I am delighted to see that the Society for Technical Communication (STC) has joined the blogosphere, with what appears to be a WordPress powered site at http://notebook.stc.org. As a recent convert to WordPress myself, I am delighted to see that STC feels this is the right blogging tool to use. (If I was an insecure sort of person, I might feel that STC’s choice validated my decision.) Read more
Tag STC
Article reprint and survey last chance
An article I wrote two years ago has just appeared as the lead item in the December 2008 edition of Tieline, the newsletter for senior members and community leaders in the Society for Technical Communication. It’s an article about running a survey using SurveyMonkey, and its publication is very timely: I am currently running another survey on SurveyMonkey, and it’s about to close. So if you’d like to take part in the User Documentation Survey for 2008, you have got until midnight UK time on Sunday night (21st December) to do so.
Content management at STC UK
This weekend I took part in a one-day conference on Content Management that was held by the STC UK Chapter. I gave a presentation on my personal experience of introducing a document management system in one department of a large IT division of a leading UK company where I was working as a contractor.
I was able to report that the document management solution we chose, Alfresco, was a great success both technically, in terms of its features and ease of use, and practically, in terms of user acceptance and improved working practices. Where the project came a little unstuck was in what, for want of a better word, I’d call the “political” sphere. The project lacked a business sponsor at a sufficiently senior level in the company hierarchy, so by the time I left the company involved it was unclear whether a budget would be available to make the solution I’d introduced a permanent feature of the department’s infrastructure.
Update 5th March 2008: I’ve just heard that the company have at last decided to go ahead with an official implementation of Alfresco. Perhaps it was something I said?
Talking about document management
I have been invited to take part in a one day event about content management being held by the UK Chapter of the STC on 1st March 2008. I will be talking about some of the practical aspects of trying to introduce a document management system in a large IT department.
If like me you’d spent nearly 15 years creating and working with documents for internal and external audiences in a range of hi-tech environments, you might have expected that the fundamentals of document management were universally understood and supported, in theory at least if not always in practice. In the “unofficial case study” I am presenting at this STC meeting I will explain why what was obvious to me wasn’t obvious to those around me, why I was asked to do something about it, what I tried to achieve, and how far I actually got.
Other speakers at this meeting will be talking about different aspects of content management, and I am sure it will be a worthwhile day. I do hope you will be able to join us.
By the way, I am also going to be giving two small presentations at the STC Technical Communications Summit in Philadelphia in June this year, where I will also be organising activities for members of the STC’s Europe Special Interest Group. If I don’t get to see you in March, maybe we’ll meet up in June?
