Our Puget Sound Chapter chapter year is now into its second half. We hope you will participate in the many activities we have planned. Our chapter currently has over 600 members and another 400 people we keep in contact with. Over 400 people have participated in chapter activities this year.

Our chapter welcomes you whether or not you are a member. In our last newsletter, I wrote an editorial regarding my personal views on how to choose the method of supporting our chapter and your own interests.

Our Saturday afternoon hands-on computer workshops include Embedded Help with JavaScript, DITA and Structured Authoring, and an Introduction to Usability Testing.

Upcoming monthly meeting topics include From Expense to Asset - Making Content Powerful.

We appreciate the participation of all the people who attended our Holiday Party at the Science Fiction Museum. The heavy rain that evening forced many people to miss the event.

The weather was fine for our Competition Showcase. Over 200 people registered to meet and talk with the recipients of Distinguished and Excellence awards.

We are currently looking for members to fill a variety of roles in the chapter for the period of July through June '08. This is a great opportunity to help your profession and the Society. The chapter can't function without a constant infusion of new officers and committee managers. Please contact Joe Welinske if you are interested.

Madcap Software is a young company, with a bunch of familiar faces. Their flagship product, Flare, is quickly becoming the market leader in authoring and documentation. Started by the former members of the RoboHelp development team, Madcap Software has created a new suite of tools that go well beyond the old RoboHelp functionality. Flare is a thoroughly redesigned product, and is being adopted by large and small companies alike. From Chevron to Xerox, more than 1,000 companies use Flare. So, what is making Madcap Flare the choice for help authoring?

Madcap Software, located in San Diego, California, was founded two years ago by former eHelp/Macromedia staff after Macromedia ended the RoboHelp program and any future development. MadCap wanted to create a company that would continue the legacy of RoboHelp's intuitive authoring application. Madcap's first goal was to make sure users who currently work with RoboHelp would have somewhere to turn as RoboHelp ages and technology changes. With thousands of RoboHelp users, a replacement was needed.

Second, they wanted to create a new authoring tool, one that would overcome some of the weaknesses that RoboHelp, and other tools, had shown over the years.

Flare is not just another version of RoboHelp. It is a brand new program that builds on the team's experience with building RoboHelp, and uses a completely new code base. As version after version of RoboHelp came out, the team found it harder and harder to manage the code effectively and bring needed changes to customers. RoboHelp was no longer flexible and developers were finding it difficult to meet the needs of users.

With Flare, Madcap had the chance to start fresh. The new code not only allowed the team to create a new product, it allowed them to quickly make improvements to Flare. For example, version one was released in March 2006, and within six months they released version two, which had a significant number of new features. On the other hand, when they were at RoboHelp change was slow. The Japanese version was also always a version behind the English language version. Now they can localize Flare for the Japanese market within a couple of months, and future releases will be concurrent with English language releases. The ability to make these changes so quickly allows Madcap to respond better to customer needs and the market, providing a robust flagship product.

Madcap also uses this flexibility to an advantage in their commitment to technical support. Their technical support team is located in the same building as their developers, ensuring ample communication between customers, technical support, and developers. Madcap keeps its support local with the belief that technicians who know the product and who have such close access to the development team, can deliver superior service. Moreover, with their quick product cycles, they can rapidly resolve problems customers are having or add enhancements customers need.

But what about the product? What is new and what have they improved over RoboHelp? First, Flare is designed to be flexible, open, and standards-compliant. It stores all of its text in XML. Gone are proprietary formats that force users to create clunky methods to move text between different formats. Moreover, all files are located on the file system, not in a database, which, again, offers simplicity.

Authors, though, do not need to know any XML to use Flare. Instead, they can create content as if they were in Word. When finished, they can repurpose the content using the full power of XML. Flare uses innovative Structure Bars to graphically represent the elements in a document. An author simply needs to drag text elements around the document and drop it in a new location to change the text's location in the document and the XML schema.

Flare is not only for authoring new content; it has an extensive set of import tools allowing users to import Word, FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and HTML documents. It converts them to XML, insuring legacy content is repurposed in a proprietary-free format. In addition to importing content, Flare allows users to treat Word and FrameMaker files as source files. Users can do all of their work in those programs, and then use Flare's Easy Sync to leverage the power of Flare and XML.

Finally, Flare is designed to be a robust singe sourcing tool. It offers support for variables, snippets of reusable text, multiple TOCs,  and conditional text. Each of these allow authors to create one source for multiple targets. When coupled with the ability to create .chm files, Help for .NET applications, FrameMaker, PDF, Word, and cross-browser and cross-platform help, Flare can tailor content to many needs.

