This month’s Intercom is longer than usual with two mainstream articles, two product reviews, two columns, and also detailed information about the upcoming Technical Communication Summit in Sacramento, California, STC’s 58th annual conference, 15-18 May 2011.
Two of the articles in this issue focus on content management and help documentation. Scott Abel’s article on Help 2.0 explains how the power of the crowd is being used to create socially enabled customer assistance experiences, engaging interactive digital content, useful mobile applications, and powerful location-aware help. He points out how talented professional technical communicators are ideally suited for this Help 2.0 “revolution.” Dick Miller’s article on documentation strategy explains why we need such strategies and provides all the basics for planning, completing, and finding support for your strategy. These are essential skills in any workplace.
This issue also contains two product reviews—Adobe FrameMaker 10 and MadCap Flare 7. Maxwell Hoffmann, an Adobe Certified Expert, interviews FrameMaker inventor Charles Corfield. His article details Corfield’s involvement in the product’s birth and FrameMaker’s success for a quarter of a century. Ed Marshall, well known for his detailed product reviews in Intercom, has published another excellent evaluation of MadCap Flare 7, including everything you’ll ever need to know about the product’s new features.
Sarah O’Keefe has decided to retire as contributing editor of The XML Strategist column. Thank you, Sarah, for your work with Intercom during the past several years. If you’d like to keep up with Sarah, visit her website at www.scriptorium.com. Sarah’s departure also means that Intercom has space for some new columnists. I’m particularly interested in continuing the Ethics Case column and starting a column directed toward up-and-coming technical communicators and their interests. If you or someone you know is interested in becoming a columnist, please email me!
I’m also pleased to announce that this month’s issue of Intercom will be open to the public online throughout April. Spread the word to your colleagues to visit http://intercom.stc.org. And I hope to see you in Sacramento!
—Liz Pohland liz.pohland@stc.org
