Philip John and Sheena Lakshmi from the Dell team
PowerEdge R810 Hardware Owner’s Manual—The Award Winning Document at the 13th Annual STC India Conference Competition
The Product
Dell PowerEdge R810 is a high-density rack server that combines advanced management capabilities with leading pric[...]
Continue Reading →
Archive for the ‘TechTools’ Category
December, 2011 § in TechTools
Write-up: PowerEdge R810 Hardware Owner’s Manual
July, 2011 § in TechTools, WriteManager
Design Considerations in Web Development
By Kris Weylo
When you design, create and deploy websites, the following design considerations can be factored into your web development cycle:
1.1 Technical issues
A simple website created with a few HTML pages and content is usually quite easy to develop and maintain. When more functionality[...]
Continue Reading →
February, 2011 § in TechTools
24 Key RoboHelp Terms
Nandini Gupta and Samartha Vashishtha
If you’re a new or intermediate-level user of RoboHelp HTML, you’ll surely find this compendium of 24 commonly encountered terms useful. And once you’re done with the basics, go ahead and explore the community content links under the respecti[...]
Continue Reading →
December, 2010 § in TechTools, WriteRight
RCO, Estimation, & Ratio Analysis Technical Documentation, Part 3
– Makarand Pandit
This is the final essay of a three-part series. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
In the previous article we talked about Ratio Analysis. We looked at
Frederick Ratio or Height Ratio
Sunil Ratio or Width Ratio
Mak Ratio or Distribution Ratio
In this part we will look at two t[...]
Continue Reading →
History of Tech-Writing Tools
- Prasanna Bidkar
Technical communication existed in some form as early as the twelfth century, when Muhammad ibn Musa Al’Khowarizmi, a Turkish cleric, developed a writing method designed to achieve a specific goal. However, the last five decades have seen an explosion of technical inventions in [...]
Continue Reading →
October, 2010 § in TechTools
Extracting content from PDFs to reformat using MS Word
The article talks about how to 'free' (read, extract) the content from the PDF files, using Acrobat 9 Professional. PDF being the final consumable output, it sometimes is difficult to extract content for re-use. The output can be of all sorts ranging from plain text to spreadsheet format.[...]
Continue Reading →
XML: KISS and Tell
- Vishesh Gupta
The characters:
KISS, The Guru
KISS is an acronym for the design principle “Keep it simple, Stupid!”. The KISS principle states that simplicity should be a key goal in design and that unnecessary complexity should be avoided. The acronym was first coined by Kelly Johnson, le[...]
Continue Reading →
August, 2010 § in TechTools
Five Adobe Captivate Tips
– Smitha V.
Five simple Adobe Captivate tips that help you design, develop, and review your projects quickly.
Create ‘stencils’ for your slides
Master Slide is a new feature in Adobe Captivate 5 that adds ‘stencils’ to your project. If you have common elements that you want to insert[...]
Continue Reading →
Creating Portfolios Easily
- Suhas Yogin & Vikrant Rai
Technical Documents don’t exist in isolation. As we are all aware, the norm of the industry is documentation sets. A documentation set contains multiple documents, each with different pagination, formats, page sizes, and any other complexities that you can add to t[...]
Continue Reading →
August, 2010 § in TechTools
Story of an Ungadgetted Technical Writer
- Sharada Palagummi
I am a technical writer and of course, I deal with technical content. I want to create great documentation. I know that technical knowledge and language skills are important, but I also want to use state-of the-art methodologies and authoring tools. However, my company does[...]
Continue Reading →
June, 2010 § in TechTools
The Value of End-User Surveys in Testing Landing-Page Usability
- Kumar Dhanagopal
Organizations use websites for a variety of purposes: to sell products and services, to get contact information about potential customers, to convince users to subscribe to newsfeeds, and so on. Regardless of the purpose, most websites have a page that is designed to be the star[...]
Continue Reading →
June, 2010 § in TechTools
Five RoboHelp tips
– Nandini Gupta and Samartha Vashishtha
In this second article in the technical communication tools series, we bring you five RoboHelp tips that will help you optimize your Help projects and generate better output.
Track the status of each topic from within RoboHelp
The Status tab of topic[...]
Continue Reading →
April, 2010 § in TechTools
DITA Writing Tips
– Anindita Basu
DITA is about semantic tags. This means all content must be placed within tags that explain the purpose of the content. Thus, for example, a UI element is tagged with the <uicontrol> tag (and not with <b> as we’re wont to do in HTML) and a directory loca[...]
Continue Reading →
April, 2010 § in TechTools
The FrameMaker Five
- Samartha Vashishtha
If you’re always looking for quicker ways to accomplish tasks, these FrameMaker tips are just for you!
1. Find is not just for text…
You can use the Find/Change feature in FrameMaker to look for many different kinds of objects across a book or in a document. In p[...]
Continue Reading →
April, 2010 § in TechTools
Confluence Wiki
– Shelpa Kaul
Confluence is an enterprise wiki and is developed and marketed by Atlassian Software Systems.
Confluence is used for documentation by code developers and project teams starting from requirement gathering and use cases to deployment and support documentation. Also, software dev[...]
Continue Reading →
December, 2009 § in TechTools
Applying Business Process Principles to Information Design
- Urmi Roy
Organizations today are constantly challenged about how to design their information system so that it can be meaningful to the users. As they are seen to make huge investments towards infrastructure for information systems, it is important to consider the design or the organization of co[...]
Continue Reading →
September, 2009 § in TechTools
Simulating Hardware
-Virupaksha K. M.
This idea won a prize at STC India Regional Conference at Bangalore in July 2009.
Software products are easy to demonstrate to clients – the products can be carried around or accessed electronically. But what about hardware products? My product is a security panel for homes.[...]
Continue Reading →
September, 2009 § in TechTools
Automation of Documentation Submittals via HP Quick Test Professional
- Hemanth Basrur
This idea won the first prize at STC India Regional Conference at Bangalore in July 2009.
Are you a Web publisher or Web submitter who uploads documents manually? The primary role of a Web publisher is to publish content on the Web. The content being published could be in differen[...]
Continue Reading →
September, 2009 § in TechTools
Writing My First DITA-Ready Topic
- Anne Sequeira
When I first heard about DITA, I thought to myself, ok here is something new for me to learn and implement. I was wrong in a way. Though DITA was a new kind of documentation technique to me, what I didn’t realise is that I had in a way been implementing DITA in [...][...]
Continue Reading →
