PRICES project: Resources for Publicity and Promotion

This package of publicity resources was one of the final deliverables of PRICES, a collaborative project within the DTI/EPSRC R&D Programme in Safety Critical Systems. The focus of the PRICES project was on human factors, and the aim of this package was to provide resources that could be used to promote a safety culture for software procurement and development.

Preparing the resources package was an unusual job which included commissioning cartoons and writing a parody of "The House that Jack Built". We also provided more conventional editing of the PRICES Code of Practice and other project deliverables.

Our portfolio also includes examples of several published books used to disseminate project results.

© 1997 Copyright Open University
See complete poem and example cartoon

Scripting Workbench Help

This online Help system was produced to support the development of scripts within a Customer Relationship Management application. It covered the use of a graphical script development tool (the Scripting Workbench) to build up the script navigation structure, define its visual design, and generate VBScript code for script actions in response to application and script events.

The Help topics needed to be accessed by script developers while they used and experimented with the Scripting Workbench, and to provide guidance on all aspects of the script design and generation process. The Help system therefore included reference information, step-by-step procedures, design advice and concept topics.

The online Help was part of a documentation set that covered not only the Scripting Workbench itself, but also the run-time script processing software and the interfaces between a CRM application and the scripting software. The printed elements of the set included technical documentation for application developers, software integrators and system administrators.

© 1998 Copyright AIT Limited
See example topic

Babywear Operations System User Guide

This user guide was written for a company which produces clothing for babies and children. The company had developed its own software which was used to manage the procurement lifecycle from initial design, through manufacture in several countries, to customer delivery or warehousing of final stock. The user guide was aimed at company staff, and covered the use of the software in the context of company procedures.

We have also produced user guides for packaged software applications such as accounting systems, payroll and stock control.

© 1998 Copyright Westward Babywear Ltd.
See example pages

Emeraude TCI (Tool Control Integration) documentation

Emeraude TCI was part of a tool integration framework produced by a French company in the 1990's which implemented the PCTE standard. It extended the PCTE framework with a Sun ToolTalk message service, in order to enable tools to exchange messages and receive notifications. It also added the ability to associate operations with tools in the repository and to invoke these tool operations from the user interface.

The documentation consisted of a User Guide for tool writers and integrators, and a Reference Manual containing details of the libraries, supporting tools, standard notifications and schema.

We have also produced technical documentation for a wide range of other application development tools and frameworks. Examples include several different application generators, a data repository, a configuration management tool, and the Scripting Workbench script generator.

© 1994 Copyright Emeraude
See example pages

Published Books

We worked on both the first (1996) and second editions of Lingo Sorcery, providing copy editing and formatting services to the author and publisher. For this job, we had to maintain the source files in Microsoft Word, working across Mac and PC platforms.

Software Without Frontiers was another example of our involvement in a collaborative project. The Glossasoft project, which was partly funded by the European Commission under their Language Research and Engineering initiative, researched and reported on software globalization issues. We helped the project leaders from the Open University to structure and edit the final project report, and later to take this forward for publication. The original material was written by a number of different authors, many of whom were not native English speakers, and our role was to reorganize, integrate and harmonize their contributions.

Software Reuse: A Holistic Approach arose from the Esprit III REBOOT project, and again involved a consortium of contributors from companies across Europe.

The editing work on this book was performed by Steve Rickaby, who has worked on a number of our projects, including the Glossasoft report.

PCTE: The Standard for Open Repositories and A Manager's Guide to PCTE. Our work on these books was commissioned by the PCTE Association, as a result of Syntagma's long involvement with companies (including GEC, ICL, EDS, Bull, Syseca and Siemens) working on the PCTE standard and related projects and products.

The principal author of PCTE: The Standard for Open Repositories was Lois Wakeman, who built up a depth of understanding of PCTE while working as a freelance author for Syntagma in this area. The book was later translated into Japanese. A Manager's Guide to PCTE was written by Margaret Aldis.

A Manager's Guide to PCTE,
1995 PCTE Association ISBN 0 9526044 0 X

We produced and published Advanced Pick: A Manager's Handbook and the earlier A Pick Handbook under our own imprint, making use of knowledge we had gained while working on Pick-based applications.

A Pick Handbook: Every Manager's Guide to the Pick Operating System Richardson and Aldis
1985 Syntagma Systems Literature ISBN  0 9510631 0 3