Written by K15T
Thursday, 17 June 2010 15:17
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K15T
On Monday June 14th K15t Software made its first appearance at the Single Source Forum[1] in Munich. The single source forum is a conference for the technical communication community in Germany. This year's focus was on software documentation and how make documentation work for highly customizable software.
Tobias Anstett, co-founder of K15t Software, talked at the Single Source Forum 2010 about "Variability in the Documentation Process using Wikis". He defined the terms variability and variants in the context of documentation and presented the reasons for the creation of variants in documentation such as product variants, internationalization and audience-specific presentation of content.
For example he went into detail about structuring content in Confluence:
Structure plays a important role for usability but also when it comes to re-use of content. Confluence allows you to structure your content in different ways. First spaces can be created to differentiate between e.g. different products, departments or types of documentation. Speaking from experience a space should always be used for a single documentation. Inside a space pages respectively hierarchies of pages can be used to introduce a global structure which can be further imporved by using headings of differnet sizes on the page level itself. Authors should always think about the granularity of content they create. Using a page for single sentences might improve context sensitive re-use of information by others but impair the readability and maintenance of the documentation in the wiki. Another concept which is more related to re-use than to stucturing is the ability to tag or label pages. Labels can be used to introduce semantic information which improves search but also the creation of filters for e.g. exporting with Scroll.
(download[2])
Here are the slides (German only):
References^ Single Source Forum (single-source-forum.de)^ download (blog.k15t.com)tobiasanstett.jpgpanel.jpg
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