Clarity

Contributed by James Turcotte, Operational & Transformation Software Executive at CA Technologies

In order to remain competitive, business agility is a given.

This is why software development teams are moving to Agile development methodologies and DevOps. Yet, most companies are living with a Technical Content Supply Chain from the stone ages.

If I was to walk into the average development shop today, I would most likely find a document management system with technical writers pounding out PDF manuals to describe the new functionality. The writers would then publish HTML versions on their website and move on to the next release. Translated versions would most likely follow in the weeks to come. At this point, the technical support team would pick up the ball by writing hundreds of knowledge articles – articles that are nothing less than bug fixes to the original published content.

DocOps is about creating a Content Supply Chain that is at its core collaborative, agile and continuous.

With DocOps, CA Technologies can “curate” content from internal and external authors throughout the product lifecycle. Content is then published using a platform that provides a single source of content contextually linked to product interfaces. DocOps analytics allow CA Technologies to obtain continuous operational feedback and make changes on the fly to improve the customer experience.

DocOps is a must have to enable business agility!

Click here to read more about this journey.

That certainly sounds agile. how would you apply that to Technical Documentation feedback? Now with the new community format the feedback is buried and lost for ever. Putting them in the product associated communities did not help. Look at my last post. Apparently none of the parties that you mention in your post related to document creation or update has even viewed the thread. Simply not worth reporting a documentation error again.

Hi urmas. As you may know from my previous community posts, the CA Clarity PPM Documentation Wiki is coming and the exact go live date is yet to be determined. Here are the links to my previous announcements about the upcoming wiki:

• https://communities.ca.com/thread/112688324
• https://communities.ca.com/thread/118354358

If you are interested in seeing the available wiki's, I encourage you to access them here:

https://wiki.ca.com/dashboard.action

One of the most powerful benefits of the wiki is collaboration; helping to close the gap between the customer (you) and us (the Clarity writers) and to provide documentation updates in a timely manner. In the past, this has been quite a challenge. But, we are doing our best to help improve the situation. My team and I are monitoring the community feedback, and we are working to respond to questions and issues about the documentation in a timely manner.

Your last post that we received using the documentation feedback tag was "CLRT-73080 listed twice in TEC605767". I believe that you have received a response from Katheryn Ellis and you are in good hands:

https://communities.ca.com/thread/241690647

Are you referring to a different post? If so, please let us know.

You can always contact me directly with any feedback about the Clarity documentation and here is my contact information. I'm always glad to help!

John W. George

Principal Information Services Engineer

john.george@ca.com

609-583-9466

Is there anything in, or lacking in this solution that would prevent its use for the development/maintenance of a Business Policy Manual, with corporate and BU specific policies, procedures and work instructions?

The pounding out PDFs bit sounds familiar.

Hi @Dale_Stockman, are you talking about the ability for you to write/author/publish your own internal documentation on the wiki? If you can please clarify, that would be great.

Thanks!

John,

Thanks for your reply.  From your comment to Urmas at 6:30 am, I think you've clarified that DocOps is something new launching inside CA - its not yet, and may never be, a product offered to CA customers.

No, we would not want to post our BPM CA DocOps wiki.  We do have the same problems managing PDFs.  I can forward what you are doing to our responsible parties, to see if there is anything from your experience that we could apply to a solution in our own environment.

Thank you,

Dale

Hi Dale, o.k. great, I'm glad my response to @urmas helped you out and clarified things for you. Yes, this is an internal CA wiki platform and is not a product offered to CA customers.

One of the great things you will see when the Clarity wiki is rolled out is that you can make your own PDF files! This is a very powerful feature that I'm sure you will love. In addition, you will be able to create ePUB documents to view on your mobile device.

When the wiki is rolled out for Clarity, I know everyone is going to love it. We have over 40 that are live (https://wiki.ca.com/dashboard.action), and the overall response from customers has been extremely positive.

Please feel free to exchange information and collaborate with me, and I will share anything I've learned with you.

Have a great weekend!

John

CLRT-73080 listed twice in TEC605767

got a very good response, but actually my last one is

https://communities.ca.com/message/241707218#241707218

Yes Wiki makes it easy to have content from users, but all people are not that happy with that feature, see

https://communities.ca.com/message/241708559#241708559

We'll see if the Clarity Wiki will go that way.

Users like @Stuart Weenig and @Gary Saarimaki could make a good WiKi

If you want to see a good (or more than good) response to a documentation feedback question see

Hierarchical queries in CA Clarity Studio Developer's Guide