Content vs. Product: The Effects of Single Sourcing on the Teaching of Technical Communication    

Identifies and discusses the effects of single sourcing on the writing process. Provides suggestions for incorporating the teaching of single sourcing into technical communication courses

Eble, Michelle F. Technical Communication Online (2003). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Rhetoric

Content-Management

Content Management (abgekürzt CM) ist die Zusammenfassung aller Tätigkeiten, Prozesse und Hilfsmittel, die den Lebenszyklus digitaler Informationen in Form von Unterlagen und Dokumenten unterstützen. Die digitalen Informationen werden oft als Content (Inhalt) bezeichnet, sie können als Dateien vorliegen, die einzeln verarbeitet werden oder auch als zusammenhängende Dateisysteme, wie z.B. Webseiten.

Wikipedia (2006). (German) Articles>Content Management

Content, the Once and Future King  

Content is the digital-stuff we use everyday in our work lives to sell and service, help and maintain our customers, our partners and ourselves. Content is the evidence of what we do. Carl Sagan said about life on Earth, 'We are star-stuff.' In our business lives, we are content-stuff. Enterprise Content Management emerges as the key factor in employee empowerment.

Moore, Andy. KMworld (2001). Articles>Content Management

Content: What Is It and Why Manage It?  

Fuelled by our own frustrations and fear of 'The Server' and 'inspired' by the frustrations of others, we set out to tackle 'content' and figure out ways to effectively create and manage it.

Kostur, Pamela. Rockley Bulletin (2003). Articles>Content Management

Content: What is it and Why Should You Manage It?

A unified content strategy can help your organization to avoid the Content Silo Trap, reducing the cost of creating, managing, and distributing content, and ensuring that content effectively supports your organizational and customer needs. A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customers' needs.

Kostur, Pamela. STC Chicago (2005). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy

Contribution of the Indian Medical Service to the Documentation of Materia Medica, Medicinal Plants and Medical Topography of India, 1750-1925    

India's medical tradition and knowledge base can be traced back to the Vedas (c.5000 BC), especially the Atharvaveda. The works of Charaka and Sushruta (c.2000 years ago) are well known. Parts of this ancient knowledge have been passed down generations by word of mouth and through the gurukula system. However, documentation about the incidence of diseases, the state of health of the people, medical practices and health care delivery in India during the period prior to the 18th century is meager, the sources being mainly the notes, memoirs and travelogues of visiting travelers. During the colonial period (c.1615-1930) western medical practices took roots in the country. The colonial powers recognizing that 'knowledge is power', commissioned surveys and studies about the terrain, fauna, flora, climate, environment, customs, and indigenous health practices, etc. in different parts of India. Officers of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) wrote over 1400 books, reports, tracts and papers covering a wide range of medical and health topics. Such sources together with the tacit knowledge of the officers involved contributed to the 'colonial knowledge base'. This paper discusses briefly this knowledge base and lists the writings of the IMS officers in the fields of (1) materia medica, (2) botanical studies including Indian medicinal plants, and (3) medical topography of India.

Neelameghan, Arashanipalai. International Journal for Technical Communication (2006). Articles>Knowledge Management>Biomedical>India

Control Costs of Translation with Advance Plan

The liability of a translated manual is several times greater than the English version. This increased liability can be tied directly to the accuracy of the translation.

McBride, Bill. Boston Broadside (1993). Articles>Language>Translation>Project Management

Controlling Quality, Controlling Costs  

By developing a strategic plan, finding out if we are producing the right learning products in the most efficient way, and changing to a minimalist document design, we can meet the challenges of the present business environment. Since many of us are now expected to produce more with less while maintaining or improving the quality of the products we produce, we need to manage our function better. By following the suggestions in this paper, you will be able to: communicate the importance of your function; get control of your function; demonstrate how you add value to your companies' products.

Mattingly, William A. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Management>Quality>Assessment

Converting from Paper to Online  

This demonstration describes the process and pitfalls encountered during the conversion of paper documents to online, CD-ROM documents that occurred at Cisco Systems, Inc.

Altemus, Desiree L. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Corporate Size and Knowledge Management

The more knowledge is hoarded, the less productive we were able to become. It’s difficult to get beyond that “sharing for the benefit of the whole” stigma, but when you can it can be a wonderful thing.

Hauser, Lisa. STC NJIT Student Chapter (2005). Articles>Knowledge Management>Workplace

Corporate Social Responsibility: Communicators Wanted

Communication practitioners understand how to use a range of tools—formal, informal, traditional and online—and two-way symmetrical communication. They need to know that, through the energetic use of these skills, they can advance the economic, social and environmental well-being of society.

Berardocco, Diana. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Business Communication>Management

CoRR: A Computing Research Repository    

This paper describes the decisions by which the Association for Computing Machinery integrated good features from the Los Alamos e-print (physics) archive and from Cornell University's Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library to form their own open, permanent, online “computing research repository” (CoRR). Submitted papers are not refereed and anyone can browse and extract CoRR material for free, so CoRR's eventual success could revolutionize computer science publishing. But several serious challenges remain: some journals forbid online preprints, the CoRR user interface is cumbersome, submissions are only self-indexed, (no professional library staff manages the archive) and long-term funding is uncertain.

