Different people in your company may understand different aspects of your technology, but sometimes you need a broader picture and a more coherent, consistent explanation.

Companies turn to us to produce documentation intended to explain all or part of their product to people other than the users of the product. The audience might be compliance auditors, prospective or actual partners, distributors, systems integrators, or new employees. Regardless of audience, the goal is always the same: clear, concise, useful information.

As a result, we’ve developed technical documents such as system architecture guides, installation and configuration guides, deployment guides, functional specifications, and release notes. For these projects, our sources are existing materials (if any) and the knowledge in the heads of your staff. As a result, unlike user documentation projects, these projects require more involvement of your internal resources. However, our technical writers still strive to be as independent as possible.

Technical documentation we’ve created for clients

Documentation for compliance purposes

When our client wanted to make a sale into the U.S. federal government, Functional Descriptions of their product’s operation needed to be developed for compliance purposes. Our role was to interview SMEs (subject matter experts) and develop 12 of these documents, which have become an invaluable resource for the company.

The project was very technically challenging, given the complexity of the product and the fact that different SMEs had different visibility into the system. For each release, we track changes that affect these documents and update them.

Transferring complex product knowledge to resellers

A client that sells their sophisticated backup and recovery software through resellers had an ad-hoc method for orienting those resellers to the complexities of their product. Resellers attended several days of on-site presentations and demonstrations from a variety of subject matter experts, with a variety of communication abilities.

We captured information from these experts and from legacy documents and designed a document providing a complete overview of the whole product. To address the different information needs of different resellers, the document (a PDF intended for online viewing) offered alternative ways to navigate the content.

Developing release notes for semi-quarterly releases

For a client for whom we do year-round work (to a maximum number of hours per month), we produce release notes for product releases that occur every other month. This involves collecting information on changes to the product from product roadmaps and the bug tracking system, identifying those items that should appear in release notes, drafting notes (consulting with SMEs where necessary), and publishing four versions of the notes from a single set of documents.