"Middleware"

[Ruth Mason/CDR/BSM/MCI <Ruth -dot- Mason -at- MCI -dot- COM>]

Hi all,

My manager asked a co-worker and me to look into something called middleware.

In essence, we're looking for a package in which trainers place information and
the tech writers extract and rewrite that information.

Here's more specific info:

We're tech writers in an internal training department.  We train employees
about complicated internal software systems (both overview and release-specific
training).  We supply training documents, written by the trainers.  The
trainers are currently doing a fairly good job at documenting the systems, but
our department is being asked to provide training for more systems.

In an effort to relieve the trainers of the writing task and free them up to do
more "training-specific" activities, my manager would like the tech writers to
take over more of the writing.

In the future, my manager expects that the trainer will attend the software
development meetings, and will research changes to the requirements, analysis &
design, and similar documents.  Then the trainer would place (type or copy) the
information to be included in the training document into the middleware.  The
tech writers would take this information from the middleware, rewrite and
reorganize it, and produce the training document.

Do you have any experience using a prepackaged or internally developed software
of this sort?  We're on Win95 and WinNT, but if you have used something like
this on another platform, we'd like to hear about that, too.

--Ruthie
ruth -dot- mason -at- mci -dot- com

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