Using AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) to Produce Highly Customized, Local/Web-based, Cross-platform Help.

Scott Prentice, Leximation, Inc. • San Rafael, California

AIR Help is an exciting new online Help delivery option for those looking for a cross-platform solution or need the ability to create a highly customized Help system. AIR Help has been made possible by Adobe's introduction of the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) development technology which lets you deploy rich Internet applications on the desktop (in this case, the Help system itself is the rich Internet application). AIR applications are developed with Flash/Flex/ActionScript and are compiled into a single file that can be installed on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Because AIR provides an embedded browser (WebKit/Safari), you don't have to design around multiple browsers or worry about browser versions; your HTML will always be rendered with the same browser technology on all platforms. To make things even better, Adobe is in the process of moving Flex and AIR into the open source community, so this technology does not lock you into a proprietary and costly solution.

To use an AIR application to deliver online Help, you develop your HTML using whatever means that are available to you. The AIR application is essentially the container and "browser." This container can be as simple as just an application window, and you develop the navigation using standard JavaScript/CSS/DHTML. You can wrap most any browser-based "web help" type of output in an AIR application. You can also take advantage of the Flex development environment to create programmatic navigation controls (similar to those found in HTML Help) to create a Help system with a "traditional" look and feel, but one that you have control over the underlying actions. You can develop a Help system that delivers a mix of locally installed and web-based content, which keeps the content more fresh and provides a more beneficial user experience. With a little creativity, AIR will let you go beyond the traditional type of online Help delivery so you can provide your users with exactly what is needed to provide solutions to their problems.

I've developed a number of AIR Help prototypes, from simple "wrapped" solutions to more complex local/web-based hybrid systems. The latest prototype provides all the usual pieces that you'd expect in a Help system, including tree-view TOC and Index navigation elements, the ability to make context-sensitive calls, full text search (of both local and web-based content), and a "comments" feature that allows users to add comments to topics that are visible to all users. I plan to provide basic instructions on how to make your own AIR Help systems as well as options for customizing your current authoring tool (HAT) to generate files that can be used for your AIR application. Current prototypes and more information can be found at http://leximation.com/airhelp/.

Scott Prentice is the President of Leximation, Inc. providing tools and solutions for print and online publishing. He has been working in the technical publications field for 16 years, as a technical writer and a tools developer focusing on custom online help and FrameMaker development. Scott has been involved in DITA for the past few years and developed the core plugin for the FrameMaker DITA App Pack and is currently working on DITA-FMx, an enhanced DITA plugin for FrameMaker.

Using Conditional Attributes with Doc-to-Help to Single-source Printed and HTML Manuals.

Lance Dockins, a la mode Software • Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Many of the products we produce at a la mode have features that are similar or exactly the same as features in other products that we offer. Because of this similarity, we found ourselves maintaining nine separate manuals that all contained a significant amount of duplicate content. As our products progressed this became more and more of a chore to maintain so we were forced to look into a variety of single-sourcing tactics. After some deliberation, we decided to leverage Doc-To-Help's conditional attributes to generate conditional builds that could be applied to each of our topic files. By doing this we were able to reduce the number of help project files we maintained from nine to five and we were able to reduce the number of topic files we maintained down to one file per topic. During the project, three main challenges arose:

• We had to migrate all of our manuals into a common source format (HTML).
• We had to we had to merge all of the content we already had into fewer project files.
• In the midst of these architectural changes we still had to meet deadlines on documentation for feature updates in our products.

Lance Dockins is the primary trainer and document author for a la mode software. He has worked for a la mode for over 4 years educating customers on how to use our real estate software solutions to improve their business. In that time, Lance has trained thousands of real estate appraisers, mortgage brokers, and agents on our software. As a la mode's primary document author, he also maintains more than 15 manuals and several hundred technical documents.

