âRe: Differentiating between software versions in help articles

Subject: âRe: Differentiating between software versions in help articles
From: Lawrence Orin <startingfresh1 -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com, âNina Rogers <janina -dot- rogers -at- gmail -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2015 10:59:01 +0200

Hi Nina,

Your question is excellent. Many factors come together to create problems
when updating online content:

* Between versions of the same product, typically 60-90% of content remains
the same.

* But we must keep back-versions live on the web for legacy customers.

* When customers search through your doc library, the scope of a customer's
search is key:

- Either search per publication (like webhelp, PDFs), or
- Search across all publications (modern knowledge base portals like
Suite Share, Fluid Topics, Confluence, MindTouch).

* In my experience, customers expect to search across all versions (thanks
to the flat world brought to us by Google et al).

* So searching a phrase often yields multiple (almost) duplicate search
results, which makes content harder to find.

âThere are several solutions to this problem:

1. Mark your content with metadata like the version number, product name,
audience type. Then allow customers to filter their searches with these
criteria.â

2. Choose a doc portal which can process search results to group very
similar items together into one entry, then sub-categorize by version
number (like Fluid Topics).

Many thanks,

Lawrence
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Adobe TCS 5: Get the Best of both worlds: modern publishing and best in class XML \ DITA authoring | http://adobe.ly/scpwfT

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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