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> Problem: The products around here are in development most all the way to the
> release date (sound familiar?). In the very least, I need to establish a
> content moratorium for my final document release.
I read most of the responses in the digest to this conundrum. Good advice, all
of it (though, Cindy did sound a bit like a pit bull in her first response! :-)
In my last job, I worked for an Application Service Provider. The cool thing
about working there was, when you make changes to the documentation, five
minutes after you get sign-off from the engineers, there it is on the web site!
I have seen other companies put updated material (online help files, PDFs)
online for you to download. It seems like this would be a good way to get
updated material to our users, and to deal with the lack of lag these days
between finishing the product and shipping it.
You could put a footer at the bottom of each page in a PDF or a splash screen
on an online help system that tells the users where to go to get the very
latest documentation. Or, for those applications that update themselves (like
Norton Antivirus), why not ask the management to have the programmers add
updates to the online help to the process?
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A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
three and a half days of immersion in the state of the art:
IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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