June 2008 - Posts
Name? Betsy
How long have you been at Blackbaud? 9 years
What technology from the past do you wish would make a comeback? Coleco Vision! The Smurf game to be exact.
Favorite part of technical communication? Multi-task…A LOT. There is so much to do. I love the ability to select what I am going to work on for any given day. I feel very much in control of my own day and I love it.
Products you Work On? RE, BBEC, & BBNC
Other projects you Work On? variables & schemes with content reuse, Team Foundation Server, Help files
How did you get into technical writing?: My first year at Blackbaud, I was in RE Support. I also became a software trainer that year. My whole life, I loved writing and I had my eye on the Doc Team since I started. I applied for an open position and transferred to the team in May 2000. Since then, I have gone from solely working on RE for the first 3-4 years to working on multiple products for the last 3-4 years.
What's changed about Blackbaud since you've been here? What has NOT changed is the question! I no longer drive to work on the banks of the Ashley River; I drive to Daniel Island. We use to develop 3 products...today, I lose count how many products we develop! My team’s processes have changed and our writing style has changed. Everything has changed….which I think is great! I enjoy the challenge that constant change brings. It keeps me motivated.
What hasn't changed? The people that I work with are very passionate and are all so great! That has never changed. Blackbaud continues to have a genuine heart for what we do and who we are. I love that we work for nonprofits so closely as nonprofits are a big part of my personal life. I volunteer a lot and try to be as involved in our community as possible.
What's one unique thing about you? In 1995, I worked at the golf pro shop during the week of The Masters in Augusta, GA. It was one of the greatest weeks of my life!
In my last post about our next generation of help, I provided an end-user view of our new help system and mentioned in passing the customization functionality. In this post, we will take a more detailed look at the customization feature.
Customization
All help topics in the enterprise help system are fully customizable. As part of the user's work-flow, we recommend that users cut and paste all topics from the default Help directory to a Help/Custom directory so future updates do not overwrite topics they may have edited.
Via a single change to a web.config file, users can specify that all current HelpKeys point to files in the custom directory rather than the default Help directory. Users can then open an HTML topic, enter their changes, and save the edited topic. The next time a user accesses this topic, the program calls the edited version. Users can also add new topics. All edited and added topics are fully integrated in the search and recognized by the application.
Tools built into the application make changing the help keys used for a given page, screen, or feature easy. Using a design mode tool, accessed from the application's Tools menu, users can access the properties screen from which help keys are assigned.
When a user clicks the ellipses in the HelpKey field, a topic browser appears, listing all available help topics.
The user simply selects the new help key he wants used in the selected area in the program and clicks OK.
Additionally, users can provide a URL or the name of one of their own files as a HelpKey. For example, a user can place a pdf version of his organization’s in-house policy and procedures document in the Help directory, then specify the pdf as a HelpKey for a specific page instead of the default topic. The next time a user accesses help from that page, the pdf document displays in the main content pane.
Next Week's Blog
Next week we will examine the technology driving the new Blackbaud enterprise help system and take a closer look at the search functionality.
So, what’s your computer’s password? Is it written on a yellow sticky note in your desk drawer? Is it your name? Your kid’s birthday? You probably wouldn’t tell me, but could I figure it out? More importantly, could a hacker using password cracking software figure it out?
Your password grants you access to all the information stored on your computer, and in many cases, to your company’s internal systems. If a hacker or some other malicious person gains access to your password, you could have a serious security breach on your hands. You certainly don’t want someone posing as you wreaking havoc on your company’s servers. And likewise, you wouldn't want anyone accessing the personal information on your home computer. One security measure you can use to help defend against this kind of attack is ‘password strength.’
Your company probably has some sort of policy regarding password strength, (if not, it should). The strength of a password can be determined by length, complexity, and randomness. In an upcoming release of our version 7 products, we are increasing password strength by requiring longer, more complex passwords. So, for example, when a new user is created in the program, the password must be at least eight characters and include one alphabetic character and one non-alphabetic character (i.e., 0-9, !, @, #).
Keep in mind, while using strong passwords can lower the risk of a security breach, it does not replace the need for other security controls.
