July 2008 - Posts
Now that our team’s Docs Day 2008 (team training day) is over, I can start sharing all the fun surprises I had for them in my presentation. I presented on my trip to the Society for Technical Communication Summit in June. I’ll be posting reviews on each presentation I went to as I promised in an earlier post. In the meantime, I wanted to share a fun new tool I used for the lunch time entertainment.
I found this site – Jumpcut http://www.jumpcut.com
Jumpcut is a website that makes adding, editing, and sharing video online easy. In 2006, the company was acquired by Yahoo but I don't think it's taken away from this fun, feature rich site. For me, the easy to use editing part was the reason I chose this site. I had embarrassing footage of me doing the Rocky impersonation in Philadelphia and wanted to add the Gonna Fly Now music to create a silly video of me for my team to laugh at. Then when I started playing on the site it was easy to add photos, more music, and transitions. The only issue I came across was trying to figure out how to transition the music. Also cool, people can remix your video or you can give them permission to edit. The features are all easy to use and the learning curve isn’t that steep. In the end, you have a **free** video you can share with others.
At risk of further embarrassment, I’ll post the video here. Warning – it is 8 minutes long! (I got a little out of control). Also, in the beginning I was making fun of the opening session by posting a picture of each person who presented something before the keynote speaker. It just went on and on! Once you get past those though, it’s all pictures of how much fun I had in Philly.
Enjoy a good laugh on me! 
Name? Justin Ward
(Editior's Note - Sometimes we just call him Ward. We don't want to confuse him with Baden, our other Justin).
How long have you been at Blackbaud? 10 years
What technology from the past do you wish would make a comeback? Trap doors and revolving bookcases.
Which technology do you wish would go away forever? Caller ID. When I was in middle school I enjoyed making prank phone calls. Now, your name and number are displayed so the person you're calling knows exactly who it is, even with a disguised voice. Bummer. Thanks to Caller ID, the prank phone call is a dying art.
Favorite part of technical communication? I’m constantly learning new things, and I like the notion that what I do will help the end user with his job.
Products you Work On? Financial Edge, Education Edge, Blackbaud Student Information System, and ResearchPoint
Other projects you Work On? Usability projects
How did you get into technical writing? My college advisor pointed me in this direction, and after two years working for a newspaper, I made the move.
What's changed about Blackbaud since you've been here? Location, CEOs, cafeteria vendors, healthcare plan, just to name a few.
What hasn't changed? My NEO photo and my cube mate.
What's one unique thing about you? I’ve been to Vegas seven times and hit every casino from Fremont to Mandalay. What’s unique about that? After seven trips I’ve won significantly more than I’ve lost. I own that city!
I love research. I love it so much I research what we could be doing five
years from now. I like to know things. Being prepared for upcoming changes is an
understatement for me. When I went to the STC conference in June, I saw a demo
of Acrobat 9. Wow, it did some slick things. However, it meant it was
time to go back to the drawing research board. We've heard of some issues with the Technical Communication Suite that Adobe is promoting with Acrobat 9, so we aren't sure when we plan to upgrade. However, when you're researching five
years out you don't worry about small details (I mean, who worries about broken
software, lost files, and loss of productivity migraines?). However, this line of
thought did produce some questions about what we can do with Acrobat now
and what we might want to consider doing this next year, two years down the
road, and five+ years down the road.
On the Documentation team, we use Adobe Acrobat as part of the process to create our user guides. Among the things we already provide in our user guides include - bookmarks, table of contents, index, cross reference links, space to make notes in the margins, and more.
A new feature we're testing on the Education Edge, Student Information System, and Financial Edge 7.77
products is a new bookmark - Search the guide. We thought we'd try to make the process to search through a PDF for your content easier. When you click Search the guide, Adobe's search feature opens and you can enter your terms. The PDF search function is pretty good and I use it often when I try to locate existing content.
Instead of relying on users to know where in Acrobat to go to for the
search feature, we've added the bookmark so it's visibly present when they open
the PDF the first time. Simple change but yet we're hoping it improves the
usability of the user guide.
