I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

Can SharePoint 2007 be used as a help authoring tool? Maybe.

Giovanni from Italy asks the following about SharePoint:

I am assisting a colleague with a complete overhaul of an existing Help system. It is in RoboHelp, but has legacy topics that have to be maintained in Word. The Help is for call center and business office employees regarding the proprietary, in-house computer program. We recently got SharePoint, and I would like to know your thoughts on the pros and cons of Help in SharePoint. For example, can it be context-sensitive?

To provide some more detail, we don’t have any translations planned, although I suspect we will need to consider translating to Spanish at some point. There is a need to post PowerPoints and PDFs that are accessed through the current Help menu. We might have multiple authors (not sure).

We don’t need any conditional text , although I think it would be useful because we have several different categories of customers. I’m also advocating strongly for context-sensitive topics. We don’t need multiple outputs, not as it stands now, although I am in the process of researching content management systems and reusability, which would be a great boon to this group.

We also use Captivate and Articulate, which I would like to integrate into short show-me tutorials where appropriate.

Giovanni,

SharePoint is a good solution is if you have simple help content that doesn’t need to be printed, translated, or conditionalized. In the following two sections, I’ve outlined SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses as they relate to help authoring. Read the rest of this entry »

Customizing Jing to auto-publish to SharePoint

The other day a developer approached me at work to ask how he could quickly capture and upload video to explain database processes he was documenting. He said he downloaded a trial version of Camtasia Studio, but wasn’t sure if it was the best solution.

Of course I had an answer: Jing, I told him. I showed him how he could use Jing to quickly capture and save video, and he seemed impressed. I thought that was the end of the story, but no. Two days later he approached my desk again and said he needed an even faster way to upload the video. He was using a SharePoint wiki to document techniques. The process of saving the video and then uploading it using SharePoint was too tedious. I need it faster, he said. A couple of clicks and that’s it. The longer it takes, the less likely I am to create video at all.

He reinforced a belief I wrote about earlier: What’s convenient gets used. With that principle in mind, the following is the quickest video solution for uploading Jing videos to a SharePoint directory. This process requires a few minutes of setup, but once you set it up, it literally takes just five clicks to initiate, capture, and publish a video to SharePoint. Read the rest of this entry »

Customizing a SharePoint site is not necessary — you can use the default theme or related themes straight from the box. And this is really how SharePoint was intended to be used by the mainstream. But if you don’t want your SharePoint site to look like the hundred other SharePoint sites at your company, you can customize the look and feel. This is something I’ve been experimenting with.

I am, by no means, an expert on SharePoint customization. But I am able to transform a default SharePoint site, such as the following –

Default SharePoint blog theme

Into a SharePoint site that looks like this:

Blueband theme, slightly modified

Or like this:

Blueband theme with more heavily modified stylesheet

(I removed the content of the above image for confidentiality reasons.)

Here are the steps I follow to customize a SharePoint site. Before jumping into this tutorial, you should know that not all SharePoint implementations are the same. My process may be different from yours. Still, I think the general steps for customization are relatively similar. The steps assume some familiarity with SharePoint. Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 »