If you are interested, here’ a good article on Microsoft’s website called, Strong passwords: How to create and use them.
The more I explore help on the internet the more I see humor
being used in documentation. Most of the time, I appreciate the unexpected
approach to help. But, am I the exception? I’ve often heard how difficult it
can be to use humor effectively. Humor for the most part is not a universal
language across cultures. We’ve been taught in technical communication to write
as one voice. I still think it's a valid point because inconsistency in language
can drive me bonkers. However, is the movement towards folksonomies and relaxed
language in explanations pushing us towards the point where we can be completely
casual with our users?
I’m not entirely convinced. It seems to me it depends on the
software you are explaining. A site like Twitter or Flickr can be edgy because
of the type of content it manages. Software in the business world doesn’t
necessarily seem like ripe ground for experimentation. I do think though that
exploring what language you use is a valid discussion point. Do we need to be
formal? Does being too formal make reading for understanding more difficult? I
know when I read for understanding I like to feel like the writer is talking to
me instead of in a monotone generic voice.
What language do you use in your communications? Have you
used humor? Or, do you have an opinion on the language we use in our help files
and user guides?
If you have some examples of some funny help documentation,
be sure to share those too.
Early in 2005, Blackbaud Inc. started work on an enterprise version of our constituent management software product. We targeted the software to high-end users interested in a powerful and customizable product, and of course, we wanted the help system to be equally powerful and customizable. From this desire was born the Blackbaud Enterprise help system. Currently employed in four different applications, the enterprise help system provides on-demand, context-sensitive help, dynamically generated links, and is fully customizable. In the coming weeks, I plan to specifically address each feature. In this my first help post, I provide an overview of how the system works on the client side.
Access Help
The server-based based help system installs on the client's Web server along with the application and can be accessed in a number of ways. From any page or screen in the application, to access context-sensitive help information, a user can:
-
Click the
Help button
-
Press F1
In addition, from the help page, the Contents button opens a table of contents and the Index button accesses a detailed help index. A Search field is also available on every help page, but we will talk more about this functionality in a later post.
Procedures
When users access a procedure page in help, the page appears displaying a brief explanation of the functionality and an expandable procedure link, keeping the page neat and tight - no scrolling.
Users click the link to expand the procedure.
Reference Information
Screens in the application usually include a number of fields and options. Because we do not want to bog down our procedures with a laundry list of field explanations, we arrange this information in a separate table, easily accessed from a link included in the procedure. These reference topics are also presented as context-sensitive topics when help is called from a given screen in the program.
Conceptual Information
The concept pages in the help system include information explaining the concept governing a function.
Dynamically Generated Links
In addition to displaying the called help information, the help system dynamically generates links to other areas in the help related to tasks, actions, sections, and other items included on the page from which the help is called. For example, a constituent page is composed of a series of tabs and includes a list of tasks you can execute from the page. If a user calls up help from a constituent page, the help page displays a detailed explanation of the page, and the links displayed on the left side of the page take the user to additional help information specific to each tab and task.
Next Week's Blog
As I mentioned in the introduction, users can customize the help file to better meet their specific needs. Next week, we will take a detailed look at this customization feature.
I know I write many (and long winded) posts about web 2.0 and my little brain gets excited about all the new technologies that emerge every day. But how can I not? I am sitting mere feet from software engineers who are part of this innovative movement to change the way we use technology. I would talk about them more but we have other people around here (for example, people named Shaun) that can speak far better than me about the Infinity platform and sites like the Blackbaud Labs. So I like to learn about and talk about things in the web 2.0 world that really speak to me as a technical communicator, a geek, and an everyday girl.
If it's hard for you to picture the connection between our software, documentation, web 2.0 websites like twitter, facebook, del.icio.us, google reader, etc and concepts like social bookmarking, rss feeds, blogging (and microblogging), mashups, wikis, podcasts, and more, think of it this way. The more innovation in how people communicate with each other the more we need to innovate in software and software documentation. How much has software changed in the past twenty years. It's legend around here how in the 90's Blackbaud decided to create The Raiser's Edge on an operating system named Windows. And now, with our new Infinity platform, we are part of this exciting movement in software that's more flexible, powerful, and adaptable. And I'm not just influenced by our products, I'm influenced by the social software on the internet. You now expect to interact with software and people differently because of the applications that have emerged over the past couple years.
