Clients

Laurie Miller Photography (website)

Oxfordshire photographer Laurie Miller provides an exclusive wedding photography service, portraiture and digital art. This project required website design, build and hosting.

Northgate Public Services , Milton Keynes (website)

Northgate Public Services (part of the Northgate IS group), formaerly Anite Public Services, provide solutions for the public sector including software for Children's Services and Adult Social Care.

I have provided documentation services to Northgate Public Services for several years. Working with their documentation, QA and development teams I have produced documentation for their Children's Case Management and Adult's Social Care range of products. Output includes API documentation, end user documentation (including Help files) and the collation of large document sets.

The Open University (website)

The Open University is a world leader in distance and open access learning. I have worked on two separate projects:

Keuhne + Nagel, Milton Keynes

K+N provide integrated solution acoss the supply chain. This project was to produce a User Manual for their FLash based online tracking system.

FrontRange Software, Swindon (website)

FrontRange Solutions (formerly Centennial in Swindon, UK) provide network auditing and security solutions. This project, working with their development team was to provide user and administrator documentation for a number of their products (Discovery, License Manager and DeviceWall), providing a consistent branding for multiple products, print and online output in multiple translations.

Universal Music Publishing (website)

The Universal Music Publishing Group is a global music publisher. Working within their Royalties Department in Chiswick, London I produced an online demo and tutorial for their online Royalties Portal. I created a prototype using PowerPoint and then the final version using Flash. The design criteria were that the demo should be able to be downloaded quickly and could be translated into several languages. Therefore the Flash version was built in a modular fashion, using a mockup of the interface and ActionScript to handle events and animations. All text was delivered via an XML file.

Hitachi Data Systems (website)

HDS provide cutting edge data storage and management systems. Working within a small team I produced administrator level documentation for a bespoke implementation of their ShadowImage rapid replication system.

Research Machines, Abingdon (website)

RM produce IT and software solutions for the education sector: internet security, caching systems, email and secure file transfer systems. I have worked on several of these projects producing end user and adminstrator level documents for both hard copy and online publication. One of the main challenges is that their 'users' range from primary school children to GCSE and A Level students to teachers. This therefore required multiple versions of documents to be produced and managed.

Servista, London

Servista provided IT services for third party utility companies. Working with their developers and trainers I produced documentation for call centre staff. This included hard copy and online (Help) documentation covering use of software and processes for customer and billing management.

ntl, Hook, Hampshire

ntl, now Virgin media was a major provider in the internet, telecommunications and entertainment sector. As part of their documentation team I produced full system documentation for use by their remote support teams. These inclded full system descriptions (hardware and software), procedural documentation and customer management processes.

Vicon Motion Systems (website)

Vicon produce motion capture systems for the clinical and entertainment sectors. For this project I produced a new user manual which alowed them to publish selected output for customers belonging to both sectors with minimal repetition or publication of irrilevant material.

Tools

With over fourteen years experience I have expertise in using a wide range of tools. Whichever is appripriate depends on a number of factors - the type of documentation required (online, hard copy, interactive), size of the output required and the ability or necessity of the client to maintain the documentation once it has been produced. Here are the most common toools I use.

Microsoft Word

As most clients have company wide implementation of the Microsoft Office Suite this is the most popular tool for production of documentation. I have used most versions of Word and have expertise in settting up and maintaining templates to provide a consistent look to documentation, setting up and maintaining tables of contents and indexing, and minimising problems with the quirks that the application has had over the various versions.

Adobe FrameMaker

FrameMaker is popular with many developers because of its availablility as a multiplatform authoring environment, its use in structured documentation and, not least., its robust nature when dealing with large documents. I have expertise in setting up FrameMaker templates, the collation of large documentation sets, numbering systems, conditional text and many other features.

Adobe RoboHelp

RoboHelp is still considered an industry standard for the production of Help files. I have used several versions of RoboHelp to produced online Help and as the main input for single source publishing.

Flash

I have used Flash for a number of projects where a multimedia type approach has been appropriate. These include interactive network diagrams, online software demos andlearnaing materials. I have experience in creating graphics, Actionscript 2 & 3, and XML driven Flash applications.

Adobe Dreamweaver

I have used DreamWeaver for several years to produce my own and client web content.

Graphics Packages

I have expertise using a number of graphics packages including CorelDraw, PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro, and FireWorks.

MS Office Products

MS Excel and PowerPoint are used routinely in production and management of documentation products.