Replacing Microsoft Help Structure with Custom "Next Generation" Help

Dawn Hughan, Intuit • Mountain View, CA

The Next Generation Help project was done as part of the latest version of QuickBooks small business financial management software. QuickBooks is a complex piece of software used primarily by small business owners and office managers with no formal background or education in business administration or accounting. This project focused on helping users quickly find and apply the answers to their questions at their point of need, with high confidence that they are getting the right answers. For the project, we completely removed the old Microsoft Help infrastructure and built a new one. The Next Generation Help project has won a design award within Intuit and received top mention in a CNET review of QuickBooks software this year.
Specific problems we solved included the following:

• Users had difficulty finding the right answer within the 7000+ Help topics included in QuickBooks.
• Users struggled with window management issues while using Help.
• Procedural topics were difficult to follow.
• There was no cohesive access to the range of assistance options we offered.
• It was difficult to deliver the right subset of information from our single repository of content that fed more than 15 different versions of QuickBooks software.

Dawn Hughan has been working in user assistance and user experience roles in the software industry for over 20 years. She started as a Technical Writer and later worked as a Developmental Editor, User Experience Manager, Documentation Manager, and Project Manager. Dawn is currently working as a Product Manager at Intuit. In all these roles, her focus has been on helping people to learn, be productive, make good decisions, and solve problems.

Calling Accessible Context-Sensitive Help with Unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript - 2 Methods Built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Frank Palinkas, Super Group Trading • Sandton, South Africa

This project demonstrates the viability of using unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript to call context-sensitive help in a web form.
Challenges:

• Create two formats of context-sensitive help for a web form: Field-level Help and Form-level Help.
• Insure the integrity of the Document Object Model (DOM) is preserved by the separation of its Structure, Presentation and Behavior layers.
• Make each Help format fully accessible to all users and assistive technologies by activation with mouse and keyboard.
• Make each Help format cross-browser compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera browser/user agents.
• If scripting is turned off in a browser/user agent, insure that both Help formats degrade gracefully and are easily available to the user.

Solution: Two solution formats are presented: Field-level Help and Form-level Help in a web form. These methods illustrate the complete separation of the Structure, Presentation and Behavior layers of the Document Object Model (DOM). Visitors to this showcase will see both formats in action, and all the (X)HTML/Structure, CSS/Presentation and Unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript/Behavior code employed to achieve the required results. This solution provides technical writers with the ability to successfully interact with development teams in the construction of context-sensitive help for forms contained in web-based applications. The Help Authoring Tool employed is Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, and its IDE Source Code Editors for (X)HTML, CSS, and DOM/JavaScript. I hope you enjoy the presentation and find it useful.

Frank is an American, working in South Africa as a Senior Technical Communicator/Web Standards and Accessibility Designer, and holds the following concurrent Microsoft Certifications: MCP, MCT, MCSE and MCDBA. Frank authors all markup, presentation, behavior code and content using Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team System IDE source code editors for (X)HTML, CSS and unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript. His technical writing incorporates web standards, accessibility, and semantics. He employs Helpware FAR HTML for the creation of MSHelp1 and MSHelp2 documentation packages and executables. Frank enjoys creating Fast Track Help tutorials which are offered free of charge to the Help Authoring and Technical Writing community. They are kept at his web page (provided courtesy of Helpware.net) for online viewing and download: http://frank.helpware.net.

Using Flash and RoboHelp to Develop an Interactive Help System that is Embedded in the Application and Accessible from the Product Web Site

George Bratsberg, Agilent Technologies • Santa Rosa, CA

In this showcase, I will demonstrate a UA model that we like to call all-in-one help. It is essentially a help system that is not only embedded in the software product, but is also accessible for viewing from the product's web page. In addition to offering traditional help topics on how to use the software, its self-contained, intuitive design walks the customer through the entire pre- and post-sales product experience. The selections on the main menu track a sequence of steps the customer would naturally follow, from accessing the information necessary for making a buying decision to end use.

