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In response to my posting regarding providing documentation source, Tim O'Neill
suggested:
You could do like Microsoft and put it on a quarterly CD-ROM. You could charge
a nominal subscription fee to recover your
costs of burning the cD. You could have ps, mif, doc, pdf formats on the disc,
cover all operating platforms and satisfy
current and future needs. You could get as fancy as you want with an
interface, but that would definitely run up your cost.
--------------------
We do want to provide our documentation in an online format. What we do not
want to do is allow user demand for an online presentation push us into a quick
and dirty solution: e.g., dumping our paper onto CD-ROM. Unfortunately, the
alternative --which BTW, many of us belive the is the better alternative-- is a
more rationale thought out process of determining the clients actual needs for
what goes online and what stays on paper and then using the best tools and
development process to provide the most useful output.
The issue with this one client is providing the source, not so much what he
wants to do with it (we have had other clients who want the source so that they
can modify the documentation to fit their internal policies and then publish a
new printed manual).
