Alan Porter's Weblog
WebWorks Blogs

Blogger and wiki aficionado Anne Gentle just invited me to participate in an “unconference” to be held in conjunction with the upcoming DocTrain West conference in Vancouver. 
 
Of course I was delighted to be asked, but had no idea what an “unconference” was. The first place that a google search pointed me was the flagship of all wikis, Wikepedia. Annoyingly the Wikipedia page while citing numerous examples didn’t actually include a definition.  
 
But it did link me to the “Unconference Blog” and according to them an “unconference” is a facilitated participant-driven face-to-face conference around a theme or purpose. 
 
I like the sound of that. What also made participating in Anne’s suggested unconference even more attractive was that the proposed schedule said it would run to about “beer-thirty,” which sounds like my sort of time. 
 
Naturally Ann has set up a wiki about the event and you can find out more, or sign up to attend, there. 
 
I'll be contributing a session titled Publishing is no longer the last step.. If you are attending DocTrain I'd love to see you there. 
 
At the main conference I'll also be presenting a session on Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information.  
 
Oh and that wikipedia page – it now has the basic definition added - guess who did that? 
 

I just came across this great post entitled DITA Backlash? on Anne Rockley's excellent blog. In the post Anne makes an excellent point. 
 

Free tools are not always the best tools – output 
 
Your job is to produce user guides, help systems, training material, etc. It is not merely to produce topics. The tools you use to create PDF and CHM files is as important as the authoring tool you use.

 
 
This paragraph had a particular resonance for me as I've not long finished authoring a white paper on just this very subject. The paper, "DITA PUBLISHING: The true costs of taking your DITA content online", is scheduled to be released at the upcoming CMS/DITA Conference in Santa Clara in April, but if any readers of this blog would like an advance copy, just drop me an email (aporter@webworks.com) and I'd be happy to send it your way. 

Still waiting to hear from either Customer Service or your Account Manager about that ePublisher 9.3 request you submitted? You are not alone. Some of our customers may have noticed that it took a little while to hear back from us when they requested upgrades to ePublisher 9.3. In fact, some customers are still experiencing delays. So why is this happening?  
 
The simple answer is that we used the release of ePublisher 9.3 to try something new in our internal process.  
 
Coupled with a greater than expected demand for upgrades, we created a process that simply tried to do too much.  
 
ePublisher 9.3 included a slight change to the licensing model that we hoped would streamline the process and make it more manageable and easier to administer for both ourselves and our customers. It seems to have had the opposite effect. We also decided to use the opportunity to do a data point check on customer information in our new Customer Relationship Management tool (making sure we had names, contacts details, product version, maintenance status and license information all up to date etc.)  
 
The result was that what had largely been an automated process before has become a mix of automation and manually checking and verifying each request. While this has lead to improved quality and more accurate information in our customer database, it means that the process has slowed down considerably. Add in the demand for ePublisher 9.3 and our system became overloaded.  
 
Over the last few weeks we have reviewed the process, made some changes, shifted priorities and the backlog has been substantially decreased, but we still have a backlog. The number of 9.3 upgrades we are processing each day is now being matched by the number of requests.  
 
So we are reviewing the process once more, seeing what we can change, plus we are adding more resources to help alleviate the problem.  
 
We are still in the process of upgrading our customer service capability. Our goal is to provide outstanding customer service, something that we regret has escaped us in the past. We are now striving for that goal and will not settle for less than achieving that goal. In the meantime, we are still learning, and dealing with some unexpected challenges. We are grateful for the patience and support that our customers have shown and look forward to smoother operations in the very near future.  
 

Do you work with Frame and use the EDDs? Want to learn how to confiqure one for use with ePublisher as a way to control help specific features?

Then we recommend that you sign up for Martin Smith's upcoming webinar and find out how he did it.

Here's Martin's description of his webinar.

 
I will be hosting a free Webinar on January 31st that describes how to control help-specific features in WebWorks ePublisher Pro using a
 
structured FrameMaker document based on a minimalist EDD.

 
This Webinar is based in part on a successful presentation that I gave at the WebWorks RoundUp 2007 conference in Austin.

 
As anyone who has used ePublisher knows, WebWorks is a great single-source authoring tool. However, implementing help-specific features (such as pop-ups, drop-downs, and custom pages) and controlling topic / mid-topic breaks requires a tremendous number of styles, or
 
time spent post-processing the help system.

 
What is needed is a way to select help-specific features within the FrameMaker source files independent of the formatting applied to the
 
text. I specialize in developing minimalist EDDs for FrameMaker that format the text using context-based style rules. The EDD independently
 
assigns paragraph and character style names to the text, solely for the benefit of WebWorks. The author can turn any section into a topic,
 
mid-topic, drop-down, or pop-up simply by selecting an attribute value. The EDD automatically assigns the paragraph styles to the section
 
heading and all of its descendents necessary to implement the desired help feature in the corresponding WebWorks ePublisher project.

 
Mark your calendar for 11:00 am EST; 8:00 am PST (10:00am CT,  11:00am ET) on January 31st if you would like to see a live demonstration of this help authoring technique in action.

 
To register, click here to access the enrollment page and click "Enroll" to the right of the event. 
 