Although most of the all-in-one system is created using RoboHelp, to achieve its multifunctional scope, we used other development tools to improve the usability of particularly challenging content. The best example of this is an interactive tool created in Flash for configuring software options with the specific functionality the customer requires. This tool interviews the customer through a series of simple questions, ultimately outputting a specific order list they can confidently present to a sales representative for purchase. Without this Flash tool, the customer would have to interpret a comprehensive list of options with many dependencies - not an easy task.

One of the inherent risks of implementing this model was that returning customers would no longer find product information in the "usual" places. The new model takes information that was scattered throughout various web pages and adds it to the all-in-one system. Our thinking was "one-stop shopping" for the customer, but for returning customers who had grown familiar our less-than-intuitive old way, the new model might have been challenging.

Because this was a one-stop design, navigation of the content became a huge factor in its usability. It took several iterations before we stopped getting complaints about where certain information was located in the system. The jury is still out. My intent is to invite open discussion on the pros and cons of this documentation strategy.

George Bratsberg has designed various user-assistance deliverables, such as help systems, manuals, application notes, and training modules for Hewlett Packard and Agilent Technologies products since 1992. He is currently the lead for our division's Customer Education department with the primary responsibility of using state-of-the-art methods to improve the customer's learning experience.

Using Author-it to Single-source a Cross-platform Documentation Set Consisting of Help, Release Notes, and User, Admin, and Quick Start Guides

Sue Heim, PGP Corporation • San Diego, CA

The client documentation set at PGP Corporation has traditionally included online help, user's guides, release notes, and quick start guides for both the Windows and Mac OS X platforms. Using Author-it, content was re-used and single-sourced to provide the various deliverables.

Since we implemented Author-it, we also found we needed to:

• Create a co-branded documentation set consisting of online help, user's guide, release notes, and quick start guide to meet the requirements for our Intel alliance
• Create a new documentation set for a new platform. This documentation set includes help, as well as a user's guide, administrator's guide, and release notes

This showcase will demonstrate how we are now able to provide new documentation, and quickly, for the various client-based PGP Corporation products. I'll demonstrate how content has been reused for the three platforms, and how we were able to quickly create a co-branded documentation set. We are using custom HTML templates for the Mac OS X help, and I'll explain how we can use the same content, but with a different look, as needed.

Sue Heim is an online help consultant and is also currently employed full-time by PGP Corporation, the the leader in email and data encryption. Sue has been a technical writer and online help author for over 18 years, and a freelance indexer for over 8 years. Sue has presented at WritersUA and various STC chapters. She is currently working on her Author-it certification.

On-demand, Dynamically Generated, Server-based Help Using Microsoft ASP.NET and Web Services

Denise Kadliak, Blackbaud • Cleveland, OH

Three years ago, Blackbaud, Inc. - a leading global provider of software and related services created specifically for nonprofit organizations - began designing its new generation of enterprise-level software products. With more than 19,000 organizations already relying on our products to help them raise money, manage finances, improve operational effectiveness, and leverage the fundraising power of the Internet, Blackbaud not only wanted to continue satisfying its existing client base but to expand and include larger nonprofit organizations. This meant moving to a Web-based application with extensive customization options. This also meant rethinking how we provide help to our users. We wanted a help system as comprehensive and expandable as the applications it served.

Our newly designed Blackbaud Enterprise help provides on-demand context-sensitive help and dynamically generated links, and it is fully customizable. Used in our recently released constituent record management and direct marketing software applications, we install the server-based help system on the Web server along with the software, which is deployed as a ClickOnce rich-client application. HTML topics are wrapped in Microsoft ASP.NET version 2.0 code. This interacts with two Web services that call the code from the applications. All “pluggable” features in the applications support linking with help topics. When a user accesses our help system from any given page in an application, the Web service builds a list of links related to functions on the page to which a user has security access. The help content for the page appears, along with a scrollable pane on the left side of the screen containing the links, allowing users easy access to all help associated with the selected help topic.

