

Check out the report (link to exter­nal web site).

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290