Getting Started with Blogging Software

We reviewed and compared the seven tools most frequently used to create a blog. Which are easiest to get up and running, or to tailor to match your site? Which has the best comment moderation features? Reporting functionality? We'll give you all the details and recommend a tool for you.

IdealWare (2006). Articles>Content Management>Software>Blogging

Getting Started with Performance Management  

What are some ways to effectively track and manage a group’s performance? Wiley examines a way to do so using specific requirements designed to measure the success of an STC SIG.

Wiley, Ann L. Intercom (2006). Articles>Project Management>Collaboration>Methods

Getting the Ear of Your CEO

Communication professionals can and should have frequent, direct access to and influence on executive leadership. Your CEO needs you, but are you ready? It is a misperception that CEOs are too busy, uninterested or unreceptive. While some communicators have close contact with executives, many other communication professionals rarely see the CEO and may have many layers of management between themselves and that "C-level" suite. But you don't have to report directly to the CEO to get his or her ear.

Gayeski, Diane. Communication World Bulletin (2003). Articles>Business Communication>Management>Collaboration

Getting This "Global Thing" Right…

CEOs overwhelmingly believe that revenue growth is their number one priority: four out of five CEOs (83%) now believe that revenue growth is the most important path to boosting financial performance over the next three years. And what do they see as the two key drivers for this growth? New and differentiated products and services (nearly two-thirds) and new markets (55%). Responsiveness is the new key competence, i.e., CEOs acknowledge that they need the ability to recognize, analyze and respond more effectively to continuously changing market conditions and risks. Reinstituting customer responsive organizations is high on their growth agenda.

Ray, Rebecca. LISA (2004). Careers>Management>International

Goal-Directed Content Management

Anecdotal evidence from within the CM industry indicates that CM implementations fail to meet corporate expectations about half of the time. Part of the reason for missed expectations could be poor usability.

Fore, David. Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Articles>Content Management>Usability

Going On-Line: Bringing Technical Reports To The Desktop  

Information management is moving quickly toward archiving and retrieving documents electronically, so Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is taking steps to help its research staff create electronic documents. Declining budgets frequently dictate that authors handle the technicalities of getting published as well as the scientific and technical information that they publish. To help the Laboratory benefit from being the leader in this area, ORNL’s Information Management Section formed a multidisciplinary team to develop, pilot, and implement a Webbased process to register and clear technical documents and to add the full text of these documents to the Laboratory’s Comprehensive Publications and Presentations Registry (CPPR). Making this happen required implementing policy changes to address the new performance measure, acquiring software needed for file conversion, developing Web guidance, and providing training and consulting for ORNL staff.

Dole, Jeanne, David Hamrin and Rebecca Lawson. OSTI. Articles>Content Management>Reports

Going Online: A Case Study in the Development and Implementation of Netscape NetHelp  

Computerized Medical Systems, Inc. (CMS) - the worldâ*™s leading radiation therapy planning (RTP) company with over 1000 installed RTP systems and over 400 installed dosimetry systems - decided in late 1996 to move existing FOCUS documentation online. Reasons for this included: the existing documentation set perceived as too difficult to use; increasing printing cost; and customer feedback. Using Netscape NetHelp as a basis, the CMS documentation staff reduced printed documentation size by two-thirds while making the information more accessible. Reactions to FOCUSHelp have been highly favorable. Future plans include migrating to the NetHelp2 framework and reducing topic lengths.

Rupel, Roberta A., Ellard Douglas, Bill Bledsoe and Frank Watson. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>Help

Good Money After Bad

Many software projects that suffer a lingering death should have been canceled much earlier. Although it is hard to pull the plug on a project with a weak business case, failing to do so does throw good money after bad. Karl Wiegers gives some tips on decision making that can help you avoid this outcome. Karl also shows how to use decision points to keep a good project moving along.

Wiegers, Karl E. StickyMinds (2002). Articles>Project Management

Graphic Designer Needs a Web CMS

While you can create very powerful content management solutions with most open-source packages -- they have a much steeper learning curve than you experienced with HTML or Flash.

Byrne, Tony. CMSworks (2004). Articles>Content Management>Graphic Design

Greymatter, RSS, and Syndication

Greymatter is an excellent web content management system. After you install it, you can begin to syndicate your content using XML. This article gives you an explicit step-by-step overview of how I created RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.92 files using Greymatter. It is assumed that you have some knowledge of HTML and XML, and that you have already installed Greymatter. Many examples and references are provided to help you along the way.

Rhodes, John S. WebWord (2001). Design>Content Management>XML>RSS

A Guide for Software Project Managers - Planning User Documentation

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)–2000 Edition is the main sourcebook in the project management field. Whilst it covers Project Communications Management, it doesn't extend to user documentation. This article seeks to provide guidance for project managers as to how the user documentation process fits in with the overall project planning. It examines: the traditional way documentation is approached and how it impinges on project planning the effects of making changes to this traditional approach.

Johnston, Carol. Cherryleaf (2003). Articles>Documentation>Project Management>Body of Knowledge

Guidelines for Mentoring Programs  

A successful mentoring relationship benefits those involved through increased confidence and a sense of direction. The relationship provides a risk-free learning environment in which to offer career guidance. Mentoring relationships can develop between individuals within an organization, between individuals in two different organizations, or between students and STC professionals.

STC. Careers>Mentoring>Management

“Hand It To Them On A Silver Platter: Meeting Researchers Needs In The Electronic Age”  

This paper describes the Electronic Resource Library (ERL) at http://plutonium-erl.actx.edu. This is a web-based, subject-oriented digital library on the topic of plutonium and its ancillary disciplines. Previous research analyzing differences in the information-seeking behavior of scientists and engineers is reviewed and lessons learned applied to this digital library model. Special consideration has been given to recommendations in the SATCOM report from the National Academy of Sciences/National Academy of Engineering Committee on Scientific and Technical Communication. This report strongly advocated the development of “specialized need-groupservices” to support the work of the engineer and practitioner.

