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Re: Options for creating documentation for OEM products
Subject:Re: Options for creating documentation for OEM products From:David Castro <thetechwriter -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 10 May 2001 08:04:20 -0700 (PDT)
> If your company sells its product both to OEMs under the OEM's brand and to
> other entities under the company's own brand, how are you handling the
> documentation? Do you rebrand and repackage it for the OEMs or do they do it
> themselves?
I'm involved in my first OEM documentation right now. We are rebranding the
documentation for the company, but we're being paid extra to do it.
> Do you have any responsibility for the documentation once you hand off to
> the OEM? If so, to what extent?
Not sure what you mean. They gave us a list of things that need to be changed
(nomenclature, portions that their version of the application doesn't support,
and so on), and I am making those changes in the documentation with conditional
text and variables in FrameMaker.
> Is there a need to track their changes?
I'm sending them shipping-ready PDF.
> If repackaging, how are you accomplishing this: do you maintain separate
> source or do you single source and conditionally tag vendor-specific
> content?
Well, before I realized to ask if this was an ongoing thing, I made a separate
copy of the docs for the company, and modified them by deleting content,
renaming stuff, and so on. Once I realized that this was something we were
going to need to do for all future releases, I started using variables and
conditional text tags to do the same.
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