Great Organizations Surprise You

As we write help for Team System, we try to hand topics off for localization as early as we can, but not too early. We don't want to incur the cost of relocalizing topics that we need to change. For example, if I hand off a topic that I've written about the warehouse schema, and then the schema changes, I'm going to have to update that. Now, localization takes advantage of localization memory, so it shouldn't be a big deal; just the changes get relocalized, right? Not so, at least until recently. Localization memory wasn't built from these incremental handoffs. Instead, it was built only at major releases. That meant that we had to do a lot of educated guessing about what features might change between the first handoff and RTM.

A few days ago, I heard that we would have an early loc hand-off, and I started thinking about what was complete enough to hand off and, of that, which of the features are stable enough to avoid the risk of change. But it turns out our loc team is now getting the loc memory updated with each drop, so we can hand off topics that without really worrying a lot about relocalizing them. That takes a whole lot of guesswork out of my planning - I can just write till it's done, and hand it off.

That's the kind of thing I've come to expect working on Team System - that someone has done something smart and now it's a little easier for me to focus on the writing and less on the overhead of getting great content out there. Nice.