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With voluminous documentation, it is indeed a big advantage to have it
available on screen, and fully searchable. Also, it is not such a big
surprise to me, that they call in instead of looking at the manual first. I
had a client who had a strategy about that. If someone called with a
question where the answer was obvious in the manual, their response was
"read the manual on page $$$". It helped.
My direct experience with on-line documentation is for myself. I did put
quite a bit of the Adobe Acrobat documentation on my local harddisk and
indexed the whole stuff with Catalog. Now, I have a very fast full text
search capability across about 25 documents (ranging from 10 pages to 1700
pages).
So, you may already guess my comments (and also my bias).
One thing you must keep in mind. The documentation you deliver on-line (or
better on CD-ROM) is still kind of a legal document. This means that you
will have to guarantee the integrity of the contents of your documents.
This is something you may have serious problems to do with a HTML based
solution compared to the PDF format. So, you should very carefully look at
what you deliver, in order to protect your butts in this respect. So, if
your clients want to avoid to "install one more steps", you might have them
to sign a document in which they agree that the integrity of contents of
the documentation is not guaranteed.
For your side, as you start from Framemaker documents, you do already have
quite a good support for the PDF format built in. From what I hear, the
support for HTML is not that good at all. So, you will have to do way more
post-processing for a functional HTML solution.
Another issue is indexing, which can be made rather easy for a CD-ROM
version, using Acrobat Catalog. I guess that there are some HTML based
solutions, but I am not sure about the additional effort on your and your
client's side.
The "shopping cart" function could be implemented with an Acrobat Form
using JavaScript.
Hope, this can help.
Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering AG
Technical documentation and translations, Electronic Publishing
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland
Fax: +41 1 700 20 37
e-mail: mailto:prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch or 100012 -dot- 44 -at- compuserve -dot- com
Bridging the Knowledge Gap ...
... with Acrobat Forms ... now for belt drive designers at
>My company has just completed a series of focus group discussions with some
>our most important clients. While these discussions revolved around
>everything from product features to customer support, some interesting
>feedback was received for the documentation team. Here is a brief summary:
>
>(Note: our manual set is 20+ volumes for one product - over 2500 pages)
>1. The groups thought our manuals were very well written and a huge
>improvement over previous versions.
>2. The groups then said that they rarely used the manuals to solve
>problems, instead calling our customer support line.
>3. When asked why, they said it was easier to call for help.
>4. The most surprising revelation was that they unanimously said they
>would prefer to receive documentation on CD ROM or on the Internet. They
>would sacrifice printed material for the ability to do on-line searches for
>topics. They claim they would use this media much more than printed manuals.
>And wouldn't need to call for support as often.
>
>Have many of you been getting similar feedback from your customers? If so,
>what has your response been?
>
>We are now looking at a completely on-line delivery for our documentation.
>Instead of starting in FrameMaker and working our up to web pages, we think
>it may in fact be easier to start by creating web pages first. We do not
>want to use PDF because our clients have complained about this "extra step".
>Ideally, we would create our documentation web and copy these exact same
>files over to CD giving us two delivery mechanisms (Internet and CD).
>
>It would be nice to add a 'shopping cart' type of functionality, allowing
>our users to pick and choose content for printing custom manuals in house.
>In other words, they would pick which topics to print and the order in which
>they are printed so that they could create their own training materials. Has
>anyone seen a tool that could do this?
>
>We are getting ready for a major rewrite of our library and would like to
>implement and on-line strategy before we start. I'd like to hear from anyone
>who has already gone through the shift from printed manuals to on-line only
>manuals and would like to share that experience. It sounds like it would be
>much easier to maintain (update) once everything was in place. My concern is
>would our customers really use this and how do we continue to provide
>printed documentation to the minority that will continue to request it.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Roger Morency
>rogerm -at- ontario -dot- com <mailto:Rogerm -at- ontario -dot- com>
>Ontario Systems Corp.
>1150 West Kilgore Ave
>Muncie, IN 47305
>(765) 751-7000
