2009.2 – Confluence and Continuous Improvement
Whew!
We’re putting a bow on our 2009.2 release and prepping it to roll out next week. ePublisher 2009.2 includes support for FrameMaker 9 and a new wiki format, Atlassian’s Confluence. We’re a bit delayed from our original ship date of 2009-06-30. This was caused first by our Q1 slip implementing our new contract licensing service. That has been going very well, though there is a bit of FUD out there which we are working to correct. The second cause for the delay involves our documentation. Hooray!
Why the heck would I be happy about a documentation delay?
Because, we’re continuing our commitment to ensure our product and documentation are in sync. We conducted a complete rewrite of the ePublisher documentation set for the ePublisher 2008.3 release. The 2009.2 documentation represents our first “dog food” experience using our wiki based feedback system. We’ve always used ePublisher to create our application help. Now we’re using ePublisher’s publishing flexibility to improve that help. In 2009.1, we encouraged customer feedback by tying ePublisher’s application help to our documentation wiki. The result of that pairing will ship in 2009.2. You can learn more about how we accomplished this through the ePublisher Power Hour for May 2009.
To give you an idea of what this means, consider. The 2009.2 documentation set includes feedback from the documentation wiki (our users), support cases, and tickets created by the development staff. All of this information was made available to our partner, UserAid. We’re able to “lay bare” the entire feedback process so that non-WebWorks personnel can leverage the information to get real work accomplished.
And that’s pretty cool!
2 Responses to “2009.2 – Confluence and Continuous Improvement”
Right, just blame the tech writers for any delays, its common practice. ;O) But seriously, I’m really excited to see the new/revised documentation. I often stumbled over help topics that would have needed a bit more “substance” or background information to be helpful, but I guess its the price to pay when outsourcing documentation work (at least in early phases when writers still need to learn about the products and how they are actually used). I must admit I never used the documentation wiki to tell anybody about the topics in question, but I’ll do this from now on.
Oh, it’s not the tech writers. They can’t be effective without a bit of product.
Very glad to see that you’ll be using the wiki for feedback in the future. Heck, if you think we’ve got a missing topic, feel free to add a new wiki page for it.
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