Halpern, Joseph Y. Journal of Computer Documentation (2000). Articles>Content Management>Web Design

Crafting a User Research Plan

Every piece of user research is part of an ongoing research program, even if that program is informal. However, making a program formal provides a number of advantages: It gives you a set of goals, a schedule that stretches limited user-research resources, and results when they're needed most. It also helps you avoid unnecessary, redundant, or hurried research.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Adaptive Path (2003). Articles>Project Management>Usability

Creating a Text/Creating a Company: The Role of a Text in the Rise and Decline of a New Organization  

A case study in the history of Microware, a microcomputer software company.

Doheny-Farina, Stephen. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Management

Creating Leaders: On the Front Lines and Beyond

Companies such as GE, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, McKinsey, IBM, FedEx and others began building their leadership engines by doing what any great team does: putting the right people in the right leadership positions in the first place. They then strengthen the leaders’ skills and knowledge and rigorously hold them accountable for hitting their operating and financial targets. Let’s peek under the hood at these leadership engines to see how these great companies not only create but sustain leadership engines that continuously produce strong leaders.

Shaffer, Jim. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Education>Management>Workplace

Creating Single-Sourced Information Products  

Until recently, single sourcing has been limited to the process of putting identical information into multiple information products. However, the results of a singlesourced approach need not be identical. You can customize the outputs to contain only the information that is appropriate for the specific situation. This presentation provides a high-level overview to the advantages of single sourcing and how to implement and maintain such a solution.

Stevens, Dawn M. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Curing Publishing Woes with a Content Management System  

Mescan's article helps technical communication managers determine which content management solutions are best for their particular goals and problems.

Mescan, Suzanne. Intercom (2004). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing

Customer-Centric Content Management: Level 3 Building the Customer Relationship

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) relies on both methodologies and technologies to assist an organization with the management of all aspects of interaction a company has with its customer. Companies achieve an effective CRM strategy by centralizing information about their customers, ensuring they have access to effective support channels (e.g., self-service, call centers) and by making a concerted effort to know as much as possible about their customers. Knowledge about the customer makes it possible to closley match customer needs with targeted product plans and offerings, point customers to the right information at the right time, and help them accomplish their tasks.

Rockley Bulletin (2006). Articles>Content Management>Management>CRM

Customizing the Appearance of Your Manual, Help System, and HTML Help System  

Doc-To-Help gives Help authors complete control over the look, feel, and content of a project's printed manual, Windows Help system, HTML files, and HTML Help system. Maintaining different content is controlled using Doc-To-Help's conditional text feature, which allows authors to mark content for print-only, online-only, WinHelp-only, and so on. In this article we discuss how you control the appearance of the printed manuals and Help using Word templates, and HTML output using cascading style.

ComponentOne (1999). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Documentation

Dealing With an IT Scourge: Process Documentation  

In this article, we outline how IT analysts can effectively make determinations about the value of process documentation, and in the process, transform a potential scourge into a possible blessing.

Schiesser, Rich. TechRepublic (2005). Articles>Documentation>Programming>Project Management

Dealing with Images in Content Management Systems, Part 1

Most web-based content management systems offer a variety of tools to help contributors enter text. When it comes to graphics, content contributors are usually expected to provide web-ready images to the system. This means that either editorial users needs to know about image optimisation and web image formats, or additional staff are required to make web-ready images out of raw materials. This article demonstrates a technical solution to this problem.

Crane, Tom. Code Project, The (2006). Articles>Content Management>Graphic Design>ASP

Death by UML Fever

A potentially deadly illness, clinically referred to as UML (Unified Modeling Language) fever, is plaguing many software-engineering efforts today. This fever has many different strains that vary in levels of lethality and contagion. A number of these strains are symptomatically related, however. Rigorous laboratory analysis has revealed that each is unique in origin and makeup. A particularly insidious characteristic of UML fever, common to most of its assorted strains, is the difficulty individuals and organizations have in self-diagnosing the affliction. A consequence is that many cases of the fever go untreated and often evolve into more complex and lethal strains.

Bell, Alex E. Queue (2004). Articles>Project Management>XML>UML

Death to Lorem Ipsum and Other Adventures in Content

Kristina agreed to push the thinking further with a discussion about content, UX teams, and how the relationships can be strengthened to create experiences and projects that really sing. The resulting conversation start with content basics and closes with a bold challenge.

Halvorson, Kristina and Kate Rutter. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Interviews>Content Management

Debbie Kennedy on Modular Writing and Reusability

Kennedy's presentation on modular writing and reusability was attended by about 200 people. In her presentation, Debbie explained how to chunk content by first looking at different content types: procedures, processes, facts, principles, and so forth. She also mentions a tool called Content Mapper that writers can use to chunk and reuse information through Microsoft Word.

Kennedy, Debbie. Tech Writer Voices (2007). Articles>Writing>Content Management>Podcasts