LEAD STORY:
S1000D: Six MORE Reasons to Consider It for Your TechDocs

OTHER NEWS:
"Don't worry, plenty of time to get that project done on time"

The Paperless Cockpit: Yet another reason to use S1000D

Managing your Vendor's Demos

Beyond the Paperless Office to the Paperless Life

This is Gonna Change Everything

GREAT WEB SITES YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER SEEN:
Early Americas Digital Archive

ASIDES:
:) Turns 25

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

FAVORITES:
Popular articles from recent issues

EXTRA:
Upcoming conferences

LEAD STORY

S1000D: Six MORE Reasons to Consider It for Your TechDocs

In 2005 we featured, S1000D:Five Reasons Why. And now, Wayne Gafford, Deputy Director of DOD's Advanced Distributed Learning Job Performance Technology Center presents six more reasons why it makes sense for complex technical data. If that's what you're working with, S1000D may well be the best game in town.

If you're wondering what's going on with S1000D-who's actually using it, what for, and how extensively-that's going to be the topic of an upcoming DCLnews article (to subscribe click here).

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OTHER NEWS

"Don't worry, plenty of time to get that project done on time"

Have you noticed that no matter how much buffer is built into a project schedule, it never seems to be enough? Why doesn't adding more buffer improve the odds of completing a project early or on time? This fascinating article suggests that it's precisely the padding that might actually cause the project delays because of two conditions you may have noticed, but never heard named before: Student Syndrome and Parkinson's Law.

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The Paperless Cockpit: Yet another reason to use S1000D

In this blog post Joel Amoussou reviews the FAA's criteria for quality mission-critical documentation in the airplane cockpit (a nice checklist that, by the way, would be useful for many industries) and relates them to the S1000D approach. According to Joel Amoussou, "S1000D provides rules and guidance for the look and feel, and printed output from an Interactive Electronic Technical Publication (IETP)." These guidelines may go beyond what the FAA requires, making S1000D standard even more rigorous. The Air Transport Association (ATA) has been working to harmonize technical data requirements with S1000D and has adopted it as "the next generation aircraft digital data standard." Can the Electronic Flight Bag be far behind?

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Managing your Vendor's Demos

Uggh! Another vendor droning on about how their product is the right one for your organization! How do they know? How do you know, when most of the demo time is spent giving you a company history? Here are some tips to get rid of time wasters and cut to the core of what you really need to know about the product being offered. After all, it's your time (and money), so use it the way you want. Blogger, Seth Gottlieb, has tips on managing vendor demonstrations such as: Start with a short list of vendors and give them a clearly defined list of what you want to know. Score each vendor during the demo while the information is fresh; get feedback from the audience immediately, and much more in between.

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Beyond the Paperless Office to the Paperless Life

Tired of junk mail, paper cuts, returning phone calls? It's not that hard to strive for a paperless life using a few simple tools like LifeLock and Pinger. If, as the author of this article suggests, you were offered a million dollars to live without things like voicemail and paper money for a month, could you do it? It's probably easier than you think. You may not be able to implement all of this, but there are some good ideas here that you can use.

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This is Gonna Change Everything

Remember the line from Jerry Mcguire where Jerry tells Dorothy, "This is gonna change everything." Her response: Promise? Well, an innovative pricing structure by one content management system vendor could promise to change a lot, if not everything, about how we pay for CMS. Read Ann Rockley's advice on how improving efficiency could make this type of pay-by-minute pricing more cost effective and give organizations important metrics on the amount of time they really spend on a content management strategy.

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GREAT WEB SITES YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER SEEN

Early Americas Digital Archive

The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is an unusual collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. The archive has two primary databases; the EADA Database and the "Gateway to Early American Authors on the WEB" which includes writings such as Jonathan Carver's three-year, five-thousand mile travel accounts through the interior of North America, scanned from a microfiche of the original 1789 publication. Or The Salem Witchcraft Papers, verbatim transcripts of the legal documents of the Salem witchcraft outbreak of 1692, converted to mark-up language.

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ASIDES

:) Turns 25

In 1982 Scott E. Fahlman was the first to use :-) to express humor in electronic communications. As we've all experienced, tone is hard to express in email-and with email, when the recipient doesn't "get it" it can cause big trouble. In an attempt to create a "joke marker" during an on-line discussion about the limits of online humor, Fahlman proposed the use of the now famous character sequence. Twenty years later the simple suggestion has grown into an entire language of keystrokes and animated smiley faces. Who could have known :-o

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QUOTE OF THE MONTH

Popular articles from recent issues

Cooking up CMS Success: Emma Hamer on the Human Side of Content Management System Implementation
http://www.dclab.com/content_management_interview.asp

S1000D: Five Reasons Why
http://www.dclab.com/s1000d_reasons.asp

What Fast Food Managers Have and Tech Pub Managers Need
http://www.dclab.com/content_quality.asp

DITA, S1000D, and SCORM: Unlocking their Interoperability
http://www.dclab.com/scorm_s1000d_dita.asp

EXTRA

Upcoming conferences

2007 ATA e-Business Forum Visit the DCL Exhibit October 17-19, 2007, Miami Beach Resort and Spa, Miami, Florida.

The LavaCon Conference on Advanced Technical Communication and Project Management Visit the DCL Exhibit October 27-30, 2007, Astor Crowne Plaza Hotel on Canal Street, New Orleans, LA

Gilbane Boston Conference Don Bridges in panel discussion on "DITA: One Size Fits All for Technical Publishing?" November 29, 2007, Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA

DIA EDM Visit the DCL Exhibit February 5-7, 2008, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Philadelphia, PA