TGIF never sounded so good

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

It's not that I don't like my new job but the learning curve is pretty steep.

All this week, I've been in the "birth agonies" of learning Adobe's documentation and publishing platform. I never realized document generation and management could be so complicated. Basically, all of their documentation is in a specialized repository stored in XML. I can check out documents and edit them in FrameMaker (structured view). The structured view allows me to interact with the XML while still viewing and editing it in a WYSIWYG window. It's *really* difficult to work with, not to mention the fact that I didn't really know what FM structured view was a week ago.

There are multiple other internal Adobe technologies and procedures I have been trying to learn at the same time. My first real attempt was today and it wasn't stellar. Fortunately, the two Adobe people I'm working with know the tools are awkward and are very forgiving. Still, I am *so* glad I have a three day break before having to face all that again.

I'm learning step-by-step but it's like climbing a steep mountain. There's a lot of effort involved in making even modest progress. However, if you keep on going, you are bound to get stronger or in my case, more skilled.

The advantage from my perspective is that I'm documenting everything about the process I'm learning. No one where I work has done that before and so we have certain individuals that know how to use these tools but the collective organization has no clue. If I'm allowed access to the company's SharePoint infrastructure, this could be the first of many documentation programs that, when done, will allow anyone of the writers or editors centralized access to this information in easy, step-by-step format...so newer people than I won't have to go through the agony of reinventing the wheel again and again.

I've proposed to the powers that be that I be allowed, at least on some occasions, to act as the metadocumenter for the documenters...recording their processes so they're not just a matter of "tribal knowledge". I think it's probably my best role. It's appalling for a company that specializes in documenting the processes of other companies to say that they don't have times to document their own.

In a business sense, this is true. Writer, Editors, and Graphics people can only get paid for the hours they are actually writing or researching. There's a lot of wasted time and money just "getting up to speed". I hope they let me fix that.

Sorry about the rant. It's been a tough week and I needed to blow off some steam. Later.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

It's the same at Boson. Thing is, the reason it hasn't been documented is because Josh and I are helping to change the process. We're going through writer and editor training with the staff, and it really takes a lot of time away from the development process. But, as you know, it has to be done... otherwise, the same problems happen again and again.

 

Trip, i've said it before and i'll say it again.. IT is a can of worms, the more you learn, the more you realise there is to learn.. and it 'never' stops

 

Sounds like you've got the right approach and attitude keep it up Trip !

Not only is IT a can of worms but Document Management and Content Management systems are generally a nightmare to work with in my experience.

I've not used Adobes but have used several others and they were all horrible, hopefully in a few more years they will fix all the bugs and add some decent functionality.....

 

You won't use Adobe's unless you do some work for them. Great bunch of people but their systems take quite a bit of learning. Fortunately, even they realize that the learning curve is almost vertical. Still, starting next week, I've got my work cut out for me. If I can pull this off, it will be a great project.

 

Now's the time to go and get totally mullered and not think about work at all