The free version of Google Sites only offers 100 MB of space, but that is enough to get started.

File Cabinets can be used as a central repository to store attachments like images, swf files etc, and linked to specific pages. This allows the changes to the files also to be centralized – one of the basic requirements of a Technical Writing Suite.

Using the various Gadgets available, one can make the site as informative and entertaining as possible. I was finding a bit difficult to embed a Captivate Demo on my page, and a quick search on google helped me to locate the Gadget I need to embed the swf files.

However, all the features are not free. So, if you want to the Google’s world class search engines on your sites, then you will have to buy a Google Mini.

Sharing the site is very simple as you can add as many Owners, Collaborators or Viewers as you like. Ofcourse, you may also keep the site for public viewing. Usually Google Sites provides a default url for all of their sites, that is suffixed by the word/phrase of your choice, but you can also provide a custom domain name, if you already have one.

At present Google sites overs 24 themes to choose from, but I am sure this number is going to increase in future.

The Google Sites Help Forum is already buzzing with activity as more and more people are trying out this cool application comming up with their queries and comments.

Madcap Application Suite

Madcap is the brainchild of people who had moved in from diverse sectors of documentation and can be safely labeled as the complete solution for ALL documentation requirements of a company.

• Flare – The flagship product of Madcap

• Blaze – Watered down version of Flare, with just print capabilities

• XEdit – Even more scaled down version of Flare; no changes to style is possible

• XEdit Review – Free utility, for users to review Flare documents without having to install Flare

Madcap also has an array of tools for multimedia documentation. The chief product in this category is Mimic, which is similar to Captivate or Robodemo. The voice recording functionality of Mimic is available as a stand alone in the form of Echo. And more, we have Capture, that is an Image capture utility, and stands tall when compared with other similar applications like Snag It and Full Shot. Hats off to Mad Cap, for implementing single sourcing in even screen capture applications. Capture is fully integrated with Flare, so you can call Capture from Flare while editing a graphic, change the Master source file of the graphic, and hurray…it gets updated in the project simultaneously.

Flare supports server based features like Analyzer and Feedback. While Analyzer helps the authors to generate technical / efficiency reports, the unique Feedback feature lets the authors get feedback from their readers. So for all online help, the users will get an option to give their feedback to the topic in question, and may be rate too! So, this is taking the online help to an entirely different level, because it becomes interactive. For localization purposes, Madcap proposes Lingo, that is based on the Software as a Service – SaaS model.

Flare has a novel approach to reviewing documents. Its just a click away, and you can not only send for review from right within the application, you can also control the way the document can be reviewed, i.e. just annotations allowed or full editing rights! I am sure there would be a way to mark topics that have gone for review, as we do not want to edit those topics any further till the time we receive the feedback. But that I have to check. Talking of collaboration, Flare supports up to five users, but beyond that, and sensibly enough it opens the gates for any source control application to manage the Flare projects. So you can map your Flare project in say.. VSS and then Check In and Check out between large teams effortlessly.

Lastly, the element level control that Flare provides is amazing. Each block of information can be shifted seamlessly and conditionalized. So, Flare gives a new dimension to conditional text at element level, although it keeps supporting the simple text level conditions as well as at File level.

Do not get let down by the ‘????’ on the status/title bars, thats just Russian font, which your PC does not have.

First we have to know, what is a good techical document. Research shows that most readers look for three things in every technical communication they come across:

1. Is it Complete?
   No one wants half baked cookies
2. Is the information easy to access?
   No one has the time today to browse through the online help, or shuffle pages of a printed manual till eternity!
3. Is it ‘Task Oriented’?
   We no longer want to read a lot of Fundas..do we?..
   “just tell me how to do it, and keep the rest of the ‘techno babble’ with yourself!!”

If the reader finds a technical document to be useful from the above three perspectives, then he/she would always be more inclined to use this document, instead of going to other forms of help, like calling up the service desk, or worse, bugging their co workers.

Keeping in mind a few things before we actually start with the outline of a Help system, saves a lot of time in the future.

1. Know your target audience:
   What is it that they would be looking for in the document? It helps to know as much as possible about them. Like their Job Profile, Education background, and Work environment. The user manual for some machinery in a factory floor will be a lot different than a user guide for an IPod. Similarly, the online help for an ERP system will have a different look than the same for an image editor.
2. How is the reader going to use this document:
   Organize the document around the reader’s tasks. This saves a lot of time for the reader as he need not shuffle through the entire document to fetch out information. Putting together similar tasks together is a step in this direction.
3. Organizing the document around the reader’s needs:
   For printed manuals its generally advisable to use hirachical pattern, where the information cascades down from main headings and sub headings to detailed smaller parts. However, the same approach does not always work for online help. Or should I say, that the fact that online help is much more versatile, it raises the bar of expectation of the readers, so much so that they start to look for something extra in it. So, for online helps, its better to plan for a modular approach. This not only ensures a faster accessibility but also provides different layers of information for different levels of readers. For example, a senior level manager would be more interested in the features of an ERP solution than a middle level executive who in turn would like to know more about how a particular transaction is made.  The modules should be cohesive, independent and loosly coupled.
4. Use Task oriented language:
   This is a must for all technical documentation, but again it’s much better to plan on this ahead as later changing the tone of the entire communication can be very time consuming. By task oriented language, I mean to use the direct speech as often as possible while giving instructions on some procedure. However, for conceptual notes, indirect speech is usually more preffered.
5. Use the bottom up approach:
   In general writing, we reserve the conclusion or gist of the document for the last paragraph. In a technical communique, this information should be right at the top,  just below the heading. The purpose of this style is to tell the reader upfront, what is being explained further down on that page. So, if the user wishes to know more, then he will read on, or else he will move over to the next page.

