English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

So far I have been doing research on the usability of Opera and some of its convenient features. Since our audience is an IT department, any feature that will help save time or keep data/information organized is helpful. The main feature that stands out about Opera is the “Speed Dial”, where you can have nine “buttons” as your home page. This allows the user to access frequently used pages very fast. This would be great for an IT person that uses a lot of web based network utilities.

This week I had a group meeting on Sunday with Kristin and Joe. We worked on the Gantt chart, and decided how to divide up the white paper into the parts that we are each going to do. The initial way we were going to divide up research and work for the white paper had to be redone after receiving our instructor feedback though.

Individual Work Blog
Date: April 12, 2009
To: Professor Tirrell
From: Scott Stella, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 2

This report is the summary of the progress toward the White Paper project, starting from last Sunday (April 6) to today (April 12).

This week we spent some time brainstorming topics for research and deciding who would research which topic(s). I will be handling research for the "usability" and "reliability" topics for the PDA white paper.

This week Group 3 met and divvied up the work for the project. My main task this week was to create the Gantt chart. In previous classes I have used Microsoft Project to create Gantt charts. However after seeing the video of creating one using Excel, I don’t think I will ever go back to using MS Project. I’m sure that it has it’s uses but when one only needs to create a simplistic Gantt chart, Excel is the way to go.

Since my group’s first topic and audience didn’t quite work with the requirements for the white paper project, I spent the beginning part of the week trying to find new ideas for a topic. The two best topics that I could think up were campus security issues and child locating devices. On Wednesday, I met with my group in a Google Chat to decide what our topic would be. After I presented my topic choices, and everyone else explained theirs, we decided to do our white paper about the different web browsers that were available to small companies.

Individual Work Blog
Date: April 12, 2009
To: Professor Tirrell
From: Zebulon Rouse, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 2

This report is the summary of the progress toward the White Paper project, starting from last Sunday (April 6) to today (April 12).

Throughout this week, we started to split up the researching assignments. My part is researching on the public opinion of all three phones. The other part I contributed to the project was writing the weekly group activity report.

This weeks activities included improving our proposal, creating a Gantt chart and beginning research on SharePoint and its competitors. After receiving feedback about our proposal we have decided to focus our main audience to smaller fresh companies. During the next week I will begin researching our main audience to learn what they need to know about SharePoint.

This week our group’s main priority was to change our proposal according to instructor feedback, establish research goals and begin working on our thumbnail deliverables. Given the vague audience we suggested, it was understand that our group needed to be more focused. In a number of replies, the group collectively decided the audience type (contractors) and the method our white paper will choose to relay its information.