IT Pro audience
My team is the Team Foundation Server (TFS) team. As a blogger, I don't usually write about the content produced by my team. However, as I consider the documentation produced by my team, a question arises: What is the IT Pro audience and how is it different from other audiences? Technically, my team is in the Developer Tools division (that might not be the official name). I'm part of a group of over 100 content publishers. This includes all the help and documents for language teams, the .NET framework, and so on.
I ran into an colleague, an editor, who switched from Developer Tools to Office. His content team produces documentation for the IT Pro audience. We chatted about how we were both now working with this different audience and how was it different. We agreed that it wasn't that the audience was different so much as the reader/user did different things. It was less qualitative and more functional.
That's how I've settled this question in my mind. SDK readers want different material from IT Pro readers because of what these people do. Carpenters do different things from plumbers. Some activities are similar. They both cut material and fit it together. But writing for the plumber audience would be different than the carpenter audience because one plumbs and the other carpents. That's not right, but I think you see my point. We don't know what either audience does with its personal time (snowboarding or skiing? Letterman or Leno?). And mostly we don't care.
IT pros have different needs than developers based on what tasks they perform. That's the big difference.
