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I am working with some developers to determine the best approach to
providing customized documentation to our users.
I'm on the team for a redesign project for our largest software application.
As part of the redesign, we are going to add features that allow users to
customize the software to match their specific SOP. Some customization is
currently available, but the redesign will make it easier for the user and
provide more levels of customization.
Rather than just provide generic help that covers all possible options, we'd
like to generate customized help as it is called by the user. The system
would read the user's custom settings, and generate help to match those
settings. For example, users will be able to turn off fields they don't use,
so they don't appear on screen. The can also re-name fields (which they can
do now). When they call help on a specific screen, we want the system to
read which fields they are using, which functions are activated, and what
labels they have applied, and then pull data and generate the help file.
We are discussing two approaches: XML and a database approach (I realize
there is potentially some overlap here).
I've been able to find a lot of information about XML (probably because I
had a good basic knowledge of it to begin with), but not much on
database-driven content (what I've found is all based on database-driven web
sites, mostly for e-commerce). I've googled and searched the techwr-l
archives, but I'm not coming up with stuff that is really matching what I
need.
Does anybody have experiences to share or sources of information
(websites/books/etc) on database-driven documentation (not restricted to
websites)? We are at the infant stages of this project, so now is the time
to explore all our options and maybe try a few things out. Right now, I'm
looking for conceptual type stuff. I already have a good idea of how we
would implement this using XML, but I'm somewhat fuzzy on how we would do it
using a database. I'm not a database idiot - our software uses a relational
database - but I've never really thought about it from this angle before.
Note: We plan on using this approach specifically to provide customized,
on-the-fly type of help. We are not going to use it for single sourcing
other types of documentation. Our user manuals provide more conceptual, high
level task information that is not as affected by field-level customization.
Also, we already have some really good content in our current help files, so
we are comfortable focusing on delivery methods at this point. If our
content was crap, I wouldn't even think of attempting this until we got that
cleaned up.
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