Content Management Musings

If you thought that Sponge Bob Square Pants was, like, so five minutes ago, then you need to check in with the kindergarten set. The spongy wonder is still quite popular, at least with the under-7 crowd, as evidenced by my own son's obsession with the show.

There's a particular episode that we've been seeing a lot lately. In it, Sponge Bob's boss, Mr. Krabs, receives a letter from the Fry Cooks' Union saying that Sponge Bob has gone too long without a vacation, and if he doesn't take some time off immediately, Mr. Krabs will be fined.

Big day for me today. Check out my article about structured writing featured on The Content Wrangler.

Through a quirk of organization, the documentation department in my company is not in a division with the software development or marketing or QA but instead with the pharmacists that create the data that is the lifeblood of our products.

It's not a bad place to be, really, and I have lots of nice things to say about the particular (ex-pharmacist) Vice President to whom I report thanks to this structure. Nevertheless, we in documentation are a mellow, efficient group and so we can easily get forgotten in the mix of pharmacist personalities who often clash in the rest of our division.

My latest project is yet another foray into the unknown. Previously, the maintenance system that the pharmacists in my company use to populate data for our products has been undocumented. There is very limited functionality for the pharmacists themselves to make notes on the policy for determining the value to enter in some of the fields, but even that is sporadically written.

The content map that I created for the primary customer documentation surpassed my expectations for improving the free-form parts of the customer documentation, such as the Overview and the Editorial Policies. However, there were parts of the documentation that were already highly structured where I saw the opportunity to reduce my own intervention greatly.

In the Technical Specification section of a chapter, each table in the database of the product gets a page. The table name, revision date, and purpose appear, followed by a list of the columns in the table.

The customer documentation for our primary product appeared to have structure, or at least someone intended it to at some point. Closer inspection showed that the content was not as clean as it should hav been, but with a beast of a document such as this, being contributed to by a cast of thousands, that's not a surprise.

When I announced that I wanted to undertake structuring our primary product's customer documentation, what I'd had in mind was creating a document model that could be applied to each chapter.

However, some coworkers from Sales had recently mentioned that they found the navigation pane in our online help to be difficult to use, and since this is also a sort of structure, the task of reorganizing the navigation pane was rolled into the project of modeling the content.

Among the documents that my department is responsible for publishing is the Technical Bulletin. Technical Bulletins communicate issues with the product to the affected customers.

The purpose of the Technical Bulletin hadn't been clearly defined, and the line between problems with the product and announcement of new features was beginning to blur. This was problematic because using the Technical Bulletin to announce non-critical problems threatened to numb customers to the really important Technical Bulletins. It was an issue of message overload.

Unlike other projects I've talked about on this site, the publication policy isn't about document modelling or automating content generation. The publication policy was an exercise in streamlining departmental process to save time and frustration.

The example database is one of my proposals that hasn't yet been implemented, but I continue to lay the groundwork for this automation of content and I believe that it will take hold eventually. (Plus, my graceful acceptance of it being totally shot down by the rest of my department impressed the boss, so that's a plus!)