Book Sprints for technical documentation
Good documentation can be a powerful sales tool, increasing both the adoption of technology solutions and user satisfaction.
With technology changing so rapidly, there is a need to publish documentation more quickly than ever before. The standard route – of hiring a technical writer for the job – tends to take at least six months, and most of that time can be spent trying to understand what your experts already know.
A Book Sprint gathers all the people with the knowledge – the engineers, architects, developers, technical writers, marketing or sales people – and facilitates conversation among them, guiding them to develop a coherent overview for users. More and more technology companies are choosing the Book Sprints method to produce documentation for complex solutions. They tell us that along with the speed of production, what they value is the output of a book which puts all the information in one place for their customers.
The fact that this book has been written, reviewed and endorsed by 5 – 15 of your key experts also adds credibility to your products. The Book Sprint process rests on strong facilitation of your company’s experts and a remote book production team motivated to produce visually attractive and coherent documentation which meets the user where they are at.
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Cisco Ultra M Troubleshooting guide
Cisco Ultra M Troubleshooting Guide: We’re becoming regulars on Cisco campuses, pulling in for a week at a time, sampling the entire menu in the cafetaria, draining the coffee supplies and marching between the cubicles, keeping small groups of engineers, developers and marketing people on track to writing guides and technical support manuals. We don’t ... READ MORE
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F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Management Operations Guide
After five days of intense thinking, testing, writing, re-thinking, and editing at the F5 office in Seattle, the F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) Operations Guide is now complete. It includes more than 200 pages and more than 20 original illustrations that cover dozens of use cases, the most important troubleshooting recommendations, and other topics ... READ MORE
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OpenStack Operations Guide
The OpenStack Book Sprint is over and the book is done. The OpenStack foundation will release it on Monday and then promote it in the run up to the OpenStack conference in April. From the blurb: “The book you hold in your hands should smell like fresh ink, and while we wouldn’t suggest you taste ... READ MORE
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Pubsweet
Last week in three and a half days, the PubSweet community had a Book Sprint to write the first guide for using and contributing to the open source toolkit for publishing workflows. Among the participants were developers from the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation and publishers from eLife, Hindawi, and EBI. The book is now ready to be printed and to be distributed at ... READ MORE
Lauren Malhoit
Technical Marketing, Cisco
“As of yesterday, we completed the Cisco ACI Book Sprint…and what a whirlwind it was! One of my coworkers asked me how I felt about the week and the first word that came to mind was ‘accomplished.'”
Nick Chase
Head of Technical and Marketing Content, Mirantis
“..when I volunteered for the Sprint, I confess that I didn’t expect much. Oh, I knew that at the end of the week we’d have a book. I just didn’t expect it to be the really great book that actually emerged.”