RE: Web Hosting Your Company's Documentation - Pros and Cons

Subject: RE: Web Hosting Your Company's Documentation - Pros and Cons
From: "Glenn Maxey" <glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 18:49:25 -0600

I concur with Dan Hall's e-mail about having a plan.

FWIW, this has always been a carrot for me and other tech publications
departments where I have worked. However, it has been squashed more than
once by rampid paranoia in sales and support. The naysayers have had all
sorts of (half-baked) arguments, like:

1) "Our product is really technical. If we expose it on our website,
it'll scare people off." (This was in spite of the fact that we would
customer password protect the area of the web where this was to appear;
the customers were ALREADY customers, hence no potential-customer would
be scared off.)

2) "If we expose our documentation on the website, our competitors will
see it and could steal our technology." (This was inspite of the fact
that the documentation primarily described the software and that the
software controlled proprietary hardware -- our money maker. If you
didn't have our software and our hardware, the SW documentation was a
teaser but didn't give away the farm by any stretch of the imagination.
You still had to develop the HW and get the SW to communicate with it.)

IMHO, documentation isn't really as proprietary as the paranoia would
have us believe. You'd have to go to a lot of effort to create a
compatible competitive product just from the documentation. When
paranoia reigns, put the stuff into a protected area of the website;
just don't make customers wait for really long release cycles to get
information that they need.

Glenn Maxey
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
Tel. +1 303.223.5164
Fax. +1 303.223.5275
glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- com




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael_Cohen -at- hyperion -dot- com [mailto:Michael_Cohen -at- hyperion -dot- com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 7:19 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Web Hosting Your Company's Documentation - Pros and Cons
>
> Hosting your company's documentation on a Web server that all
> customers
> access remotely.
>
> I'm interesting in hearing about your experiences in this
> area , good and bad.

> Any thoughts, opinions, experiences, etc. would be greatly
> appreciated.

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