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Subject:RE: most effective method for SME review? From:"Sharon Metzger" <sharon -dot- metzger -at- gmail -dot- com> To:"'Tom Johnson'" <tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com>, "'TECHWR-L Writing'" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 22 Oct 2015 12:48:57 -0400
Confluence question:
We're a Confluence house, too, and all my SMEs are on Confluence, where we
have internal wiki pages as well as product doc sources. They like the
inline comments, and we've also added the Comala Workflows plugin which I
engage when I need their review signoff. I have a VP of Engineering behind
me on this, which certainly helps.
Sounds like your doc sources are not in Confluence. I recently discovered
that you can mark up PDFs in Confluence. I have some PDFs on Confluence
pages. When I click the link to open the PDF in the Confluence viewer, I see
a "pin" icon at the top right to show comments (which have been pinned with
the pin icon at the bottom of the screen). That lets you review and
collaborate, and even @Mention team members to get their attention.
Our inline comments directly on the doc source Confluence pages allow us to
go back and forth -- and there's a Resolve button to close down the thread
when I've incorporated their comments. The PDF comments look just like the
inline comments' UI so I suspect it works the same way -- you can comment as
you address each comment in your (offline) source files, or Resolve the
thread as appropriate. This ought to be smoother than sending out a PDF to
more than one reviewer, then having to reconcile comments.
General notes on effective methods:
Tool-wise, I tend to agree with "whatever works for the SME." If they like
to mark up hardcopy, I'll be happy to work with that. If they want to email
or mark up a file, that's fine, too.
For me, the most effective general strategies are asking for small chunks at
a time, and asking specific questions of specific people. This keeps "review
the product doc" from seeming too daunting.
Sharon Metzger
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+sharon -dot- metzger=gmail -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+sharon -dot- metzger=gmail -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Tom Johnson
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2015 12:32 PM
To: TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Subject: Re: most effective method for SME review?
I have Confluence as well as that Talk plugin. This is probably the one
method that I haven't tried. How do you get your content in and out of
Confluence to facilitate the review?
I could output my content as HTML and paste it into the source of a
Confluence page. To make any edits to the content, though, I'd need to make
them in my source and then regenerate the HTML back into the page.
This workflow seems problematic. Suppose someone makes a comment that says
"grammar error here..." Here's are my options:
- If I fix the grammar error on the Confluence page itself, I can't just
copy that generated HTML output back into my source. So I'd have to make the
update in two places -- in Confluence and in my source.
- If I fix the error in the source and regenerate the HTML output, and then
paste that generated HTML back into the Confluence page, it will remove the
Talk annotation.
How are you getting around this problem? (If you're authoring and publishing
natively in Confluence, this workflow might not be an issue.)
On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 9:00 AM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
wrote:
> Inline comments in Confluence (a newish feature, though previously
> available using the Talk plugin). It's quite similar to shared review
> in Acrobat, which I often couldn't get to work on a shared file.
>
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 2:12 AM, Tom Johnson
> <tomjohnson1492 -at- gmail -dot- com>
> wrote:
> > What has been your most effective method for reviewing docs with
> > subject matter experts? I feel like I've tried everything and
> > haven't really hit upon the best way of doing it.
> >
> > Some approaches I've tried:
> >
> > - comments forms on web pages
> > - direct edits of source files on Github
> > - in-person visits at my desk
> > - email
> > - JIRA tickets
> > - Word docs
> > - comments on PDFs
> > - Google docs
> > - Beegit
> > - focused meetings
> > - over-the-shoulder sessions
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