Documenting Procedures for the IT Department - Suggestions & Help Needed

["Daniel Walter" <danieljames_walter -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Hi all

At the moment I am working with some guys from a client's IT department to 
document their network services -- critical processes and knowledge that 
needs to be documented in case people leave the company and walk out with 
substantial local knowledge about the networks, who to contact when 
something goes wrong, etc.

I'm feeling a bit out of my depth and want to group the documentation they 
have drafted into some sort of logical structure that is sensible for them. 
I'd like to get some feedback from the list to see if the way I am thinking 
is the right way to go. I will then get their feedback -- but I want to have 
something sensible to show them to begin with!

The draft documentation (which is very brief -- no more than one page per 
topic at the moment) broadly covers where the physical devices are located, 
who to contact, related procedures (i.e. what to do). I've been given a list 
of things they have written down:

Subject & Trigger for action:
Radius server -- what to do when the routers won't authenticate
User creation and authentication  -- new users, etc
Firewall -- network failure
FTP server - maintenance
Web server -- maintenance, faults, additions
Intranet  -- server maintenance, failure
Domain Name Server -- maintenance faults
Email systems -- maintenance, faults
Internet Connection -- Maintenance, faults

Should I group these by function, for example, servers, and then create 
sub-groups such as radius server, FTP server, web server. Or would it be 
better to create chapters called Maintenance, Troubleshooting, Set up? This 
information will be able to the IT guys from their Intranet.

I'm going to look around for an online course as I need to get to grips with 
all of this (corporate servers, intranets, etc) as we're doing more and more 
of this type of work -- can anyone recommend any good resources?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Dan



_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: 
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Buy ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 6.0, the most powerful SINGLE SOURCE HELP
AUTHORING TOOL for MS Word. SAVE $100 on the full version and $50 on the
upgrade.  Offer ends 10/31/2002 (code: DTH102250).
http://www.componentone.com/d2hlist1002

All-new RoboHelp X3 is now shipping! Get single sourcing, print-quality
documentation, conditional text and much more, in the most monumental
release ever. Save $100! Order online at http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.