On our team, for example, our help file is improved on the Infinity platform. Because our technology capabilities expanded and the software our team uses to create the documentation improved, we are able to provide a more robust search engine that makes it easier for you to search for help content. Would we have been able to do that without websites like Google that changed how we expected to search for information? I'm guessing not. New emerging trends have things like folksonomies where users create the tags that identifies information they find. Someday, I hope the industry that creates software for technical communicators (for example, Adobe), can help us create documentation that enables us to include social bookmarking. Wouldn't that be cool, eh? We have lots of cool ideas on our team that we jot down and then work to make happen. Change takes time and patience (which I have little of sometimes). But, as we work on improving you're still changing. And we listen. We keep our ears and eyes open to what your needs and expectations are so when we can, we increase our capabilities to bring you the best user assistance content.
In other ways, I'm also just learning about how people need to use information in their real lives and not just in virtual communities. You expect different things from us and your software than you did ten years ago. After all, that's probably why this regular Blackbaud employee sitting in a regular, gray cube is talking to you through this blog. Chad Norman, is one of our web 2.0 gurus (if not THE guru) who is leading us on this journey to interact better with our clients. He's very encouraging but even I wonder, what the heck am I (one of approximately 1,700 employees) doing writing a blog on the company website? Even if it is weird for me, I still write because I don't want to pass by this opportunity to interact with our clients, colleagues, company leaders, and the technical communication world. It's just too inspiring and too cool to be a part of innovation.
From my perspective, I'm very excited about all of these changes. They force me to grow and they help me stay involved in the process. Just because I do sit in a gray cube, in a sea of gray cubes, doesn't mean I don't want to know how our clients work, how they make a difference, and how in whatever way I can, help make their day easier.
Being involved in information on a daily basis and trying to keep everything organized in my head I'm always looking for tools to streamline and simplify the process. An online tool that's been on my periphery of late is del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. It has a bunch of neat features and yet there is still a lot for me to learn beyond the surface. Here is what I've learned…
- Your bookmarks are saved online no matter where you go.
- You can share your bookmarks with others or keep them private.
- You can network with others in your field or on your team to share your favorite websites, blogs, articles, news, etc.
- Do you hate how you search for something but the website creators described it in a way you would never think of? Well del.icio.us takes that away from the powers that be and gives the power to the people. It's a concept called folksonomies. We decide how to describe a site, tag it, and share it. Over time, the more people bookmark something the easier it is for you to find.
- You can see your tags in a list, in a cloud, alphabetically, most recent, how often used, or in bundles. However your mind organizes things, del.icio.us can probably accommodate.
- Have you gotten to the point where you love google but can't stand the eight billion, five million, and two results that appear. How do you pick which link is the golden ticket? If you're me, you do a lot of clicking and navigating back to the search results. The nice thing about del.icio.us is that it improves google. How?
- Use your network to see what they are reading.
- Because information is organized by how users tag them, you can search based on your word and know you're getting information that's more accurate.
- Save your research on del.icio.us with your comments appended. Other people do the same and you can read their comments. You get an instant evaluation before you even think about spending time searching a website for your research.
- If you have some really nice friends, they might even save a link just for you. I can see how that would be awesome on my team. We use email but how easy would it be to lose track of the email?
- Subscribe to your favorite tags. If something new appears with that tag, it aggregates itself all nicely for you on your subscriptions page. No more searching for info, sit back and wait for it to come to you.
- Post manually or install a plugin for firefox and a button for IE. If you install the plug-in, bookmarking a page is as easy as clicking a button on your browser whenever you are on that really cool website.
- Here's a plus that probably only a technical communicator can love, the site has easy to understand help written in an easy to read style.
- Are you using Facebook to social network with your constituents, colleagues, peers, etc? del.icio.us integrates with Facebook! Can you feel the synergy?
- Does your organization have a wishlist of items? Create a wishlist of items you need, append with comments (like how many, sizes, numbers, etc) and share that with your constituents. If you're like me, it'd be a list of cool things like a wii, a Barnes & Noble gift card, a road bicycle, nike workout clothes, and an iphone that would magically be shared with my family and friends in approximately five months ;-).
