AntiTechWriter.com

AntiTechWriter is me, Ric Fox — and from time to time a group of my colleagues. We are all dedicated communications professionals whose experience in developing detailed technical documentation, sophisticated online training materials, and web sites optimized for the user experience provide a wide variety of affordable services.

I'm a user assistance strategy and content consultant with almost 20 years experience in the software industry. In 1991, after a one-year stint with an IBM technical publications consultancy, I began my software startup career by going to work for the Austin, Texas company, Tivoli Systems.

Standards

My first assignment was to adapt the Tivoli documentation library to the UNIX System Laboratories (USL) standard markup language, which would accompany the adapted Tivoli software source code. The business goal was to have the software become a standard in the eyes of the distributed systems management industry. During the year-long project, I met fellow tech writer and soon-to-be mentor Barbara Staines. Barbara had been hired to perform similar adaptations of the documentation for the Open Software Foundation (OSF).

Single Sourcing

Barbara approached me with the idea of "single sourcing" the two sets of documentation we each were responsible for delivering. The idea was that we would use a single set of text files containing the documentation text, a set of variables in place of specific names, and a set of generic formatting markup tags. Once the text files had been run through the process, the variable names would be replaced with specific labels and the generic formatting tags would be replaced with formatting specific to both USL and OSF. Using a crude collection of Unix scripts and text files, Barbara and I used the system to produce both sets of documents, while maintaining the integrity of the information source. This valuable lesson has stuck with me since those days in the early 90s, and I have continued to use the single-sourcing approach in my work ever since.

More Standards

I continued working on product documentation for various Tivoli software releases. In 1993, I was assigned to work with Greg Bowman on Specification of Interfaces for Distributed System Administration Applications, which ultimately was accepted by X/Open and the Object Management Group (OMG) as the industry standard for a distributed, object-oriented systems management framework.

The World Wide Web

Around the same time, Tivoli colleague Steve Basile introduced me to the World Wide Web (WWW). The Web was still in its infancy, though the Internet had been around for a long time and people had been using things like gopher and archie and jughead to post and view text. The HTML 1.0 specification didn't include tables, so what would render in the browser was just structured text and sometimes a few GIF images. But you couldn't do any layout. It was really simple stuff.

I viewed the source file for an HTML page and noticed that it contained markup similar to the markup I had used on the USL and OSF projects. Using vi, I learned the simple HTML in a week. I began downloading Apache web servers and setting them up on any systems anyone would let me. I became proficient with the workings of the Web, and when the HTML 2.0 specification came out I campaigned Tivoli Marketing executives Mike O'Rourke and Scott Harmon to let me form a dedicated Web team to provide Internet exposure for Tivoli.

Tivoli co-worker Tim Deagan and I formed the Tivoli web team in 1995, and began transforming the simple, 10-page brochure Web site into a scalable, interactive site with over 600 pages of content and images, winning a Tivoli award for innovation. Later, I moved away from day-to-day management of the site an on to the new task of building and maintaining a robust information architecture that would support the efforts of a web team that had grown from just two people into a group of editors, developers, managers, and IT staff.

Tivoli Business

In the seven-and-a-half years I spent at Tivoli, I not only learned invaluable information delivery techniques and became an early adopter of Web design and development, but I also got to experience first-hand the success of a small startup company as it moved through profitability to an initial public offering (IPO), and finally on to a financially successful merger with IBM.

More Startups

After leaving the hugely successful Tivoli, I continued working for software startups in Austin, gaining experience that can only be achieved by living the life of a startup junkie: aggressive deadlines, sleepless nights, last-minute crises ... all of which had to be overcome. In the end TriActive, Journee, and IronGrid were less financially successful than Tivoli, but they were still rich experiences that I used when I went to the next startup, AlterPoint.

AlterPoint

I joined AlterPoint in August of 2002 as a consultant to write the user documentation for the first release of their new network configuration management software DeviceAuthority. I wrote the first 64-page document for the product in two months. From that point on, I either wrote or had a hand in what became the equivalent of over 1,500 pages of user documentation and customer training materials, while providing innovative changes in the user assistance process — such as mining customer forums to produce new forms of user assistance — as the software development processes changed, as well as providing leadership to a team of communications professionals.

A Little about My Colleagues

From time to time I need help with the work that comes to AntiTechWriter.com. The group of professionals that round out the AntiTechWriter team is made up of lots of different people. We have full-time tech writers and those who work for us on a freelance basis. We have part-time training developers who juggle their work at AntiTechWriter with the demands and rewards of taking care of a family. We have someone who can write PHP for web sites, and we have someone who does web design and artwork. We also have a couple of people who create our desktop help and training videos, as well as an on-call technical editor.

When the demands of AntiTechWriter become too great for one person, it's always a treat to work with my friends and colleagues to get the job done. I hope you'll call on AntiTechWriter to help you with your user assistance needs anytime at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Sincerely,

 

Ric Fox, AntiTechWriter

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