In this interview, I chat with Lance Dockins, Doc-To-Help user, about content management, continuous publishing models, authoring in HTML and D2HML’s flexibility, choosing Doc-To-Help over RoboHelp, modular help projects, NetHelp, and more.  To listen, go to:  Doc-To-Help Videos, Podcasts, and Screenshots … or read on.  ♥ Nicky

Nicky Bleiel:  Welcome to our inaugural Doc-To-Help podcast. I’m Nicky Bleiel, Doc-To-Help’s Lead Information Developer. Our guest today is our newest MVP, Most Valuable Professional, Lance Dockins, of VRAZER.

Hi Lance!

Lance Dockins: Hi Nicky.

Nicky:  Congratulations on your MVP designation, and welcome to the extended Doc-To-Help team.

Lance:  Thanks, Nicky. It’s a great honor to have been selected as an MVP. Having used Doc-To-Help for several years now, I’m really excited about the fact that I’m now an MVP.

Nicky:  Good to hear. We are absolutely thrilled to have you. Now, when did you start working with Doc-To-Help?

Lance:  I started working with Doc-To-Help about four-and-a-half or five years ago.

Nicky:  And once you became more and more familiar with it, over the years, what was it that kept you using it and drew you to it?

Lance:  Well, yeah. In my case it definitely was a situation where we were drawn back to Doc-To-Help more than anything else, because about three years ago it was, the documentation manager at this software company had become disenchanted with Doc-To-Help. Because he had fallen, I don’t know, two or three versions behind and that’s a pretty significant fall back when it comes to Doc-To-Help. Because there’s so many things that come out in each new version. 

So he started experimenting a little bit, started particularly looking at RoboHelp as a possible solution. In time, I started digging around in newer versions of Doc-To-Help. Because I knew that you guys had started adding HTML source documents and a variety of other things as well.

So, as I kept working with our existing Doc-To-Help projects, and he was experimenting on a few of our projects with RoboHelp. It became apparent to me that we could just stick with Doc-To-Help. But move over to HTML source docs to solve a lot of the problems that we were dealing with at that time.

And so, I persuaded him to drop RoboHelp and stick with Doc-To-Help. I think he was extremely happy with the outcome of me having done that.

Nicky:  Awesome. What HTML editor did you work in?

Lance:  Well, now there’s the editor that’s built right into Doc-To-Help. But at the time I was using Dreamweaver.

Nicky:  Oh, OK. Working in (Adobe) Dreamweaver kind of sets you apart from any of the current Doc-To-Help MVPs because it’s a different perspective. Because Doc-To-Help is mainly known for its support of Microsoft Word. But, as you mentioned, you were one of the early adopters of the HTML support and the support for XHTML source content. 

Now, why did you choose to go in that direction?

Lance:  Well I’d say, in a word, flexibility. We would have the exact same topic content in five different manuals with maybe a product name changed up.

So, if we had to go in and update one of those topics in one of those manuals. The odds are strong, because of the way our product cycles work. That the same update would have had to have been made in five or six different places. And the fact that you could use D2HML. To put in conditional blocks for what HTML is going to appear in what project and what format of the help.

We would not have been able to pull off a lot of what we did to modularize our help. Or, actually, we put together a search engine that indexed all of our help. And aggregated that with all of our other tech support bulletins and so forth. And served that out to our clients and internally as well. So, we were looking, when we went to HTML, for a pretty robust solution.

Nicky:  Well, just to back up to explain to everyone, D2HML is “Doc-To-Help markup language.”  That’s a fancy way of saying it’s a way to create links, as you said conditional text, inline text, keywords. It’s just a very simple way of creating all of those elements in your help project.

Lance:  Oh, yeah. Absolutely. If you’ve ever used HTML, it’s basically like an extension to HTML that’s native and specific to Doc-To-Help.

Nicky:  So your project was a very large, you’ve modularized, help system. Using Doc-To-Help with Dreamweaver as the HTML editor helped you solve a lot of your issues. I actually saw that project at a WritersUA Peer Showcase a couple of years back. And it was really amazing the way you have everything structured and all of the different help targets worked out. 

So you would say that Doc-To-Help helped you overcome a lot of challenges?

Lance:  Oh, yes. Absolutely. Actually, we went with that modular system because we needed something. Where we could use the exact same source document in five different projects and have no problem with that.

Nicky:  Right, and it really embodied the whole concept of content strategy. Even the way the whole project was structured and the way you were doing reuse.