For longer term research, I've been hearing about other ways to increase the
functionality of the PDF. Recently I received an email about enabling PDFs for
comments. In short, this feature would enable users to make comments or
notes in the documentation as they use it (very web 2.0 like). I like that it
takes information (user guides) our users have already said they like (in our
survey) and expand its usefulness. An article from
Shlomo Perets
discusses some ways to enable PDF comments. For us, it would require an update
to our Adobe products and with our issues in the Tech Comm Suite it's not a good
decision for us to implement. While we wait for Adobe to sort out its business,
I am going to introduce this idea to our usability team. We don't even know if
this is a feature users would like so it's time to do some user research.
Other items I've heard about and would like to do user research include -
- Information Design. Not really a cool new feature per say but I like
reading blogs and articles about how people use content. We redesigned our user
guides for the products on the Infinity platform. Now as our software evolves
and user expectations evolve, it's good to stay current on the latest research.
- Keywords. Add keywords to each PDF and then provide a way for users
to search the user guides on our website. We've been looking into this for a
while but have been having problems working around how we would do that with the
current security settings in place (you have to login to see the user guides).
Security issue aside, we have to see how this would affect our current work
processes and what the return on investment would be.
However, I know we can't stop there. There is a whole field of information on
readers that needs to be explored (you know, in between writing new
documentation for all the millions of software product releases we have each
month).
I love that a part of my job is to look for new ways to enhance our documentation. So if you have any suggestions, tips, or tricks for Adobe Acrobat, please pass them on.
Oh and if you have any knowledge of other tips and tricks for other PDF readers
out there, I'd be glad to hear about those too. As long as the reader is free
for our users, I'm willing to do the research on ways to enhance our user
guides. Research on cool new user assistance features is about as cool as The
Dark Knight (already one of my all-time favorite movies). In other words, it's too cool for school.
This post is a little off topic from documentation but it's a great resource I came across from my alma mater's listserv.
Introducing... Worldmapper! http://www.worldmapper.org
According to their website, "Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest… There are now nearly 600 maps."
Did you read what I read? 600 maps for us to click around, play with, and in general become more aware about the world we live in. I especially recommend you spend some time learning a bunch of cool things in the Map Categories section.
366 of the maps are available as PDF posters. This is definitely a great resource if you need a visual to communicate an important point.
Here's an example of a map based on total population…
And another example, based on road traffic deaths…
I guess the traffic in Charleston doesn't seem so bad now.
Each quarter we enter the respondents of our online survey in a drawing for a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. The 2nd quarter winner for 2008 is Christopher Raspe of Oberlin College. Congratulations, Christopher!
Last quarter we had 98 responses to the survey. That’s a new record for us. The survey continues to provide us with lots of great information and it’s also initiated a number conversations with clients we might not have had otherwise.
For the past year, we’ve averaged approximately 50-75 responses, so this quarter saw a substantial increase. This is a trend that we want to continue. In fact, with the 7.77 release of Education Edge, Financial Edge, and Blackbaud Student Information System, we will begin placing a link to the survey in the help files.
Up to now, we’ve captured feedback only from clients visiting our website and using the online user guides. By adding a link to the survey within the help files, we hope to tap into a whole new segment of documentation users. We are very excited about this opportunity.
And remember, to be entered in our 2008 third quarter drawing, complete our online survey. It takes only a few minutes. To send us feedback about our user guides or help file documentation at any time, email documentationcomments@blackbaud.com.
Name? Ellyn
How long have you been at Blackbaud?
6.5 years. I left Blackbaud for 2 years and just returned March '08 (remotely in
Williamsburg, VA).
What technology from the past do you wish would make a comeback?
Sound effects in games like Pong and Pac-Man! I even had the Pac-Man Fever
album.
Favorite part of technical communication? I enjoy the usability aspect
- assessing how our users process and use the products and documentation we
create. I love visiting clients in their work environment and learning how they
use our products! I also have great interest in international communication and
translation. And lately, I'm becoming more fascinated with social networking and
Web 2.0.
Products you Work On? The Education Edge, Blackbaud Student Information
System, The Patron Edge, Blackbaud Enterprise CRM.
Other projects you Work On? Usability group - researching Team Foundation
Server to track client contact activity.
