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Subject:RE: Are you on the cutting edge? From:"HALL Bill" <bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 17 Oct 2002 08:50:23 +1000 (EST)
Steven Brown wants to know who thinks their departments are on the cutting edge where technical writing is concerned: "Is single sourcing, expert systems, and XML just the stuff of myth and conjecture? Are most of us simply churning out simple online help and printed manuals?
Given that it seems to take forever to convince management to commit funds to the tools, Tenix is pretty close to being a world leader. We have the view that technical writing is an integral part of an overall engineering and knowledge management framework required to support a fleet of products with operational knowledge through their entire in-service life cycle.
There is already a reasonable amount of information on the open Web about what we have done with ship maintenance documentation and some of the ways we are extending on these lessons learned. Doing a Google on [tenix xml maintenance documentation] gives a picture of some of our efforts in this direction. Our major successes to date are "single source" solutions. We are working to deploy the infrastructure to give us full capabilities to manage shared content using a "virtual document" approach.
We are working with our content management system supplier (http://www.teratext.com.au - or for North America/Europe - http://www.teratext.com) and integrator (http://www.aspect.com.au) to extend what we have done for the ANZAC Ships into a generic document and content management system (GDCMS). Based on existing capabilities in the core TeraText product, GDCMS will able to work with a variety of document formats (e.g., RTF, SGML, XML, graphics, etc.), such that we can readily deploy the GDCMS as a knowledge capture and dissemination portal both across our several divisions and for defence clients' needs.
We have a clear vision what we want, and continue to progress towards that vision, but pioneering is a hard slog.
Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Strategy and Development Group
Tenix Defence
Nelson House, Nelson Place
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Australia
Tel: +61 3 9244 4820 (Direct)
+61 3 9244 4986 (Office)
URL: http://www.tenix.com
Mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com
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