- Collaborate with your colleagues, co-workers, constituents, donors, volunteers etc to raise the collective knowledge of a group. This could especially be useful if it has bookmarks to news, calls to action, important resources, and more. Just imagine your network helping your organization be better. That might be in the long range plan but in the meantime...
The only part I have yet to figure out is how not to get overwhelmed by all the wonderfully organized and abundant information. I love information but in this context it's almost as if I could get lost in learning. Is that a bad thing? Is social bookmarking too much of a good thing?
How often do you think about the conversations you have with your constituents or users? Are you thinking about the synchronous real time conversations - the phone calls, the meetings, the special events? If you are, you're overlooking one of the most important conversations you're having with your members, users, or constituents. The conversations we have that aren't in real time can make or break your success. Some examples of asynchronous conversations are reports, journal articles, policies and procedures, legal notices, emails, websites, twitter, SMS, promotional materials, and more. No matter the medium, every user is seeking an answer.
This concept was perhaps the most interesting from a thought process perspective from the conference I attended. The session I attended was from Ginny Redish on Writing as an Asynchronous Conversation. It made me think about how I write and how every piece of documentation we write is an ongoing conversation with users.
So, whenever you write something, ask yourself, what question am I answering? You can see if you're answering questions by looking for the verb. Conversations usually start and progress with one. For example, check out Amazon.com's login page. What question are they asking you?
In the software world, we've been answering questions for a long time. A dialog box is a form of question. Do you want to delete this very important file forever and be doomed two days from now? Click Yes or No! We, of course, click No and curse ourselves out later. However, the key element is the program asked me a question. The conversation was started by the software and I gave a dumb answer, but an answer just the same.
Over the years, in software documentation we've added more conversations via context sensitive help (F1), help files, user guides, tutorials, and more. No matter how we do it, we have to evaluate whether we are answering your questions. If we aren't, what can we do better? See, another question!
I suggest you ask yourself the same thing. How are you doing in your conversations?
For example, try answering these questions -
"How is my money being used?"
"How can I help your mission by volunteering?"
"When is your next special event?"
"What is the latest news from your organization?"
"The economy isn't great. I don't have a lot of money, but I want to help. What can I do?"
How did you do answering the questions? And, more importantly, where are you answering them? We can't always rely on real time conversations to answer questions, we have to be effective with every means of communication or software available.
Sometimes, your users or constituents won't know the correct question to ask. In those situations, try to think out the questions for them and answer them in advance. Provide them with the conversation starter and they're more likely to be engaged.
And remember, people don't have an infinite amount of time. They really will only participate in the conversation long enough to get their answer. Therefore, all your communication whether it's real time or not needs to be concise, clear, and efficient. Don't provide lots of and lots of text that users will balk at when they see (for example, this crazy long post is not a good conversation starter 
). Keep your answers to the point, ask yourself if you're answering a question, and validate by having others review your work.
After all, it's not really computer to human interaction. There is a person on the other end of the computer and they need human to human interaction. All these great tools like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Raiser's Edge, Blackbaud NetCommunity, Education Edge, and more are tools. They are the medium that connects you to your people. Are you using the tool to create conversations?
Here's a short reminder…
1. Keep conversations short and on topic.
2. When you write something, identify the question being answered.
And remember, over these short asynchronous conversations you're having with constituents, users, and members, you are developing relationships. It's not always about making the pitch where you win or lose people, it's how you handle the short, quick conversations on a daily basis.
I recently (6/2 - 6/4) attended the Society for Technical Communication's 55th Annual Conference in Philadelphia. (And yes, we have been around for at least that long trying to help users make sense of technology.)
Over the next several weeks I plan on sharing my impressions of the conference sessions, the experience, and all the new questions I have about the emerging trends in the field. To give you an idea of what is to come, I thought I'd share the sessions I attended.
