Technical Documentation Development Services
Scoggins Communications works closely with your SMEs, customer
support, marketing and management in all areas of documentation development to:
- Scope the level of effort
- Maintain document control
- Define style and layout and target audience
- Gather and interpret content
- Develop/test documentation
- Conduct review, edit and approval process using real-time online collaborative review tools
- Finalize, package and deliver documentation
- Follow up with documentation updates
- Track metrics
Print and Online Documentation
The types of documents we create, format and develop include, but are not limited to, the following. We also offer collaborative and synchronized real-time reviews online from our secure web server.
| Installation guides | Product release notes | |
| Provisioning guides | Method of Procedures (MOPs) | |
| User guides | Administration guides | |
| Troubleshooting guides | Upgrade guides | |
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| Training material | Application Programming Interface (API) | |
| Licensing | Process documentation/diagrams | |
| Technical plans | Marketing plans | |
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| Requirements specifications | Retail advertising | |
| Branding and brand management | Sales collateral | |
Tools: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Adobe FrameMaker, Acrobat, Captivate, LiveCycle, Photoshop, Presenter
Online/Offline Help Applications
Our technical writing experts create, edit, manage and publish professional online help content supporting rich media, 3-D graphics, animation, Adobe Flash and multiple languages. The help applications include powerful search capabilities such as ranking, wildcard, metadata and context-sensitive searches. Online/offline synchronization is supported as well.
Help system output formats include:
| Adobe Flash Help | Oracle Help for Java | |
| HTML | WinHelp | |
| Microsoft Compiled HTML Help | Adobe AIR application | |
| JavaHelp | PDF and print output |
Tools: Adobe AIR, FrameMaker, PDF, RoboHelp, Captivate; MS Word
Technical Editing
Coordination
Manuscript handling, planning and estimating, job monitoring and
control, dealing with printers, and so on.
Policy
Ensures that a document conforms to the policy of the company in presentation, content, legal requirements, and so on.
Integrity
Ensures that the document is internally consistent. For example, are references to figures, tables, sections, part numbers, product numbers, and other documents correct, and do the referenced items exist?
Screening and copy clarification
Performs copy editing by ensuring:
- Incomprehensible statements (resulting from missing material) are identified and clarified
- Illustrations are correctly inserted
- Mathematical equations are typeset correctly
Format
Ensures document conforms to the organization’s standards on typography, layout and illustrations.
Mechanical style
Examines whether the document meets the organization’s standards
such as capitalization, spelling, hyphenation of compound words, use
of symbols, bibliographic references and use of italics or bold
type.
Language
Addresses how ideas are expressed, regardless of the format or mechanical style (sentence complexity, use of active or passive verbs, conciseness, clear and logical development of ideas, use of jargon or technical terms appropriate for the intended audience).
Substantive
The substantive edit deals with the overall structure of the publication:
- Does it all fit together into a coherent whole?
- Is the order of presentation logical?
- Is all the necessary information included, and unnecessary information deleted?
Tools: AP Stylebook, Chicago Manual of Style, Microsoft Manual of Style, client style sheet
Templates
- FrameMaker template development
- Word template development