A technical writer with Blackbaud for nine years, Denise Kadilak participated in the new help system’s pilot project and is currently responsible for maintaining and updating Blackbaud Enterprise help in two different applications. Denise has presented on topics such as structured authoring and indexing at local STC meetings and the international conference. She has also published an article in intercom on indexing and regularly contributes book reviews to the Technical Communication Journal.

Producing Conditionalized Functional Reference Content through DITA Specialization and and Custom XSL

Jennifer Wrightsell-Hughes, PCI Geomatics • Gatineau, Quebec

PCI Geomatics software is built on a foundation of core functions that are used to perform a variety of geospatial processing tasks. These functions are used by two types of end-users (users of PCI's scripting application and users of the visual modeling application) and by third-party developers who leverage the functions to build customized applications and workflows. In the past, the documentation for these functions has been maintained in three different sources specific to each of the three audiences, despite the significant amount of overlapping content. This state of affairs resulted in a content production system that was unnecessarily difficult, inefficient, and costly to maintain, and that produced inconsistent and often inaccurate content.

In this project, DITA specialization was used to consolidate the three sources of functional reference content into a single DITA source and publish this single-sourced content to three distinct conditionalized outputs. The project involved the following:

• Analyzing and modeling legacy content from the three XML-based sources, and identifying areas of content overlap as well as conditional content based on audience.
• Defining a comprehensive structure to support all of the required outputs.
• Defining a new functional reference topic type called "PCI Function" by specializing the DITA Reference DTD and MOD files.
• Creating custom XSL files to support specialized processing for the new PCI Function topic type and produce the three required outputs (two distinct flavours of HTML Help to support the scripting and visual modeling apps, and non-DITA XML files used as input to existing JavaDoc, EpyDoc, and Doxygen engines to create developer Help).

Jennifer Wrightsell-Hughes has worked in the software documentation field for over 8 years. Since joining PCI Geomatics in 2004, Jennifer spear-headed the adoption of DITA for the production of PCI's software documentation and has led several DITA-related development efforts. Before that, during her 5+ years at ESRI, Jennifer worked to improve and streamline content development processes, and was responsible for implementing an in-house, single-source Help authoring and publishing solution.

A User Assistance Make-over Using Interactivity, Controlled English, and a Getting Started Guide

Kelly Mullins, Techsmith Inc. • Flint, MI

SnagIt's help file contained lots of text and tables. It was functional and accurate but not very engaging. We moved the help file over to a new format that used SnagIt to showcase its capabilities. Interactivity was added to the help file making it fun to use and giving our users examples and techniques they can copy and make use of themselves. Also, controlled English is used in both content and graphics to reduce the localization costs. We took a UI that relied heavily on the help file to instruct the user and moved it to a user centered design incorporating help for each step of the capture process.

The use of the Ribbon in SnagIt's design opened up avenues for user assistance not possible in previous releases such as the use of the Enhanced Screen Tips. The ribbon also allowed us to build user-centric workflows and processes into the UI. At every step of the design and implementation of SnagIt 9.0, Information Developers acted as the customer advocate proposing changes and corrections for the design. We also took an innovative approach to designing the Getting Started Guide included in the boxed product. We surveyed our users and the people who work with our customers to find out what they really wanted in the box. The result is a visually interesting, colorful, helpful poster created in SnagIt and printed on waterproof paper. This piece became the showpiece for the release next to SnagIt itself.

Kelly Mullins is a long time resident of Flint, Michigan where she began her career in software development seventeen years ago. As a consultant, she has been a technical writer, process improvement manager, business analyst, and UI designer for GM, GMAC, Chrysler, Freightliner, and AAA. The last six years have been spent at TechSmith where she has been a lead on the Information Development team working with the SnagIt and Camtasia Studio product teams.

Using Rich-Client Oracle Help in a WebCenter Application

Peter Lubbers, Oracle • Oregon House, CA

Oracle WebCenter combines the standards-based, declarative development of JavaServer Faces, the flexibility and power of portlets and runtime customization, and a set of integrated Web 2.0 services into a new generation of context-centric, composite applications. Using Oracle WebCenter capabilities, you can build content-rich applications that allow users to interact with instant messaging, wikis, discussion forums, and other collaborative services directly within the application. The new rich-client Oracle Help 5.0 is a natural choice for providing online Help for WebCenter applications, because it allows you to use the same rich client features in the Help system that are used in your actual application.

