Does a job advert have to be well written?
I remember a conversation I had with a particular Recruitment Consultant when I was looking for my current job. Having sent him my CV he commented on how clear and easy to read it was. This was welcome praise, but I surprised him when I said that as a Technical Writer it should be! He was surprised not because of what I’d said, but because he realised how few people applying for Technical Writers jobs knew how to market their skill set in their CV.
It can work both ways of course. Would I have applied for my current job if it had been badly marketed? Definitely not! It was therefore with absolute horror that I saw this job advertisement. Why any sane Technical Writer would even consider applying for such a position is beyond me. Quite apart from the plethora of grammatical and spelling errors, the employer seems to want someone with a completely different skill set from any Technical Writer I know. What do you think?
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RoboHelp 9 to SharePoint: OK but did you spot anything else?
Yesterday my post centered on the first RoboHelp 9 sneak peek video released by Adobe. Focusing on the new review work flow, it seems to have generated a lot of excitement in the technical communications industry. Although the video centered largely on the Acrobat.com cloud, a lot of people were more interested in the ability to use Microsoft SharePoint as their portal for the review files.
As a reaction to this, Senior Product Evangelist for the Adobe Technical Communications Suite, RJ Jacquez, today updated his blog post to bring RoboHelp users up to date with some other new functionality available in Adobe RoboHelp 9. If you look on his blog post, you’ll now find a second short video which describes how in Adobe RoboHelp 9 you can publish your WebHelp output directly from your project to your Microsoft SharePoint site. It is well worth a second look.
Eagle eyed viewers of RJ’s video may notice the following when looking at the Adobe RoboHelp 9 user interface:
- The WebHelp Single Source Layout dialog looks different. In RoboHelp 9 the options have been reorganized so that like minded options are grouped together. This was not always the case in previous versions.
- RJ uses a “Save & Generate” button. This new button negates the need to save the SSL properties and then click “Generate” to generate the output. It does both in one hit.
These may be small things but will make my life a whole lot easier and hopefully yours as well. What is more, these changes were made as a result of interaction with actual front line RoboHelp users on the product’s beta test team.
Note: A previous blog post of mine highlighted some of the issues with publishing output to SharePoint in previous versions of RoboHelp. I’m glad to see these no longer apply.
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Adobe RoboHelp 9: Content reviews made easier
Last week Adobe’s Senior Product Evangelist, RJ Jacquez, released his sneak peek video of what was coming up in the new release of Adobe FrameMaker 10. Shortly after, Adode’s Product Manager for RoboHelp, Ankur Jain, announced support for Microsoft Word 2010 in the forthcoming Adobe RoboHelp 9. Now RJ Jacquez has released the first of a series of sneak peek videos highlighting one of the new work flows possible in Adobe RoboHelp 9.
Focusing on reviewing content, this is one of the areas in the new version of RoboHelp that I am most excited about. Getting content reviewed has always been one of the most troublesome experiences of my technical writing career. If my conversations with fellow professionals are anything to go by, this is true for most of us. Quite apart from getting the content reviewed, getting it into a deliverable that can be sent for review was quite another. Even when a deliverable was produced, what would you do with it? Email just doesn’t quite cut the mustard, especially where a shared review was concerned. Oh and what about trying to apply all those comments from multiple versions of a single file?
In this sneak peek RJ highlights how Adobe RoboHelp 9 had additional integration with Adobe Acrobat X Professional that allows you to:
- Create PDFs of your content.
- Save PDFs for review to either Acrobat.com, a Microsoft SharePoint workspace or a WebServer.
- Automatically generate emails to reviewers informing them of a review process.
The reviewers add their comments and suggested changes directly to the PDF using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader X application that can be downloaded from the Adobe site. They do not need access to the professional version of Acrobat as the functionality that allows them to, in effect, edit the PDF is inside the generated PDF. Any review comments are stored inside the PDF ready to be imported into your Adobe RoboHelp project. Once imported, you can see all the comments and decide whether to accept or reject them.
RJ’s video focuses mainly on his use of the Acrobat.com cloud to perform the review. You can forgive him focusing on this as it is a very useful portal for all sorts of stuff, but as a Microsoft SharePoint user it is the ability to lock our review into one of its workflows that really interests me. We currently have a workflow that works pretty well inside Microsoft SharePoint, but which requires a fair bit of manual work to identify to the reviewers what to review. It is Adobe RoboHelp’s ability to flag the actual content to be reviewed with a couple of mouse clicks that really makes a difference. In fact I would say that the usefulness of the Topic Status has finally come of age. Take a look and let me know what you think.
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Why Technical Writers should write exam questions
It has been awhile since I took a formal exam that resulted in a qualification, but I can remember the fear I had that I’d turn over the exam paper only to find I couldn’t answer a single question. If I had, would I have answered any of the questions below as these students have? I doubt it, but these rather humorous examples of how not to answer exam questions highlights the somewhat lax attitude to setting them.
Question One
Here we have an example of how the question setter has a pre-defined answer in mind but has failed to take into account the lateral thinkers of this world. Of course the answer is (I think) technically correct although with 50+ signatories, some may well have had to squeeze theirs in somewhere.
Question Two
Next we have a plain lazy question. Find “X” where? Once again the answer is technically correct but the question fails to ask the correct question. As someone who was at odds with most of my peers at school in actually liking algebra but who equally found it kind of pointless, I can quite understand why someone would want to answer the question in the way they did.
Question Three
This is my personal favorite. Technically you could argue that the logic Peter used to answer the question was not implemented with sufficient vigour. You see the gap between the opening and closing brackets (and the “n”) is the same in each example. Still that would be splitting hairs.
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Microsoft Word 2010 Support in RoboHelp versions
As someone with a relationship with Adobe that is closer than a mere software provider to user, I am maybe more aware than some about the work going on behind the scenes in that company. This week it certainly seems like things are being ratcheted up a gear or two. Yesterday I blogged about Adobe’s FrameMaker 10 sneak peek. It is doing the rounds in preparation for that product’s release, whenever that will be. Now comes news from Adobe about support for Microsoft Word 2010 in another of its flagship technical communication products, Adobe RoboHelp.
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