Lance:  Absolutely, yeah, the whole point. At the time content strategy wasn’t a buzz word like it is now. But at the time what we had was this major time consumption problem. Because it would take me five or six times as long to get a single update done. 

And so, what we had to do was just cut that out. And that’s ultimately what we wound up doing. Just putting one copy of help files into a big, more or less, a repository of documents that we could include in any of our help projects.

And then we just used the D2HML tags and said. Well, if we’re in this particular help project, we want you to spit out this piece of HTML. Otherwise, we want you to spit out this other piece of HTML. And when we’d compile it, it was perfectly unique to each different product that we needed to compile help for.

Nicky:  That’s awesome. That’s exactly what you want your tool to do. You want your tool to make your life easier and save you time. I also noticed that you did employ almost all of Doc-To-Help’s target outputs. You made chms (compiled HTML Help files). You made PDFs. You used NetHelp. 

And, as far as I could tell from your NetHelp output, you basically were employing a continuous publishing model for your documentation.

Lance:  That’s correct. The same publishing model was used for all of our products as well. Continually put out new updates and, I guess, feature changes on a pretty regular basis. It was just a continuous update model.

So, every month or so I would have a new round of changes that’d have to be documented in existing products. Those would either be rolled out on a web based product, and so the manual would just be part of the release. Or it would be released in an update for desktop software, and the manual would have to go down to the desktop.

But also, we had copies of all of our help on the web, so that way we could continually have that up to date. And a large part of having it on the web is right up there with trying to serve that content to all of the different people inside of our organization.

We actually built a custom search engine that indexed our NetHelp. That would allow us to serve that content both to our customers and then also to our employees, like our support techs and sales reps.

So that way they wouldn’t have to go in and memorize these manuals to go find answers to common questions. They could just type in a Google search in our custom search engine and [finger snap] there it was.

Nicky:  Wow, that’s really cool. [chuckles] They must have loved that. Is there anything else that impresses you about Doc-To-Help?

Lance:  I’m a big fan too of the way that Doc-To-Help does its HTML output, NetHelp. It’s clean. It’s XHTML now. Actually, the XHTML editor you guys added in the last year or so is fantastic.

Nicky:  Over the past five years you’ve watched Doc-To-Help evolve a lot. You mentioned one of the changes, the addition of the XHTML editor. Are there any other changes that you were excited about?

Lance:  I was actually excited about a couple of things. The fact that you started doing XHTML NetHelp and XHTML source documents were both things I was very excited about. Just because of the fact that it opened my range of possibilities quite a bit more than what was going on prior to that with just HTML.

And then, the different upgrades that you’ve added to NetHelp over the years have actually been very nice as well. A lot of times it’s little things that mean the biggest thing to me.

You’ve been very responsive over the years and added, obviously, huge things in recent years. But also a bunch of very little things that have just smoothed out the entire experience for the people consuming the help as well as writing it.

Nicky:  Right, it does. You make a very good point about it going both ways. Things on the user end are very, very important. As technical communicators, we want to make our end users happy and have them find what they need in our help very, very quickly. 

But on the other hand, we want a tool that gives us all kind of flexibility under the hood that our end users never see. So we try to encompass all of that, the big and the small.

About your MVP designation. Why don’t you take a minute and tell us more about yourself and what you’re working on now.

Lance:  Well, right now I own a company called VRAZER. It’s primarily a web development company. 

But an extension of that is work with Doc-To-Help. Particularly for those people who are wanting to go to HTML style help. Or modularize their help so that they can cut back all of the time that they’re spending updating documents right now. Or people who want a custom NetHelp theme.

Those are all things that I have done before, and so I’m doing those things now. But, on the same token, I take that from end to end, whether it’s inside of Doc-To-Help. Or all the way to the other extreme. Where you’re doing something like taking the Doc-To-Help output and putting it together in a search engine or something. As I’ve said, I’ve done that too.

So it’s definitely on the HTML side of what Doc-To-Help does where I’m working today.

Nicky:  Now, if anyone wants to contact you, do you have a website?

Lance:  The website’s still in process at the moment. The best place to contact me is by email because I always have access to email. And that’s my email address, Lance@Vrazer.com. V R A Z E R.com.

Nicky:  OK. Well, Lance, I really enjoyed talking to you today. You’re one of my favorite tech comms. I thank you a lot for your insight and the time you’ve spent with me.

Lance:  Well thanks, Nicky. I’m enjoying working with you guys as an MVP and look forward to helping other Doc-To-Help users take their Doc-To-Help projects to the next level.

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Download a free trial version of Doc-To-Help here: http://www.doctohelp.com/

Recorded Feb 2010.

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