I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

In a previous post, I mentioned my desire to use SharePoint as a help authoring platform because it provides a Web 2.0 experience that is company-sanctioned. SharePoint not only has blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, but also integrates with Active Directory, Outlook 2007, and has integrated search across all content.

However, the more I tried to use SharePoint as a help authoring tool, the more problems I ran into. SharePoint doesn’t handle role-based content very well. For example, if you have administrators and regular users, it’s not easy to create two versions of the same help material. SharePoint does have audience targeting, but only if your audience is already tagged with roles in Active Directory (and if active directory is integrated with SharePoint). Read the rest of this entry »

Preface: I wrote this post after spending a month digging deeply into SharePoint, attempting to customize and brand the site as well as migrate all my help content to it. If you’re totally unfamiliar with SharePoint, this post will not get you up to speed. But for those embarking on a SharePoint customization challenge, most likely you’re already familiar with SharePoint. Reading these ten concepts and gotchas will help you avoid some of the pitfalls I encountered when customizing my site.
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I sometimes feel that my life online varies drastically from my life at work. Online, I blog and publish podcasts and write about wikis and Web 2.0. But at work, I used Flare, InDesign, Word, and other tools to create standard help deliverables, such as the User Guide, the Quick Reference Guide, and the Video Tutorial.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to take my documentation into web 2.0 territory and enable user interaction and feedback, but I’ve been hampered by tools. Around some people, just saying the word “tool” brings up immediate negative responses. For example, when I interviewed Scott Abel about social networks and asked him about Ning, he didn’t want to discuss Ning because for him — and many others — tools are merely a selection of wrenches in a hardware store aisle. You figure out what you need first, and then you pick your tool.

I don’t think anyone who is eager to implement web 2.0 interactivity into their documentation can be so indifferent with tools. This is because there are no good web 2.0 tools for documentation. Right now everything’s a hack. You have to cobble together a solution from various things and try to make it work. Read the rest of this entry »