Technical writing outsourcing technical writing offshore

About Us

Characters Corporation is an international documentation development and outsourcing firm that offers complete documentation services to industry since 1993. The company provides custom solutions for the single sourcing of large documentation sets.

In cooperation with e-Doc, its affiliate in Israel, Characters offers offshore outsourcing of documentation projects, leveraging the pool of advanced engineering and linguistic skills available in Israel to offer high-quality services at competitive rates.

Characters can assist you in your existing technical writing project or provide a comprehensive solution for your documentation needs. Strong outsourcing project management ensures that all our technical writing projects are on schedule and within budget.

Characters has made a special investment in technology. The technological issues raised by large documentation projects do not have off-the-shelf solutions. The company researches and develops the technologies that provide the best solution for each technical writing project.

Outsourcing of Technical Writing Services

Outsourcing is a management strategy that has gained increased popularity in the past decades. It refers to the subcontracting of non-core organizational activities to vendors that specialize in those areas. Outsourcing generally results in more effective and economical execution of these activities.

The writing of user documentation, its maintenance, and production require a multidisciplinary team of experts in such diverse areas as computer graphics, XML, the on-line delivery of manuals, and more. To maintain world-class expertise in all the disciplines of electronic publishing would require a commitment that few companies can make outside the areas of their core business.

The following projects must be considered simultaneously:

- Trimming and streamlining the documentation set.

- Conversion to an integrated and fully electronic production process.

- Upgrading the appearance of the documentation.

- Development of state-of-the-art on-line documentation.

- Development of documentation revision control and workflow control systems, and laying the foundation of an enterprise-wide information exchange system.

- Development of documentation project tracking and management tools

It would take years to develop in-house expertise in all these areas; it would be even more difficult to maintain the currency of such expertise. Following each technology upgrade in documentation, companies immediately begin falling behind and fail to keep pace with technological developments. To stay abreast the rapidly developing technology in electronic publishing, companies must rely on large numbers of consultants. Outsourcing buys all services from one vendor.

<H1>XML Tools</H1> A case can be made for using any combination of authoring and delivery tools, in combination with conversion utilities. Eventually, one or two overriding considerations render the matrix useless. No amount of work on evaluation criteria, preliminary analysis, reading of reviews, and experimentation with demo products will produce a true picture of the tool s ultimate usefulness in production. Only when we begin trying to do useful work (as opposed to testing or preparing sample files) do we become aware of the true features and limitations of the product. At that point we will have to find ways around these limitations. For example, the tool produce proper sideheads? This is not clear until you actually try to create one, indeed, until you try to create one in an existing document (because, for the sake of the exercise, the tool will create a perfectly good looking sidehead in a certain type of document; of course, you will never have any need of this particular type of chapter.) While these and other similar limitations are significant, they are not insurmountable, and in our view, not foreseeable under any type of preliminary analysis, so you might as well forget about them. So we tossed out the matrix, we tossed out the detailed analysis of features, and focused on the do-or-die constraints. Most important: a good understanding of what we want to accomplish and of who is going to do the work. See also our special links at <a title="links" href="edoc.html">e-Doc</a> and <a title="links" href="ariel.html">Ariel</a>