Category / Productivity

by Will Kelly

Building the better G Suite administrator

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I’ve written about G Suite and other cloud productivity tools or a while now. Furthermore, I’ve had the chance to explore the intersection of Microsoft Office and G Suite for technical writing and user productivity.
G Suite can represent some significant cost savings for *some* organizations. It’s not going to happen by taking G Suite live and sending your enterprise users a URL. Outside of a solid implementation plan, the role of the G Suite Administrator plays a crucial role in the successful launch of G Suite.

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by Will Kelly

An alternative perspective about taking meeting minutes

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I was talking to a recruiter once who asked me how I felt about taking meeting minutes. The first thing I said was “I think meeting minutes are overrated because I’ve rarely if ever seen them consulted again by meeting participants. When is the last time you consulted meeting minutes after a meeting was over?” While we both laughed about my response, I was quite serious and didn’t know how serious I was myself until well after the call was over.

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by Will Kelly

The center of continuous technical education must be you

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I’ve come to realize the importance of working in environments where continuous technical education is imperative to the success of projects and overall company health.
We live in a world that harps on the value of work/life balance. I have no arguments with balance but technical learning needs to be an integral part of that balance.
Yet, keeping abreast of the latest technologies should be the responsibility of the employee not always the employer. We live in a web-enabled world where new apps and services are accessible via download or through a trial account.
Today, accessibility to new technologies is too easy especially compared to when I started in the IT industry.
Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash
by Will Kelly

My Word template manifesto

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For reasons that continue to elude me, I’ve come across a lot of Microsoft Word template issues in my time. Some templates were so bad that what should be a simple productivity tool ends up hobbling documentation efforts. Finding template issues is a never-ending source of disappointment for me. Perhaps it’s because I usually create templates in the early stages of a project and keep the fuss to a minimum.

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by Will Kelly

Lessons learned from working as a computer book industry technical reviewer

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I was a computer book technical reviewer earlier in my career. It was a freelance gig, but I still consider the work one of the more formative chapters in my professional writing career even though it wasn’t writing work.

Computer book technical reviewers sometimes called technical editors are responsible for ensuring the technical accuracy of information technology book manuscripts. The work taught me to pay attention to technical details, which in turn went on to influence my work as a technical writer and freelance writer.

The lessons I learned include:

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by Will Kelly

Moving your team from email inboxes to online collaboration

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There is a dizzying array of online collaboration applications available today.
Even in 2017, you still have to write your own migration plan to move your team from email inboxes to an online collaboration platform.
A proper collaboration platform migration is agnostic — these tips can apply to most any cloud or on-premise collaboration

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