The future of Madcap and Flare looks bright. Sales exceeded Madcap's expectations last year. With revenues growing at an average of 50 percent month-over-month for the last half of 2006, Flare is quickly becoming the industry choice. As CEO Anthony Oliver noted, sales continue to grow as technical communicators discover the superior product and support. With a continued commitment to quality, continued innovation that is difficult for competitors with legacy code bases to keep up with, and great customer and technical support service, Madcap looks to be a major player in help authoring for some time.

What is your official position on the STC Board?

I am currently serving as the Scholarship Manager.

What are your official duties as a member of the board?

Board members attend a monthly meeting, are encouraged to attend every STC meeting, carry out the duties of their particular area, and provide status reports to the rest of the board.  For the scholarship manager, I manage getting the information out to the various educational institutions, assemble and chair the selection committee, and work with the successful candidates upon selection to ensure they receive their funding, and also to advertise the results of the scholarship applications.

How long have you been in this position? How long have you been a member of STC?

This is my second term as the scholarship manager. I was new to the position for the 2005 scholarship and am currently working on the 2006 scholarship.
I was one of the founding members of the Canada West Coast Chapter and have been an STC member for about 25 years. I was awarded Associate Fellow status in 1998 and have been a member of the PSC chapter since 2001.

What is your job/career outside of STC?

I've worked as a technical writer, technical, technical editor, and technical communication manager for almost 30 years, mainly working in the high technology sector in Vancouver, Canada. I worked for an acquisition company that Microsoft bought in 2001 and have been working on the Exchange Server team as a lead and a technical writer on that team.

Do you feel like the work you do with STC benefits your career in any way? Or vice versa? 

Being an STC member early on in my career was extremely beneficial. When I first starting doing technical writing in Vancouver, there were no training programs whatsoever, so I read and learned everything from STC publications (even read the STC Journal cover to cover!). It was of enormous help also during the early years when I found myself as a lone writer. By reading, going to conferences, and attending STC chapter meetings, I was able to learn about the best practices in the profession and was able to educate my employers about issues such as standards and trends.  I continue to learn through reading publications like Intercom, and to keep up with what's going on in the profession through conference attendance and chapter meetings.

What have you done to bring new things to the STC table?

I've tried to share some past experiences from another chapter, when they did something that seemed like a good approach. 

What do you enjoy the most about STC?

I enjoy the company and discussions with other people in my field. At this point in my career, having been in technical communication for quite a long time, the social part is the most enjoyable part for me.

If you were to meet someone who was interested in filling your post next year on the STC Board, what kind of skills would you tell them they needed to have? What advice would you pass along to them?

I think the most important thing you can bring is enthusiasm, and ability to get people to consensus. Most of the scholarship manager tasks are not difficult, and are of an administrative nature. But you have to feel comfortable gathering a good team of people, and then working through the applications and coming to agreement on the overall best candidate for a scholarship.

The venue was great. The food was stellar. The cost (free!) was just right, the invitations were open to members and non-members, and the date was convenient. All was set for STC's annual holiday party, with over 200 guests registering for the event before December 18th. Yes, a night of drunken debauchery, table-dancing, and tech-comm networking was clearly in MY foreseeable future.

And then, the storm hit.

Looking back, it was the worst among many miserable weather experiences that we Puget Sounders would meet with over the next couple of months. The weather in December was more than a bummer - it left tens of thousands without power for days, some for weeeks. Traffic was snarled for hours, causing otherwise determined STC partiers to finally give up the ghost and stay home.

Those hardy technical communicators that soldiered on through the rain and wind were met with a subdued but elegant party. STC volunteers worked hard to set up for the event.

Set at the Science Fiction Museum at the EMP, STC attendees were able to mingle in the main party room, enjoying food and beverages, or take a tour of the museum downstairs. I did both, and had a lovely time. My date was able to revel in extreme geekdom, explaining the details of various Star Trek costumes and storylines.

A good time was had by all that managed to attend, and hopefully next year, we won't be met with the same wrath of Mother Nature.

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STC's 2007 National Elections are gearing up. Campaign emails have already started flowing in to our newsletter. Although it is not our policy to publish individual campaign information, the Puget Sound Chapter encourages all STC members to view the elections web page and carefully read all of the candidates' platforms to prepare for voting.

Elections will open in March, with ballots and instructions mailed to Society members.

