Core Dump

Tom Johnson has an interesting post about writing documentation in a Microsoft SharePoint environment. which allows writers to work with blogs and wikis, among other Web 2.0 features.

Finally, I like the idea of SharePoint as a documentation tool because it’s a medium that’s alive. Most other help authoring tools are static. The Internet might as well not have been invented — it makes no difference. To me, that is the saddest thing about the tech comm. authoring tools. You author in a program on your own computer, and then upload to a file directory somewhere, and then leave the content as is until you update it again. Sorry, but that misses out on everything cool and dynamic and web 2.0 that has happened in the last 10 years.

With SharePoint, your documentation is a living entity, an organism that is constantly growing and breathing online. Like my blog — I receive comments. I look at hits. I can watch visitors in real-time. I publish comments back to it. Readership subscription grows and shrinks (but mostly grows). I see incoming links come back to it, and I link to other sites and people. As insights come to me, I add them to the blog, and other readers come and see and leave comments, and I respond. It is a living, growing, breathing body of information. Help should be the same way, not a static file that gets a push update once every 6 months.

Labels: Microsoft