Ruddy, Karen. OSTI (1999). Articles>Content Management>Web Design

Handling Tough Situations: The Short Method

We discussed how to buy time when you are assaulted by an unpleasant surprise. Our argument was that few people respond well to challenging situations unless they have some time to prepare. Therefore, whenever you can, you should divide the task into four distinct phases: (1) minimal immediate response, (2) preparation, (3) problem-solving discussion, and (4) follow-through. Unfortunately, some situations don't let you postpone a full discussion. For such cases, you need the 'short method,' which condenses phases 1-3.

Reimold, Cheryl. IEEE PCS (2000). Careers>Collaboration>Project Management

Hands-on XML and Round Trip HTML for Technical Communicators  

XML can simplify production of documents for print, help and web delivery. It can make document components reusable, portable between platforms and easier to maintain. XML also has a dark side. Parts of the standard are turbulent, vendors are rushing XML products to market that are not fully standard-compliant, implementation requires careful planning, and porting of legacy documents to XML is not trivial. Technical communicators can prosper by identifying the parts of XML that can be implemented immediately, by preparing documents to exploit support for XML available in new versions of Microsoft Word and Adobe FrameMaker, and by using hybrid HTML/XML for document delivery.

Reichman, Katriel. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Content Management>Single Sourcing>XML

Happiness is A Good Fit: Personality Typing Tools for Career Management  

Members of our profession have tended to manage their careers by choosing either technical or management paths, then following them. Increasingly, technical communicators are factoring their personality types into the equation. This paper examines how standardized personality typing tools used by career planners are applied to help team members to find a good job fit, build a highfunctioning team, salvage interpersonal conflicts in the workplace, and make a suitable career change.

Bailie, Rahel Anne, Liz Babcock, Conni E. Evans and Emma C. Hamer. STC Proceedings (2002). Careers>Management>TC

Happy Birthday Communiqué

Provides a recap of how the online, wiki-based Carolina Communique evolved and won an Award of Excellence in the Newsletters: Web & Online category of the 2008 APEX Awards for Publication Excellence

Sapir, Rick. Carolina Communique (2008). Articles>Content Management>Newsletters>Wikis

Hat Heads vs. Bed Heads

Calm tension, communicate more easily, and run your projects more efficiently by applying the right relationship management techniques.

LaFerriere, Keith. List Apart, A (2007). Articles>Management>Collaboration

Hats Off to Your Own Web Business

Sahil Parikh built and runs his web app DeskAway a world away in Mumbai, India. In this article he shares some of the things he’s learned and hats he’s worn while creating his successful and profitable web app business.

Parikh, Sahil. Vitamin (2008). Articles>Management>Web Design>E Commerce

HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't)

An ongoing tension within Wikipedia is characterized as the inclusionists versus the exclusionists. The inclusionists argue that one of Wikipedia's core values is that it should be open to all ideas, that truth emerges from a variety of directions. Better to include than exclude. The exclusionists see Wikipedia's utilitarianism diminished if too much froth clouds the valuable information inside. These people delete material they consider inappropriate. The case offers students a chance to understand issues such as how online cultures are made and maintained, the power of self-policing organizations, the question of whether the service is drifting from its core principles, and whether a Wikipedia-like concept can work in a business setting.

Silverthorne, Sean. Harvard University (2007). Articles>Knowledge Management>Policies and Procedures>Wikis

HCI Design for Network and System Management

All too often the people responsible for the care and feeding of the information technology infrastructure are poorly supported by the very technology they must manage, even as the popularity and use of networks (such as for the World Wide Web) grows. Corporate MIS staffs spend billions of dollars just on managing their computing infrastructures, and still they must continually cope with ineffectual products that do not support them in their work. A $2,000 PC may cost $5,000 to $10,000 a year to support.(1) This Special Interest Group (SIG) provided an opportunity for over 30 HCI practitioners and researchers in the domain of network and system management to share information about the problems faced by operators, system managers, administrators, and end users, and to explore new techniques in user interface design that might provide better support in the future. The group spent the majority of its time sharing information about design problems in a structured brain-storming exercise. Candidate areas for solutions were considered in response to the defined problem.

Graefe, Thomas M. and Dennis Wixon. SIGCHI Bulletin (1997). Design>Human Computer Interaction>Management

HCI Solutions for Managing the IT Infra-structure

In a kick-off Special Interest Group (SIG) at CHI 97, participants focused on key design challenges in the domain of network and system management. At the conclusion of the CHI 97 SIG the group decided it would be helpful to continue to meet and to provide a forum for exploring solutions to these key design challenges. The CHI 98 SIG provided an opportunity for over 30 HCI practitioners and researchers in the management domain to share information about work in several key areas.

Graefe, Thomas M. and Dennis Wixon. SIGCHI Bulletin (1998). Design>Human Computer Interaction>Management

Hello, My Name is Doug and I'm a Workaholic

It's important to be able to distinguish between workaholics and people who are simply wrapped up in their work--either because they enjoy it so much or because, temporarily, they have decided to make it a priority to win a promotion or attain the kind of lifestyle that they want. For a workaholic, work is the end, not the means. While it may bring wealth or power, what matters most is simply working. Just as alcoholics drink because they must--not always because they enjoy it--so a workaholic is addicted to working even when there is no rational reason for doing so.

Davis, Douglas W. STC (2007). Careers>Workplace>Project Management