Bryant Street Cafe

Feedback is very important to Sun. There is a growing interest to align feedback efforts to improve the capturing and reporting of feedback.[Read More]

I just worked on a project I am excited to share with you. Now when you are downloading Solaris 10 8/07, you can also download all of the documents. That's nearly 400 documents in PDF format covering Solaris 10 8/07, Java Enterprise Suite and additional products that ship with the Solaris OS. Let me know what you think! Go here to see what you get and download the docs! http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp

I am not an engineer. But I use a lot of applications. I was involved in helping design a workflow for a group inside Sun. To do that, I worked with a methodology called "The Bridge" (for example, http://www.upassoc.org/conferences_and_events/upa_conference/2005/program/activity.php?id=235,) where we gathered a small group of users and engineers to participate in a focussed three-day workshop designing a workflow. The outcome of that process is to have paper prototypes of GUIs which capture the needed functionality. From those paper prototypes one could conduct usability testing. And all of this without any coding. From this effort, one could derive a prioritized set of specifications because one would have derived how the user uses the application. I will say this effort is a hard sell, at least for me. But I would love to hear if others had worked this way on interfaces.Or maybe I don't realize that a lot of work is done this way and since I am not in the engineering community, I am not aware of it.

Several of my coworkers have encouraged me to do a blog. Having worked for Sun for over 15 years inside the technical writing community as a program manager, there are many stories I would love to share and discuss. I was the first documentation program manager in the Solaris documentation group. I learned from the ground up the work needed to get Solaris documentation out the door on time. I have worked with writers, editors, and managers during this time. This is my first entry so I am thinking about things I'd like to write about: Running teams, working on documentation media, publishing processes at Sun. I'm open to questions. I have worked with Solaris and Java Enterprise writing groups. Cheers, Mary