I'm still in that niche, and I hope I'm not being Debbie Downer, but no, the software is still horrible.
The only movement that's happening today is where individual ERP/PDM/ILS solutions are beginning to just incorporate the tech writing tools wholly into their ecosystem, rolling them up into SAP/Epicor/TeamCenter/Aras/etc. Or even into the CAD system[1]. Doing S1000D in Program X? Whelp, better get TeamCenter spooled up so you can do the writing and publishing.
What does that do for interoperability? Nothing good! But it doesn't matter - S1000D instances weren't interoperable to begin with. The one good thing from this, is that it might - and I do want to underline might - give the pubs team a somewhat better chance of optimizing their data flows from other business systems. Yeah. Might.
All this crap makes me think of Daniel Dennett's famous essay on Chmess. How "chmess" sucked in a whole generation of chess scholarship, with no one stopping the train for one hot second to ponder that they're blowing their entire careers optimizing something that never happens.
[1] Oh yeah, CAD for maintenance manuals. The engineering design system, that's a great place for parts lists.
Oh yeah, CAD for maintenance manuals. The engineering design system, that's a great place for parts lists.
This was always a fun one. We realized right away that the data in the CAD models was superior to the technical drawings we received as PDFs (most of which, awful scans of paper documents). However, only the technical drawings were acceptable for the type-certificate. Our manuals were part of the type cert, so we had to verify everything agains the crappy PDFs anyway.
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I'm still in that niche, and I hope I'm not being Debbie Downer, but no, the software is still horrible.
The only movement that's happening today is where individual ERP/PDM/ILS solutions are beginning to just incorporate the tech writing tools wholly into their ecosystem, rolling them up into SAP/Epicor/TeamCenter/Aras/etc. Or even into the CAD system[1]. Doing S1000D in Program X? Whelp, better get TeamCenter spooled up so you can do the writing and publishing.
What does that do for interoperability? Nothing good! But it doesn't matter - S1000D instances weren't interoperable to begin with. The one good thing from this, is that it might - and I do want to underline might - give the pubs team a somewhat better chance of optimizing their data flows from other business systems. Yeah. Might.
All this crap makes me think of Daniel Dennett's famous essay on Chmess. How "chmess" sucked in a whole generation of chess scholarship, with no one stopping the train for one hot second to ponder that they're blowing their entire careers optimizing something that never happens.
[1] Oh yeah, CAD for maintenance manuals. The engineering design system, that's a great place for parts lists.
This was always a fun one. We realized right away that the data in the CAD models was superior to the technical drawings we received as PDFs (most of which, awful scans of paper documents). However, only the technical drawings were acceptable for the type-certificate. Our manuals were part of the type cert, so we had to verify everything agains the crappy PDFs anyway.