How did you get into technical writing?:
As an English major, I completed a few internships with various literary reviews
and magazines. The experience was sufficient but I didn't really enjoy that type
of writing. My advisor was big on this thing called tech writing and encouraged
me to try a few tech classes in the department. I did and I've been in tech
writing ever since!! I continued into the MA in English/Tech Writing program
(almost finished paying the student loans!) and gained some very cool real-world
experience. We worked on so many interesting projects, ranging from helping to
publish the department web site to editing documentation for NASA. I also really
got into the international communication/translation aspect of tech writing but
that's another story. Maybe I'll blog about it :-)
What's changed about Blackbaud since you've been here?
The technology - it's amazing how much has changed in just the 2 years I was
gone!
What hasn't changed? The
people! My co-workers genuinely care about helping users make the most of our
products and documentation. And my team is awesome. Especially being remote, you
lose a little of that personal connection established by living in the cube
farm!! I think we all work well together, communicating about work stuff but
also taking a bit of time to connect personally.
What's one unique thing about you?
I love to scuba dive.
Anything else? Happy to be back!
Even on vacation I couldn't escape documentation. While most people think technical writers explain software or some similar product (and it's true, I do) so many other forms of technical communication exist. On my vacation I was bombarded with other people's technical writing. It's like one of those things you never notice and then when you're aware of it, it appears everywhere.
Here are a few examples from my recent trip and the time spent in the great outdoors of Northern Michigan.
- Planes. Not only did I have neat little instructions with pictures but I also saw a flight attendant reading out of a huge manual. I thought they had to memorize their stuff. And, I know pilots have thick books of instructions as well. Not sure if I'm more or less comfortable with the idea that flying takes so much instruction to complete safely.
- I bought a bunch of new gear for camping. I did read the instructions and follow them for my tent, footprint, self-inflating foam pad, head lamp and screen house. I did not read it for my sleeping bag or SIGG water bottle. I should have for the SIGG because I was supposed to wash it before using the first time. Ooops. I'm sure a few chemicals still inside won't harm me, right?
- Food. Do you notice how many food packages come with instructions and warnings. I am always reading the labels and not even thinking about who designed and wrote them.
- Countless other items I completely ignored as I tried to disconnect for a few days.
Interesting observation about the camping gear. Years past the product pictures and instructions that they crazily throw in last minute were more frustrating than helpful. This time, I actually could figure out what to do based on the instructions. Either I'm getting better at this documentation interpretation thing or my field is improving. You decide. :-)
Now that we have looked at what Blackbaud enterprise help offers our end-users and their clients - Part 1 and Part 2 - this week we will take a look at the technology driving the help system. We will also talk about how this technology serves to make our search functionality cutting edge.
Technology
As I mentioned in Part 1, the server-based help system is designed to be installed on a Web server along with the Blackbaud Enterprise application itself, which is deployed as a ClickOnce rich-client application. In the help system, HTML topics are wrapped in Microsoft ASP.NET version 2.0 code, which interacts with two Web services that call the code from the application. This technology enables us to display context-sensitive information and dynamically generate links to topics for all the functions a user has rights to on a given page of the application.
Implementation
All “pluggable” features in the application support linking with help topics: tasks, search lists, reports, data forms, pages. Pages in the application support multiple help topics: root page level, page level actions, page sections, and page section actions. Each of these items is associated with a “HelpKey” property in the code. By default, HelpKeys are specific HTML filenames of topics within the system. But end-users can modify HelpKeys (no coding necessary) and include other file types that display in a browser (doc, pdf). They can also link to fully qualified URLs. See Part 2 of my series for more information about manipulating help keys in the system.
As a result, when a user accesses our help system from any given page, a GetPageMetaData Web service builds a list of links related to functions on the page to which a user has security access. The help content for the page (usually an overview) appears, along with a scrollable pane on the left side of the screen containing the dynamically generated links, allowing users easy access to all help associated with the selected help topic.
Search
Blackbaud’s help system depends on Microsoft Indexing Service, which extracts content from files and constructs an indexed catalog to facilitate the user’s search. The service is initialized and configured for Blackbaud Enterprise help on the Web server with an install utility that is part of the application.
The Search field is available from every topic in the help system (via the ASP.NET wrapper). When a user executes a search, an ASP.NET handler issues a query against the indexing service search catalog, which is configured to include all files in the application Help directory. Each time the service indexes the catalog, changes to existing files, as well as new files are included. So end users can add their own documents or topics to the Help directory, and these files are included in search results.
The results are returned and displayed in a dynamically generated html page.
