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RE: Striving To Increase The Page Count Was: Estimation of the nu mber of pages...
Subject:RE: Striving To Increase The Page Count Was: Estimation of the nu mber of pages... From:mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 4 Jan 2005 10:45:31 -0500
David Neeley
[...]
> Ideally, given time and the authority to do so, user documentation
> should be fluid--being updated as needed to respond to real-world
> questions and problems among users in the field. Given the ability to
> have documentation downloadable, this is increasingly possible. That
> is why the docs people responsible for a given product doc set should
> be monitoring the tech support issues continuously throughout the
> product lifecycle...with recurring problems being earmarked either for
> the next upgrade or for a slipstream documentation upgrade if
> sufficiently serious.
When you can update documents on-the-fly, allowing customers to always
be downloading the latest-up-to-datest, does that mean that you begin
to burn through document version numbers at a rapid rate?
What about when several versions/releases of product are in the field?
Do you fix/improve docs only for the last-released version of product?
Or do you attempt to improve (say) Help for an earlier version that
might be still in use by a lot of customers? Does that then require
you to maintain streams of docs/help for each product version, and/or
to apply Conditions at each new release, to allow you to keep generating
old-version and new-version doco updates?
Or, is there a different, perhaps better way to handle that sort of thing?
[...]
> In fact, I have rarely been part of a doc project that had sufficient
> time that there was little rush at the end of the release cycle.
> Usually, it's a mad scramble to get everything covered that absolutely
> must be included, let alone the time to edit and polish. Perhaps your
> experience has been different?
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