Hurray! I get to write. July 14th – July 18th

I began this week testing the last of the context sensitive help. Same old same old. On Tuesday I started a new project that included collaborating with my aunt. There is a feature in NX called "roles". These roles can be system default or user created and they are basically pre-packaged user interface designs. My project is to edit the help on the topic and include features that were left out when the original documentation was written. This is my first real opportunity to create new content for the online help.

First I went through the original documentation. I realized that the individual help pages (or articles) should be organized differently because initially, there was no real rhyme or reason to the order that they were in. After this I began to test each function available (creating new roles, sharing roles over the network, etc.) using the existing documentation as a guide. After this I prepared a short document outlining the changes to the organization and content that I wanted to make.

Next, I met with my aunt to discuss the changes that needed to be made. She included a lot of features that she needed the users to be aware of that were not in the original documentation. Much of the discussion was on the topic of sharing roles. She regularly deals with customers and this is one of the major features concerning roles that customers have had a lot of trouble with.

I've begun to transfer my text from the word document that I had created to separate .XML files for each article. This required learning to use the XML editing software that the office uses called ArborText. It includes a lot of different tags but I've only used a handful so far. What's nice is that the office has templates available for the different kinds of help pages that the tech writers have to create.

The next step is to have someone check my articles for the correct content. After that I have to get it reviewed by a peer and then some time early next week I should have a conference call with our editor.