RE: Mechanics of collaborating with Marketing

[Christi Carew <ccarew -at- rangestar -dot- com>]

>From your post, it sounds like you are not actually part of marketing. I am.
Marketing does do all the content at my company, and that "marketing" is me.
I am the most technical person in our marketing department.

> I'm the first technical writer in my company, and I'm
> trying to create and implement a documentation
> strategy where there has never been one. Marketing has
> generally created all "documentation" that goes to
> customers, and despite my incredible skills and
> expertise (he said with a friendly wink), The Powers
> That Be have determined that marketing should continue
> to do so, with me focusing primarily on overall
> strategy and content.

This sounds like you'll be doing content, but marketing will do layout. Yes?
Works for me. I like doing layout, but for the types of docs that we most
often produce, someone with a bit more design background can do a better
layout than I can (though I'm learning).

Working with or in marketing is not the evil hell that many people make it
out to be-- especially if the product or service is highly technical.
It sounds like you could simply consider marketing as part of your team.
Ignore the titles and work with them.

> I'm interested in the mechanics of how you collaborate
> on documentation. Specifically, does marketing take
> your content and publish it via DTP tools such as
> PageMaker or Quark? If so, do you use FrameMaker to
> author the content and then simply provide an RTF or
> text file to marketing? Also, who creates the index?

I can't help too much on these specifics. Our docs aren't long enough to
warrant indexes or Frame (though I've used Frame in the past and am an
advocate).

Christi Carew
Product Marketing Documentation Specialist
ccarew -at- rangestar -dot- com
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