This site does not make you download any heavy program into your machine,and is up and running in a matter of seconds. Most of its features are presently free for all, but among the premium features are the Full Screen mode, yes that will make you forget completly that you are actually using a browser.
To work on images, you can either pick them up from your own computer or any of the popular image storage sites like Flickr or Photobucket.
I wish this had a image capture facility as well, till then, I am putting the ‘Print Screen’ button to full use !

If for a moment we overlook the concerns of Security and Internet Connectivity, then the most obvious benefit of this scenario is that all one needs at his end is a PC and an Internet connection.

Writely is a step in this direction. This is a completely web based word processor, which gives almost all the functionalities of word processors like MS Word, Open Office, Frame Maker etc. As off now Writely is supported only on IE5.5+, Mozilla 1.4+ and Firefox 1.0.6. Netscape and Opera do not support this application yet.

The application works very smoothly on a broadband connection, i.e. as fast a web application can possibly work. However its performance on a dial up connection is yet to be tested.

Writely allows HTML, ‘Plain Text, MS Word, Open Office and RTF Docuemnts to be directly imported. However, you may just open a blank document in Writely and copy the contents from the clipboard. While you are working on a document, Writely provides a host of Formatting Features, Spell Check, ability to insert comments, pictures, tables, page breaks etc. However, you will have to stay content with the handful of fonts provided by Writely, as you are not allowed to add any fonts of your own. Besides, the possibility of decorating your document with stuff like Word Art, Clip Art as in MS Word is also not yet there. But then we should remember, that this is just the first step. May be Writely wants to preserve these features for its paid services.

But whenever you create a document, you will like to take a print or atleast see a print preview. Both these features are still quite primitive, infact, there is no such thing as Page Setup. So for taking a print you will have to first save the document in doc, rtf or odt format and then make the necessary page settings.

If Writely lacks in the Print department, then it certainly offers a lot more when it comes to the Web. The docs from Writely may be published directly on the web. You can make the document public, so that it may be viewed by all, or else you may also restrict the viewers to a chosen few. All you have to do is to provide the email id’s of the people who are to view the document, and they would receive a mail from Writely, with a temporary password and a link for the document.
The document may also be directly posted into a blog. All blogs are not yet supported but a few popular once are covered. (I have posted this review from Writely) Whatmore, the published documents may be accessed by RSS feeders too.

Since Writely is now a part of Google, we may rest assured as far as the security aspect is concerned. No document is searchable on the web unless it has been given the ‘public’ status.

If more than one person needs to edit the document, then all the owner has to do is to add more users or Collaborators as Writely prefers to call them. Each of them will receive a temporary password and a link to the document and they all can edit the document simultaneously. The document may be shared between as many as 50 people.

One more feature of note is that Version Control is possible and more than one version may be compared at the click of a button.

With all these features, Writely is certainly the best possible solution for anybody looking for a web based word processor. Other similar services like Whiteboard and JotLive are still in the stone age when they are compared with Writely.

Writely still has some work to do as far as features like Headers & Footers, Page SetUp, Columns, User Defined Styles, End Notes and Foot Notes are concerned. But I can’t wait till such things come, Writely is my MS Word of the Web for now and I hope it will be the same for you all too.

The dot com fiasco of 2001 has resulted in
the evolution of a brand new concept of delivering content on the internet,
aptly named as Web2.0, as it is a new avatar of the original style of web
design.

Web2.0 is not exactly a new technology, but rather a set of principles and practices, which govern the design and content of sites which knowingly or unknowingly adhere to these principles.

The Web2.0 era lays more stress on providing Services to its users than dishing out the products in the form of releases as done previously.

Some of most popular services provided by the Web2.0 genre of websites are GMail, Wikipedia, Flickr, Amazon, ebay etc. What is common in all these services is that they are not very heavy applications but rather simple open source technologies, which might be hacked and reused by anybody. These sites rely not only on open source but also use light weight scripting techniques like AJAX.
Scripting languages like java script and perl were once decried by the software engineers as pseudo languages. But now these very scripts have become the backbone of quick and simple web applications.Another essential feature of Web2.0 is that it relies on harnessing collective intelligence. Therefore, these applications are updated and enhanced on a regular basis based on the updates received from the users. The main benefit for the users is that they do not have to wait for new releases to come. Most of these applications may stay in a beta stage for years together. Moreover, this kind of a structure prevents the user from getting stuck between different versions of an application. All users of MS Office know how cumbersome and painstaking it is to maintain different versions of the same document!

Advertising on the internet has also seen some radical changes in the Web2.0 era. Earlier, most online advertisers focused on the major (read very large) websites to promote their wares. And the prevalent mode of advertising was mostly banner ads and pop-ups.
But off late, with the advent of Google’s adsense, small, non intrusive ads can find place in almost any web page. Thus not only the major websites but also the small sites which incidentally comprise the major chunk of the web can also be utilized.
Now-a-days any serious website owner would like to use the viral marketing techniques of adsense to popularize his site, rather than going in for the more conventional methods of advertising.

However, apart from the above mentioned features, what really sets Web2.0 apart is the rapid growth of blogs. Earlier, people used to have personal web pages on which they voiced their thoughts. But Blogs have given a new dimension to the concept of freedom of expression. Use of RSS feeds have given a further boost to blogging as now one can access the blogs of his choice right from the desktop of his computer!Web2.0 also encourages the application builders to break free from the PC Platform and explore the yet mostly uncharted territories of hand held devices, and other communication channels. One such example is iTunes, which lets users download music files to their iPods using their PC as a local database.