Web applications are typically bundled and deployed as enterprise archive (EAR) files and it is common to deploy the Help as a separate application on the web application server that hosts your web application. It can be challenging to make the web application link to the help system application. For example, you may not be able to know ahead of time what host name and port number the applications are going to be running on, and therefore you will need to code the application in such a way that it can be deployed on any application server.

Peter Lubbers will show you how WebCenter applications are built and deployed to an application server using Oracle JDeveloper. Peter will then show you how easy it is to set up, deploy, and associate Oracle Help with a WebCenter application; how to easily associate the web application with the Help application using a generic Help Provider class that is part of the Java help development framework; and how you can gather interesting data about the usage of your server-based help system.

Peter Lubbers is an information architect at Oracle. A native of the Netherlands, Peter served as a Special Forces commando in the Royal Dutch Green Berets. Prior to joining Oracle, Peter architected and developed the internationalized Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS) Testing Framework. At Oracle, Peter develops documentation automation solutions. Three of these solutions are currently patent pending. He is also the author of the award-winning Oracle Application Server Portal Configuration Guide, the Oracle Application Server Developer's Guide for Microsoft Office Interoperability, and the Oracle WebCenter Framework Developer's Guide.

Using Rich-Client Oracle Help in a WebCenter Application

George Bratsberg, Agilent Technologies • Santa Rosa, CA

In this showcase, I will demonstrate a UA model that we like to call all-in-one help. It is essentially a help system that is not only embedded in the software product, but is also accessible for viewing from the product's web page. In addition to offering traditional help topics on how to use the software, its self-contained, intuitive design walks the customer through the entire pre- and post-sales product experience. The selections on the main menu track a sequence of steps the customer would naturally follow, from accessing the information necessary for making a buying decision to end use.

One of the inherent risks of implementing this model was that returning customers would no longer find product information in the "usual" places. The new model takes information that was scattered throughout various web pages and adds it to the all-in-one system. Our thinking was "one-stop shopping" for the customer, but for returning customers who had grown familiar with our less-than-intuitive old way, the new model might have been challenging.

Because this was a one-stop design, navigation of the content became a huge factor in its usability. It took several iterations before we stopped getting complaints about where certain information was located in the system. The jury is still out. My intent is to invite open discussion on the pros and cons of this documentation strategy.

George Bratsberg has designed various user-assistance deliverables, such as help systems, manuals, application notes, and training modules for Hewlett Packard and Agilent Technologies products since 1992. He is currently the lead for our division's Customer Education department with the primary responsibility of using state-of-the-art methods to improve the customer's learning experience.

Using Shareware / Freeware Tools to Increase Your Productivity and Accuracy

Ed Marshall, Marshall Documentation Consulting • Shirley, MA

Ed will demonstrate many shareware tools that let the computer do the work - using the computer to automate repetitive tasks, compare data, find information quickly on your computer, etc.) to help you work more effectively and accurately so you can turn your computer off at night and sleep instead of pulling all-nighters redoing work. Tools to be shown include:

• Advanced text editors - Provide features such as syntax highlighting, customizable for many languages and auto-completion of HTML tags. You can also automatically generate the HTML coding for lists using wizards in these advanced text editors.
• File / folder level comparison tools - Using these tools consistently and effectively prevents the common problem of accidentally overwriting your changed files with previous versions stored in source code control. They ensure that you are putting the correct versions of your edited files into a source code control system.
• Advanced search and replace tools help you quickly find those misplaced / misfiled documents / e-mail messages, especially helpful when you don't have a lot of time to let the built-in Windows search utility find text strings. You can also use them to quickly find and replace all instances of a product / tool name in your information set, even in binary files such as FrameMaker or Word files.

