back to basics

It's my own fault. For the past 10 or so years, I've been working on a series of software user guides for a small, creative, and extremely cool company in Ithaca. Here's a hint to the product line lineage: the first app was running on Windows NT.

Over the years, the apps have expanded and contracted in various forms and stages. At one point, two different enterprise apps were being developed using completely different technologies and methodologies. One based on Java and something akin to an agile development methodology; the other based on C+ and VisualStudio tools following a traditional waterfall development methodology.

As the enterprise and ancillary apps have matured, there's been a conscious move on the part of the developers to reuse and share objects across the apps. This is all very good from a project management perspective. However, it's created a basic documentation dilemma for me: Trying to find a way cast entire sections of the guides in a generic style without compromising the product brand.

For a long while I've been using FrameMaker conditional text as a band aid. That approach is quickly becoming unwieldy as the amount of shared functionality across apps increases. What I need to do before it gets any worse is to back out, take a functional/object view of the information across the guides, and start building DITA-esque libraries of information. I think this approach will move me as close to an integrated set of information types as I can get without a full-blow DITA implementation.

Oh, this is the fun stuff. It really is.