Go Completely On-Line

[Elna Tymes <etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM>]

Posted for my business partner:

A few comments from some recent experience at Oracle.

Oracle's been doing a fair amount of work over the last few years to
develop a viable online doc strategy.  With the disparity of products
they sell, they've been able to try out different solutions in the field
to see what works and what doesn't.

Structurally, the approach they're settling into involves an extensible,
online-delivered documentation set that still provides a great deal of
print-centric attention. All documentation is, according to spec,
authored in Frame, then delivered in both HTML and PDF.  All doc sets
are completely searchable, using Acrobat Catalog for the PDF sets, and a
custom-coded Java engine for the HTML. The Java engine also contains and
indexed list for each doc set and a multiple-book tree control for
organization of the online presentation. The file format is extensible,
so that a single, common installation area can store content files for
more than one book set - and all of those book sets are available
through a common framework. Though HTML is the prefered output medium,
PDF is usually provided so that end users can easily produce paper books
if they so desire.

The end result of this was a recent edict that all documentation will
migrate to an online delivery means, and that except for some limited
product lines, no paper docs will ship with product.  Anyone who wants
printed books will order them through an online store, and no book will
be printed without a pre-existing order.

You might compare this with Novell's experience from the early 1990s.
They shipped all of their docs on CD for one release, and were
completely castigated by their users - to the extent that they reverted
to paper docs for the next release.  It appears that there has been a
change in
- perceived utility of online docs;
- acceptance of online-only delivery; and
- online delivery technology.

Charles Prael
Los Trancos Systems