Technical Writer

An anti-Microsoft rant.  Unusual, because I like their products and 90% of all the computer programs I use are Microsoft.

Here in Australia—and I believe the rest of the world—Apple are running a series of Mac vs PC ads.  Most of us have seen them by now.  One in particular really resonates, the one that has a go at the overly intrusive security system on Vista, which requires users to cancel or allow virtually all user actions in an effort to make the PC secure.

We have Vista at home on one PC, and sometimes I want to turn off all security because those annoying messages frustrate me.

The worst thing is, I’m not even sure where the problems really are.  Vista, or Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).  I suspect it’s a combination of both, but that makes any problem twice as difficult to track down.

IE 7 was released not long before Vista. I know I started using IE7 only a month before I got Vista.

Here are three specific examples I have personally come across, one work related, two from home.

• At work, on our SharePoint Portal Server (2003) we use Microsoft Office web components.  We have used them for over twelve months with no problems.  Users have no problems accessing them, provided they set their portal server as a trusted site.  Recently, a small number of users upgraded to IE7, and suddenly we’re having problems with web components.  If the site is not a trusted site the user gets a message warning them that someone is trying to download date, asking them to okay it.  If the site is a trusted site they simply get an error. I am sure it’s only a setting, but it is extremely frustrating.  You would think that Microsoft would have ensured their own products were compatible, at the least.
• Vista and Java.  The home PC that runs Vista blocks Java on startup.  I have to go in and physically say it can run every time.  I can see no logical reason for this except that Java is a non-Microsoft product. Few people go long on the internet nowadays without running a Java applet or two.  Microsoft knows this, so why bother to make it so hard?
• The Microsoft genuine advantage. By the time you put up with having to manually load Java, and issues with programs that used to run perfectly but no longer do, you start to get annoyed with everything the company does that isn’t seamless.  This last issue probably isn’t really an issue, but compounded with the other two problems, it is really annoying me.My software is the genuine article.  Every Microsoft product is either store bought, with genuine serial numbers, or in the last two months it’s part of my TechNet subscription. Two days ago I attempted to download the Microsoft Save as PDF addin.  This is one of those products that Microsoft validates first, to ensure that you have a genuine version of Office before it will allow you to download the addin. That’s fine. I do have a genuine version of Office.The validation failed and it took two days to find out what was wrong.It turned out I had an unregistered copy of Visio on my PC.  I had loaded Visio up one day last week, but had not yet got around to entering the registration code.  You know how it goes—sometimes you get called away in the middle of things, and come back to it later.  It’s not even part of the standard Office suite.

The whole security thing is really annoying me at present. 

I am reminded of a security expert I worked with, who once recommended that I never create forms where the user had to okay alert that told them when something was happening, when those things were not errors.

“If you make them click okay all the time when nothing is wrong,” he said.  “They start ignoring the messages.  Then, if something really does go wrong, they miss it, because they’re so used to ignoring the messages.”

That’s about where I am at with Microsoft at present.  I am sick of their so-called security, which is continually bringing unimportant matters to my attention.  I am already at the stage where I ignore any messages Microsoft puts up, and all I want to do is turn the whole security thing off.

My boss used to write his own blog on our company intranet. 

It was easy enough to do in SharePoint (2003). He added each blog as a portal listing.

The blogs were popular.  He used the same chatty, informal style he used at our team meetings, and gave us the same type of news—about our team, about what was happening in the company, about where we were going with our projects.  Everyone enjoyed them.

He stopped after four posts.

I asked him why?  Was it too much work?

It wasn’t the effort of doing it, he said.  In fact, he enjoyed writing them. The problem was that people took what he said as fact, and started copying and pasting his comments as facts into other reports.

In one blog, for example, he spoke about a major project he hoped to start before Christmas.  It didn’t start until March.  He had not committed to the Christmas date in any formal report, but other departments took the details from his blog as fact.

Now you might say he should have known that would happen, but what is a blog, and what do you expect from it?

By its very nature a blog is supposed to be more informal than a standard business document.  More of a chat than a ‘real’ report.  Most people accept that.  Had this man stood in front of his team at a team meeting and told us exactly what he said in his blog, it wouldn’t have been a problem.  But this time he wrote it down.

If you are considering starting a blog at work, think about the potential consquences.  Blogs are fashionable at present, and not just in the personal space.  The CEO of our parent company even does one, although I confess it’s most of us don’t read that—it’s somewhat bland and plays very safe (with good reason).

Blogs are, by their very nature, public (even on an intranet), and the blogger has little control over what other people do with the content.  Anything in the blog is liable to be quoted, and often misquoted. It’s a hazard of blogging.  If the blog is too safe it doesn’t tell the reader anything useful. People don’t read it, and so it becomes a waste of time writing it in the first place.

Starting a blog at work is more risky than starting one outside of work.

Think long and hard about the consequences before you do so.

I spent the last three days at the AODC.  Lots to think about, which I may cover in other blogs, but here are some general impressions.  Of course, these are my own impressions, and it may be just who I talked to on the day.

• There are plenty of tech writing jobs out there at the moment.
• The role of the tech writer is changing along with the technology we use to do it.  Adapt or perish.
• Globalisation is big.  More companies seem to be involved in translating to other languages.
• XML has arrived.  (As distinct from all those years where we have been saying it’s coming.)  People don’t talk so much about XML any more, they talk about schemas used to manipulate XML—DITA, DocBook, RSS.  And rather than talk about moving to XML (althought that’s there), they talk about moving to an XML schema based product, such as DITA.  
• Web 2.0 products are heavily over priced at present.  The prices paid for companies like You Tube and My Space are reminiscent of the prices paid for dot com companies just before the original dot com bust. 
• Tools are merging.  The tools you use to manage documentation may be different, but behind the scenes the way each tool does it is similar.
• The new front end programs are most often accessed through a browser now. Even if they are not, some form of web interface is built in.
• Single sourcing and content re-use are the way of the future. 

If you haven’t seen single sourcing or XML coming, you probably need to do a little more reading in the field.  Both these have been coming for a while.