The Puget Sound Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication is very happy to be able to say that we have as a sponsor the company that produces the tools that (outside of authoring and publishing software) are probably used by more technical communicators than any other.

To begin with, TechSmith is familiar to many tech writers and illustrators as the world’s leading producer of software for capturing screen shots — both still (SnagIt) and video (Camtasia Studio). These fine tools help us communicate to our audiences more effectively, whether in printed or online documentation.

Among their other products are two very useful tools for analyzing product usability and customer experience — Morae and the web-based service UserVue.

SnagIt, Camtasia, and Morae can be used standalone, or developers may incorporate them into their own software. They have been localized into five languages and are available either directly or through resellers in over 30 countries.

TechSmith has been in business for 20 years. I encourage you to check out the latest versions of their products (trial versions are available for most) at TechSmith’s web site.

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http://www.stc.org/edu/scholarshipInfo01.asp

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In my first technical writing job in 1983, I worked for a small, startup engineering company that developed and manufactured hardware test equipment. The company was divided into three groups: Sales & Marketing, Engineering & Support, and Manufacturing.

In the one year I worked at the company, the three of us technical writers were moved back and forth between the Sales & Marketing group and the Engineering & Support group because the VPs of each group couldn’t figure out what to do with us. Couldn’t our documents help sell the product? Then put us on the Sales team! Couldn’t we edit marketing materials and trade journal articles in our spare time? Assign us to the Director of Marketing! No, wait—we needed to be involved in the technical details of the product as it was being developed. And our technical documents should serve as reference for the support staff. Move over, engineers, and make room for us liberal arts types in your geeky circles! At one point, we were about to be assigned to the VP of Manufacturing because we did, after all, “manufacture” (a.k.a. print) a physical product (manuals) that had to be packaged and shipped along with the hardware. Fortunately, our team leader successfully argued against that move.

Little did I know at the time that this small company’s confusion about technical writers represented a microcosm of the high-tech world I would work in for the rest of my career. But now I can see why. Technical writers are an eclectic bunch. I’ve known them to have backgrounds as varied as philosophy professor to marine sergeant, or circuit board assembler to lawyer. It’s easy to put engineers in the engineering group, sales representatives in the sales group, and so on. But writers? It’s hard to pinpoint where their skills and contributions best fit into the organization. A common question is whether to centralize the writers in a Technical Publications department or decentralize (embed) the writers in pre-existing groups. 

High-tech companies often make the common mistake of viewing technical writers’ sundry backgrounds, skills, and personal strengths as miscellaneous and peripheral to the business. But it is nevertheless a mistake. What technical writers do contribute—or can, given the opportunity—spans all of these functional groups. By definition, technical writers create a factual, objective message about a product to assist users. The message can take the shape of several different deliverables: GUI designs, message wording, help systems, documents, and Web pages.

When technical writers are fully engaged in all the core functions of the business, they can provide a glue that holds Sales and Marketing, Engineering, and Client Services together. Regardless of where technical writers reside in the organization, they can help create a satisfying experience for the customer, from presales to point-of-use. With embedded technical writers, each writer has to address that challenge individually. In a centralized Technical Publications
group, the manager’s most strategic goal is to work toward integrating the technical writers’ expertise into where it fits best to benefit the company and its customers.

Since 1983, Marylyn King has demonstrated the value of innovation as a technical writer, a manager, and a director. You can reach Marylyn at MarylynGK at aol.com. This article was originally printed in the Capital Letter.

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STC recently hosted its annual competition showcase to display its members’ finest work.  The creators of the 35 top projects within the Art, Publications and Online categories were on display at the Red Lion Hotel in Bellevue.  The event provided a chance for STC affiliates to view their colleagues’ work and gather ideas for future projects. 

The focus of the evening was to view the tremendous work of the competition showcase winners and to present the awards for Best in Show.  All entries were astounding, but three stood out above the rest.  Each Best in Show winner was brought to the front of the room with a round of applause from their peers and given a plaque for their accomplishments in their particular field.  One additional honor was bestowed for Creative Vision, which was a new category for the 2007 event. 

Volt’s Bothell office, which specializes in staffing Technical Communication professionals, sponsored the event.  Attendees were treated to a raffle where the grand prize drawing was for an Apple iPod, which was generously donated by Volt.  The event provided an elegant setting, an excellent dinner and inspired those who attended.

The STC competition showcase was an inspiring night for all who are passionate about the Technical Communication field.  STC along with Volt put on an amazing evening and event!

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