I produced this documentation set for Corda Technologies' Corda Server and Corda Builder products, version 6.0. It was based on my PopChart+Optimap 5.1 Documentation, however I made numerous changes to content, content organization, web layout, and so on.

To see the Corda 6.0 documentation, click below:

• Corda 6.0 Documentation

Some of these changes reflect new product features. For example, we divided our product into three separate modules (PopChart, OptiMap, and Highwire), each of which exposed different functionality (graphing, mapping, or PDF generation) and would be purchased separately even though all of the modules were still the same product. So a big challenge was making the documentation immediately accessible to users of all three modues. Other changes reflect lessons learned about how different audiences (developers, administrators, designers, and so on) learn to use our product.

Like the PopChart+OptiMap 5.1 Documentation, I produced the documentation in two formats: PDF and HTML. The documentation is single-sourced from Framemaker 7.0, and I used a highly-modified Webworks template to convert it into the HTML version. I used conditional text and variables to produce two distinct branches of our documentation: Corda Server (our server product) and Corda Builder (our desktop product).

I list this documentation under several portfolio categories, so let me take a moment to justify each of those categories:

• Technical Writing - This should be pretty obvious. One thing that I would like to point out here is that the documentation takes a multiple-audience oriented approach, which is why there's so darn many books.
• Product Design & User Interface - In the process of writing the documentation, I became heavily involved in product design and usability review. This was mostly motivated by my desire to make the product so usable that I wouldn't need to write any documentation. Of course, that was just a pipe dream, but I still helped our development team make things less convoluted. Also, you might argue that designing the documentation interface is itself is an exercise in product design and usability--you have to figure out how to efficiently meet the educational needs of you users.
• Web Development - First off, I had to gain a knowledge of what I was documenting, and the product was a heavily web oriented product. This involved developing a number of examples for all sorts of web environments. Secondly, I had to make a lot of customizations to the WebWorks templates (which translates our FrameMaker files to HTML) to get our current look and feel. This involved a lot of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It also took a while to get it XHTML compliant.

You might also want to check out my entry on the Automated Documentation Build process, as this greatly simplifies our documentation generation.