Ed Marshall is an independent consulting writer, with 20 years experience writing and producing documentation for highly technical products including Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Java-based products, Software Developer Kits (SDKs), Web Services, and other tools for developers. He is the sole proprietor of Marshall Documentation Consulting. Ed has presented talks on source code control, developer documentation, and editing / proofreading at the local and international levels of the STC.

Enhancing HTML Help with Custom Navigation Components and User-developed Custom Content

Kelly Brown, Practice Partner - McKesson • Seattle, WA

After inheriting online help systems (Microsoft HTML Help format) that were at one time printed manuals, many of the topics were disorganized and confusing for end users. The unstructured topics and a lack of procedural and context-sensitive help made it difficult for users to find the information they needed to complete simple tasks. Practice Partner recently became a subsidiary of the McKesson Corporation, vastly increasing our number of potential users. In order to meet the needs of our current and future customers we believed it was imperative to re-organize our help to make it easier to use. To improve the usability of our online documentation, we undertook a complete redesign of our help system, starting with a new style sheet to help improve the overall design and consistency of topics. Content was rewritten where necessary, and reorganized into a structured hierarchy of conceptual, procedural, and context-sensitive topics. A custom toolbar was added to each topic, providing Home, Back, Print, and Email Feedback buttons, a javascript-based style sheet switcher to change the topic text size, and a search box to find text in the current topic. Breadcrumbs-style links were included to help users navigate through the topic structure, and a new help Home page was added to provide links to topics describing new features and the most common tasks. An additional feature was added to allow internal users to add custom notes or other content to selected topics by editing external HTML files installed with the help. When these files are updated in an HTML editor or in Word via shortcuts in the help, the user's custom content is automatically displayed in an IFRAME in the relevant help topic.

Kelly Brown is the Lead Technical Writer at Practice Partner, a provider of electronic health record (EHR), medical billing, and appointment scheduling software, in Seattle WA. Kelly has 7 years of experience working as a writer, and now manages a small team of writers developing online help, user and technical documentation, and training materials for Practice Partner's suite of products.

Exploiting New Technologies to Facilitate Increased User Interaction with the UA of a Web-based Application

Colin Dawson, Info Action • Baulkham Hills, NSW, Australia

The project is a testbed of some of the latest technologies for web applications. It uses embedded help, context sensitive menu-help, roles-based "typing" of help topics, a sophisticated self-updating tutorial, and most recently Web 2 technologies. All of the content is created in an ordinary help authoring tool and linked without the use of map files.

The web application provides workflow automation for small businesses. Naturally each small business has its own stand-alone account, with employees, customers, supervisors and accountants. While the core of built-in help is identical for each company, it can be supplemented with company-specific "My Links" and notes, somewhat like a blog. Each company's private entries are added to the embedded part of the help content, which can be revealed or hidden as required by each user. This provides a way for companies to respond quickly to any perceived shortcomings in the built-in help, as well as adding instructions or information that are only relevant to their business, such as "At end of month, please submit timesheets on Thursday", or "Maximum meal allowance is $12.00". The private area can also contain links to temporary information, such as holiday closure dates.

As well as providing support for company-specific information, it is hoped that the Web 2 capabilities will increase user-engagement with help in general through exposure to "personally significant" content. A critical requirement throughout development was to ensure that all built-in help could be easily authored using common help authoring tools, and that context linkages can be achieved without the use of a topic map. This was later modified to support the optional use of a topic map to override default linkages, for cases where a topic needs to be used in more than one context.

Colin Dawson has over 20 years experience as a technical communicator, including roles as a team member, team leader, and business owner. He won the STC 2005 "International Best in Show" award in the category of technical art, as well as local awards in all three categories of competition. He has prior experience as a technical journalist and avionics technician. In recent years he has been developing business software and help authoring processes.

