Get Everyone Involved: Technical Communication with Wikis

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tekom Europe Roadshow 2014 24 September 2014, București Johannes Egenolf, K15t Software GmbH Get everyone involved: Technical Documentation with Wikis PLAN AUTHOR TRACK PUBLISH ENGAGE

description

Johannes Egenolf's slidedeck from his presentation at the tekom roadshow 2014 in Bucharest, September 2014. A growing number of companies worldwide and across all industry sectors already create and share their knowledge with enterprise wikis like Atlassian Confluence. Those knowledge management and collaboration systems enable all employees to create and access content within the same tool. Collaborative documentation workflows and flexible tools are becoming crucial to keep up with the pace of agile product development. Because technical documentation is a major corporate content asset, more and more organizations start using wikis also as a techcomm tool. Their main goals are to improve collaboration when producing documentation, to unify the content management toolchain, and to simplify the authoring and distribution workflow. In this session, we will discuss use cases where Confluence might be the right choice. We will bust some common myths about wikis and their content management and single-source publishing abilities nowadays. Also there will be room for questions. Contents: What is an enterprise wiki? Use-cases for wiki-based documentation Agile documentation workflows A wiki's collaboration strengths and potential flaws Workflow management and content lifecycle in a wiki Content distribution and single-source publishing Common myths about wiki-based documentation Takeaways and Q&A panel

Transcript of Get Everyone Involved: Technical Communication with Wikis

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tekom Europe Roadshow 2014 24 September 2014, București !Johannes Egenolf, K15t Software GmbH

Get everyone involved: Technical Documentation with Wikis

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Johannes Egenolf

Technical Writer &Customer Advocate, K15t Software

About Me

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Get everyone involved: Technical Documentation with Wikis

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> Why Wiki-based documentation?

Agenda

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ENGAGE> Plan: Audiences, Structure, Versioning/Variants

> Author: Content creation in an Enterprise Wiki

> Track: Quality assurance, feedback and workflows

> Publish: Releasing and exporting content

> Engage: Agile documentation workflows

> Takeaways and Q&A panel

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Why Wikis for Documentation?

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Out of the box –great for documentation

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But –I have special needs!

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Content Reuse

Page hierarchy

Inclusion library for reuse:> Only visible to authors

> Can be reused everywhere

> Page titel: _Modulename

> versioned (optional)

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Managing Versions

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Easy-to-Use Editor

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Macros

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Macros

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Macros

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> Work on upcoming releases in the background

> Edit pages for a specific release version

Versioning Content

Select the version you want to work on

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Multilingual Content

Display the Confluence content in the right language

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Guidance for Authors

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Automated Language Quality Checks

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> Motivated Wiki authors mutually fix their errors.

> Content is improving based on feedback from other users.

Ex-post Approach for Quality Assurance

Good!Better!

Perfect!

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> Are available for wikis, toowith add-ons (Comala).

> Track the content state.

> Restrictive workflows alone do not guarantee high quality!

Restrictions and Approval Workflows

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> Make content available when the product is released

> Readers can access the latest version and previous versions

Publishing Released Documentation

Select the version to publish

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Publishing to PDF, HTML, Word (single pages)ist a default functionality of enterprise wikis like Confluence.

Advanced publishing using add-ons:

Export Formats

Document-centric Context-sensitive help

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Web Publishing

http://www.KICK-ASS_WEBSITES_WITH_CONFLUENCE.com

• Public Wiki with Themes • Static HTML Export • Viewport for your Wiki

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Iterative development of documentation

Everyone contributes to the content:

> Developers

> Technical writers

> Quality assurance team members

Agile Documentation Workflows

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> Public product documentation

> Everyone can comment and interact

> Sharing insights, feedback, questions, answers …

Involve Your Customers – Example: Atlassian

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Cheese+Macro

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Wiki-based documentation works for all content lifecycle phases

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Enterprise Wikis like Confluence already exist in many IT teams

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Technical Writers become Information Managers

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More than 13.000 organizations collaborate in Confluence

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Questions & Answers

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[email protected] @k15tsoftware www.k15t.com Today: Johannes

Stay in contact

Invitation: Webinar on Monday, September 29th „Content Management with Confluence“