Re: Hey! She messed with *my* manual

[Char James-Tanny <charjtf -at- gmail -dot- com>]

As more and more companies go to content management and components,
this feeling will have to be addressed...and folks will have to let it
go.

I went to a meeting last year at a company that had instituted DITA.
The print author and the online Help author were there, and explained
how they had 35% reuse in the Help...even though it was a subset of
the print. My impression was that they didn't achieve 100% reuse in
the Help because the authors weren't able to work together or to let
go of owning specific topics.

So why would something like this matter? It causes an increase in
development time, it causes an increase in editing time, it causes an
increase in QA time, and it costs more to translate. And then there's
less time available to document new features or other products.

I know that it's hard to let go of projects that you've created. But
to successfully move to content management, you have to. (You can
still feel that twinge, though.)

Char James-Tanny ~ JTF Associates, Inc. ~ http://www.helpstuff.com
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Microsoft Help MVP since 2002
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Co-author of "Managing Virtual Teams" ~ http://www.wordware.com/wiki
AuthorIT Certified Consultant, Development, and Training
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