Using a Style Guide to Assist in the Creation and Maintenance of a Web-based Tutorial Developed with Captivate and RoboHelp

Laurie Edelman, Altera Corporation • San Jose, CA

Altera Corporation is the pioneer of programmable logic solutions supporting semiconductor companies throughout the world. The Quartus II software is an advanced engineering design tool provided to engineers for the purpose of programming Altera logic devices, namely FPGA and CPLD chips. The Quartus II Interactive Tutorial is created with Adobe Captivate and RoboHelp products and is designed to assist the novice Quartus II software user. The tutorial provides an overview of key features and, additionally, guides and tests users on how to use the features correctly.

The tutorial is embedded in each version of the Quartus II software. One challenge faced by Captivate project developers is the integration of new software features into an existing Captivate project, which can potentially introduce changes that affect every slide in the project, making it difficult to maintain and unmanageable.

This presentation describes several best-practices for guiding the creation and maintenance of a Captivate project. Presented is an approach for updating a project in a time effective manner, while still maintaining the quality of the overall project. Two important best-practice techniques are applying consistent style requirements and cohesively managing team-based development. Applying these best-practice techniques can reduce time-consuming release-time tasks, such as editing for style and formatting consistency between different segments of the same Captivate project.

There are many tools available for user assistance developers to effectively convey ideas and concepts to the end-user. Regardless of the tool you use to create documentation, it is important to be aware of the features, boundaries, and limitations of the tool. Tools often offer many features, many of which are limited in their functionality or allow the creation of sleek projects that are labor intensive to maintain. Poor feature selections can greatly increase development and maintenance time and result in unmanageable projects.

Laurie Edelman is a Senior Technical Writer with Altera Corporation, where she is responsible for creating web-based training targeting programmable logic devices. Laurie has experience creating user assistance documentation within a variety of industries including Education, Software Quality Assurance, and Software Engineering. Laurie has worked in the high tech industry as a programmer, QA Manager, web designer, writer, and technical editor. Her wide-ranging experience lends a valuable and integrated perspective to creating user assistance documentation.

Large-scale User Guide Development Using Customized Authorit Objects and Word Templates

Elissa Hannam, RT Logic • Colorado Springs, CO

Outputting a flawless, customized Microsoft Word document from AuthorIT (AIT) takes time and patience, but it can be perfected. With a thorough understanding of AIT objects and Word templates, users can make use of styles, variables, frames, fields, AutoText, and macros to swiftly publish sound, customized Word documents from an AIT database.

As a team of two, we are challenged to produce 100+ customized user guides each year in Microsoft Word, documenting a tailored combination of 37 products. Due to the time constraint, single sourcing and automation are a must. However, we cannot allow efficiency to trump usability. What's more, Word presents a plethora of challenges when it comes to producing user guides. Numbered lists, tables, headers, etc. can all run amok during the publishing process. To rectify these issues, we have painstakingly perfected our AIT objects and Word templates to automatically customize and format our user guides during the publishing process. The result is Word documents that are tailored, functional, and pretty.

Our process took many months to perfect, but our outputs are flawless. Wed love to help guide others by sharing our experience and expertise. Our showcase will:

• Demonstrate how to build an AIT book on-the-fly and then publish it to a flawless Microsoft Word document .
• Highlight our AIT database.
• Exhibit our Microsoft Word templates (styles, macros, AutoText).

In particular, we will show how we overcame the following challenges: styles and style mapping, page numbering (different formats), customized headers (autoText/fields), customized title pages per product/customer (variables/frames) and more.

Elissa Hannam is a Senior Technical Writer/Editor for RT Logic, and specializes in template design, online help, and single-sourcing. A self-proclaimed activist for standards, Elissa has authored several style guides for large corporations, including Front Range Solutions, Hewlett Packard, and RT Logic. Elissa has presented at several local STC events, the 2007 WritersUA conference, and authored an online help system that won Best in Class/Best in Show at the 2001 Rocky Mountain STC competition. Elissa holds degrees in English and Marine Biology from the University of New Hampshire, and an MA in English and American Literature from the University of New Mexico.