Monday
Getting Real-World Feedback on Your Information: A Case Study
- Korin Bevis, IBM
Trends in User Research
- Karen L. Backhmann, Seascape Consulting
- Jean Anderson, Siemens Medical Solutions
- Whitney Quesenbery, Whitney Interactive Design
- Ginny Redish, Redish & Associates
- Todd Zaki Warfel, Messagefirst
XML the Easy Way: Moving Your Unstructured Content (Word / FrameMaker) to DITA
- Todd Aldous
Tuesday
Writing as an Asynchronous Conversation
- Ginny Redish, Redish & Associates
Guidelines for Effective Captivate Movies
- David S. Locke, Wordsmith
So, You Can Write. But Can you Think?
- Dawn Maxson, Dell
- Deborah Doyle, Sun Microsystems
Stop Wasting Time: Ten Things You Can Do to Make Yourself More Efficient
- Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler
Mining Web 2.0 Content for Enterprise Gold
- Michael Priestley, IBM
Wednesday
Agile Technical Documentation
- Jean-Luc Mazet, Hewlett-Packard
Engaging Diverse Audiences using Screencasts, Wikis, and Blogs
- Gail Chappell, Sun Microsystems
- Cindy Church, Sun Microsystems
Secret Social Session (S3) on new Social Media & Networking
- Robert Armstrong
Editing Modular Documentation
- Michelle Corbin, IBM
- Yoel Strimling, Comverse
Overall, the conference was a great opportunity to network, learn, and think critically about how this new information can be applied to my team. Only two sessions ended up being disappointments but you can't be happy with everything, right? Either way, the future of technical communication is exciting and varied. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else than in the middle of progress.
Lately, much has been said about Twitter. Chad wrote a great post (Twitter Makes Relationships Work - Right Now) with an explanation of what Twitter is so I'll skip the overview and get to the business case.
Let's start with a little confession I should make… For a while, I had a twitter account but didn't use it much. I wasn't quite ready to be a twitter evangelist. Everything changed for me when I chose a focus for how I was going to use twitter. What I realized was while I didn't always like the concept of letting people know all the mundane things I was doing in my average day, I did like how it could improve my professional and business connections. Here are some ways to use twitter in the business/professional sense.
1. Follow your colleagues. Not only do you create connections across teams but you can stay informed of the latest news in their world. I am following a few leaders in my company with specialties in technology, webby things, marketing, customer support, etc.
2. Follow fellow professionals. This is perhaps my favorite way to connect. I love learning about what other people in my field are learning, doing, finding. I could never keep up with all the changes in technical communication and I don't have to. Instead I can look to peers and mentors for what they find interesting. I share the things I find interesting and our worlds really do expand.
3. Promotion! Share your work content. I am posting a link to our From the Docs Side... blog every time I write one. If we do something else cool, I'll share that too.
4. Tweme the possibilities. If you don't know what a tweme is, it's adding a hash mark to posts so they can easily be found in public streams. I had such a good time at my recent technical communication conference by tweming with other conference goers. Here's our example. Just by putting in a hash mark we could follow each other's post on the same topic. There are so many possibilities with twemes. You could create one for your local professional chapter, a conference, topics in your organization you want to separate, etc.
5. Tweetscan. Tweetscanning is searching all twitter streams for specific keywords. You want to know about technical communication, type that into tweetscan.com and you can find what other people are saying about tech comm and perhaps you'll find some cool new people in your field to follow.
6. Want to know who's the most popular in twitter, go to a site like tweeterboard.com. This site ranks people on popularity. This is again, another way to find noteworthy people tweeting.
7. Support social causes. Movements are happening on Twitter. Just google Frozen Pea Fridays or read here and you can learn how they started a movement to support a woman with breast cancer and ultimately raised money for research.
Either way, definitely re-consider your use of Twitter. You get to control who's in your network and who you want to follow. Also, if you type twitter apps into google, you'll discover new apps are being created daily as people are learning to harness the power of micro-blogging. After all, not everyone has the patience or time to read long blogs like this one. Instead, we want quick updates under 140 characters in length.
Even these guys are tweeting and they're no slouches -
Guy Kawasaki - http://twitter.com/guykawasaki
Robert Scoble - http://twitter.com/Scobleizer
Kevin Rose - http://twitter.com/kevinrose
So, are you ready for the twitter movement?