 
 
 


WebWorks CEO and Founder, Tony McDow, described Martin's EDD as one of the cleanest and most 
"ePublisher comprehensive" EDDs he has seen and believes it worth 
examining if you are considering EDD work for your own documentation.

Last week we launched our 2007 Customer Survey asking all our customers and prospects to share their views on our products, their experiences of dealing with the WebWorks.com team and their plans for the future. The survey only takes about 5 minutes to complete and has become a valuable tool in helping us fine tune our products and services to meet our customer needs.  
 
A lot of the questions on the survey are things that we talk to our customers about everyday. We have set ourselves the goal of treating our customers as partners and opening up the lines of communication. We are always open to comments and a simple "how are things going?" question during conversations has helped us learn a lot about how you are using our products. But with over 4,000 customers spread across 30 countries, it is physically impossible to have personal contact with everyone, as much as we'd like to. So the survey gives everyone an equal chance to share their thoughts. 
 
So far even though the number of people who responded is more than last year, it is still a small percentage of the user community. 
 
One of the early respondent used the comments section to ask the question "Do you really want to know what I think of your products?" 
 
Yes I do. 
 
They more data we get and the more feedback we receive from you, (and I read every single comment), the more we can tailor our services, products and processes to meet the needs of the majority of our customers. 
 
So click on over and let us know what you think. 
 
The survey will remain active until January 2nd, 2008. 

As I head out for the long holiday weekend, I just wanted to wish all our customers, partners, and friends a HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

We are still riding the wave of excitement generated by RoundUp and have some great things planned for the coming months and on into next year. But we haven't forgotten the rest of 2007. I am currently putting the final touches to the latest edition of THE WORKS newsletter, the promised 2007 end-of-year Customer Satisfaction Survey, and some updates and new content for the website. All of which should be rolling out starting next week.

 

When you become intimately involved with a product it's often difficult to step back and distill its value into just a few simple direct phrases. Often it needs someone from outside to grasp what you have been saying and capture it.  
 
RoundUp attendee Anne Gentle did just that on her blog. And with her permission here's her 
 
7 things you must know about ePublisher Platform. 
 
1. Content is king. Your source content can be Word, Frame, or DITA. You can even convert other formats such as RoboHelp to Word or Frame and go from there. 
 
2. Formats are separate from content and can be customized. 
 
3. Combining content is allowed and even encouraged. Mixed content is just fine. 
 
4. There are great demos (over an hour’s worth) on the Quadralay web site. 
 
5. ePublisher has an extendable XML adapter. This extensibility means that no matter what XML you’re putting in, ePublisher can be extended to understand it. 
 
6. You can automate the dickens out of your output build processes and integrate with development’s version control systems and build with the Auto-mapper. 
 
7. The WebWorks Wiki (uses MoinMoin engine if you’re wondering) has lots of information and they encourage people to contribute to it. 
 
Thanks Ann - we couldn't have said it better ourselves. 

It's been just over a day since the end of our RoundUp Users Conference, and after some time to reflect, everyone on the WebWorks team had a great time meeting with customers and partners.  
 
Although I was bouncing around most of the time doing behind the scenes stuff, I tried to sit in on as many of our customer use case presentations as possible. In each case I was impressed by how people have taken to heart the concept of ePublisher's work flow, the benefits of single sourcing, the ability to accept, merge and convert multiple inputs, and achieved results above our expectations. 
 
The feedback I heard on the technical sessions was consistently positive, with every single person who filled in a feedback form saying they had learned something new over the two-days. We couldn't have asked for much more than that. 
 
If you would like a flavor of the sessions check out these three posts on Anne Gentle's excellent just write click blog. 
 
Over the next few days and weeks we will be adding content from the Conference to the website and blogs. I hope to add a few more detailed observations and thoughts on this blog, but in the meantime perhaps the best summary of RoundUp 2007 came in an email from a customer this morning. 
 
Great job with the user conference! Congratulations. Folks were excited to open the communication lines, and the content was very rich. 
 

Welcome to the new WebWorks.com Blogs. The blog section of WebWorks.com represents another step in our ongoing strategy to improve communications with our customers and to encourage the growth of a vital and informed WebWorks ePublisher community. Over the coming weeks we will be posting news on: 
* Various WebWorks events. 
* Product developments 
* Trade shows and conferences. 
* Partnerships 
* Feedback on customer comments 
* Plus the occasional fun article on what we get up to out of the office and life in Austin Texas.  
 
We will also be posting some thoughts on general industry and technology trends. 
 
Joining me on the WebWorks Weblog will be Tony McDow (Quadralay's CEO and Founder), Andrew VanConas (VP-Business Development), Ben Allums ( Director of Engineering), Jesse Wiles (Senior Consultant) and other Quadralay staff. 
 
As a short introduction, I'm Alan J. Porter the VP-Operations here at Quadralay, which basically means that my team looks after most of the customer facing activities such as Sales, Marketing, Services, Support and Training. I've been with Quadralay just under a year (in fact I will celebrate my first year with the company during our upcoming RoundUp conference), but have spent more than twenty years in the Corporate Publishing world as technical writer, editor, tech pubs manager, consultant as well as holding senior management positions at several publishing software vendors. Please feel free to contact me with any questions either via this blog's comments section or at 1-877-6-WEBWORKS.