SubscribeFeb 21, 2008
Day 12: Documentation
Your team can use a wiki to collaboratively write, edit, and assemble documentation. If you publish it electronically, consider letting your audience contribute to the wiki and help build the documentation:
An easy to use web app that helps your organization to capture, share and exploit its knowledge.
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Future Changes is Stewart Mader. He wrote the book on wiki adoption, and he has led or advised enterprise-wide wiki deployments in Fortune 500 companies, universities, nonprofits, small and medium size companies.
Advisory Services include: adoption strategy and timeframe, vendor/product analysis, content structure and templates, roles and permissions, data migration, and workshops. Linda Ziffrin of Valley View Ventures handles bookings. Contact to discuss your needs.
RECENT COMMENTS
- Stefan Kleineikenscheidt said: "Absolutely agree. Waiting for Wave which will be even better.
my 2 euro cents,
-Stefan" - Martin Seibert said: "Hi Stewart, I am missing real open source alternatives in your list. Did you leave them out by purpose? What about Foswiki (TWiki-fork) or XWiki? Best regards Martin Seibert"
- Sarah said: "Thanks for the writeup Stewart! This is a big day for MindTouch and we're proud to be providing a [collaborative] Intranet that is engineered with intelligence and delivers businesses HIGHER ROI and lower TCO than"
- Mark Roseman said: "Hi Stewart, thanks very much for putting this guide together - a very useful resource! I put up a blog post pointing to it, as well as talking a bit about pricing models for"
- Martin Seibert said: "Hi Stewart, this is very valuable content. Congratulations to your study. I like the results a lot. Is it correct, that your respondents all came from self-recruited online-ressources? How did you attract them? Best regards Martin Seibert"
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BOOKS & ARTICLES
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Wikipatterns A practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization. Buy the book |
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Using Wiki in Education 10 case studies from education show how to collaboratively build curriculum, guide students' teamwork, and manage research projects. Buy the book |
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5 Effective Wiki Uses (PDF download) Five ways your business can benefit from using a wiki. Published in the August, 2008 issue of Website Magazine. |
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USEFUL WEBSITES
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- Wikinomics Blog
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Rebecca says:
Mar 3rd, 2008
Hi,
I am in the investigative stages of creating user documentation using a wiki. I currently have a multi-chapter FrameMaker document that I import into a HAT to create context sensitive help. How would I create a manual from multiple wiki pages?
Stewart Mader says:
Mar 3rd, 2008
Hi Rebecca,
I’m not sure what you’re referring to with the acronym HAT – can you give me more details there?
Thanks,
Stewart
Janet Swisher says:
Mar 11th, 2008
Hi Stewart,
HAT is Help Authoring Tool, which is a specialized program for creating online help for applications. Some of the top tools in this category are Adobe RoboHelp, MadCap Flare, and WebWorks ePublisher.
It seems likely that most wiki engines can export the content of the documentation wiki pages as HTML files, which could be imported by most HATs.
The tricky question is how to get the wiki-based Table of Contents into a format that a HAT would recognize as a TOC. For example, to produce Microsoft HTML Help (a.k.a. .chm, the standard help format on Windows), the TOC has to be in a specific structure of HTML 2.0 “li” and “object” tags. If the wiki doesn’t export in a format that can be easily translated into this format, you’re stuck recreating your TOC in the HAT.
I’m interested in any examples you can share of actual projects that have generated print or online documentation from a wiki. Even if you can’t share names of companies or their products that are documented this way, it would be helpful to know what wiki engine and other tools they use.