Technical Writer

I mentioned in an earlier post how WordPress really was a simple content management system, and other people have said the same thing, including:

• David Peralty over at Blogging Pro
• Tom Johnson over at I’d Rather Be Writing
• ZMAng over at BlogHelper
• and lots of others.

Maria Langer is a lady who redesigned her commercial site, Flying M Air, as a WordPress CMS.  What’s more, she blogged about how she did it.

Take a look.  She’s done a great job.

I took the plunge and installed SharePoint 2007 on my home PC last night.

As my home operating system is Vista, I installed a virtual PC first.  (Easy enough to install, using the instructions from Microsoft.)   After this I installed Windows Server 2003, then SQL Server 2005 and finally, MOSS 2007 on top of that.

It wasn’t too hard, although it took all day.  I had two sets of instructions to follow.  I used SharePoint Reporter’s How to create a MOSS 2007 Virtual PC: The Whole Nine Yards, with Eli Robillard’s How to Build a SharePoint Development Machine as a reference, particularly for some of the Virtual PC settings.  (Robillard used a different virtual PC, which is why I didn’t use his instructions, but they were both similar.)

The instructions were a dream to use.  They told me exactly what I needed to do, and when.  They were everything good documentation should be.

Although I had never installed Windows Server or SQL Server before, I had not trouble setting it up.  There was enough information to carry out each task, but there was no unnecessary clutter in them either.

Everything was exactly where I needed it, when I needed it.

I ran into difficulties right at the end, after MOSS 2007 had been loaded, but I suspect that had more to do with the fact that I went out to dinner with friends part way through installing SharePoint and tried to finish the install four hours later, after a civilised amount of wine had been consumed.  Still, I was on familiar territory then, so I ditched the instruction and winged it.

I started at 10:00 am, and finished at midnight.  None of that time was spent troubleshooting, it was all spent following instructions and waiting for installs—and dinner, of course.

That’s a pretty impressive piece of documentation.

Over at I’d Rather Be Writing, Tom Johnson wrote about how  watching a user follow your instructions was one of the best writing tips ever.  Tom wrote about how the user scans and glances, rather than reads, and how you really need to simplify the words so that the user doesn’t have to read.

It was not long after this that I had to find out how to create views in InfoPath, so I went along to Microsoft’s site and found the training module So that’s how: Great InfoPath features for customizing controls. 

[Just an aside here. I don’t know how I found it the first time, because I unwisely failed to bookmark it and have just spent half an hour (that’s right, 30 minutes) trying to find the link again.  Most frustrating.  I didn’t think to look for Great InfoPath features for customizing controls. I was searching for views or buttons or dates, which I knew it covered.  I don’t know about you but I seldom find anything direct in the Microsoft site itself. I always have to use an external search engine, such as Google, to discover things.]

Anyway, I found the tutorial, and it’s pretty good, as are many of the tutorials on the revamped Office site, if you can find them.  Each section contains introductory audio/visual text, which you can read, and then allows you to switch to the program where you can follow the instructions to learn how to carry out whatever you are being taught.  Afterwards, you got a quiz with simple questions to cover what you had learned.

I skipped through the introductions, just clicked Next and Next until I got to the Practice in InfoPath buttons.  As I did this I remembered Tom’s article, and how his user just scanned and glanced at extraneous information.  This was the very same thing, and I am generally someone who reads manuals and other material—but not, obviously, when I just want to learn how to do something.

The introductions were well written and well presented.  They wouldn’t have taken long to read/listen.

I also skipped the quiz at the end of each section. Again, they were well done, but I just didn’t bother.

I was a standard user in action.

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p.s. Funnily enough, after I had written this blog, but not posted it, Tom posted an article on another of the Microsoft tutorials—A perfect model for online tutorials: MS Visio Shapes course.  I have to agree with him.  These are good models for online tutorials, both the Visio and the InfoPath one.  If I had designed and written these I would be very happy.