3 ring binders or no?

["Rollings, Gill" <WGILLR -at- WOK-MSMAIL-GW -dot- ISL -dot- COM>]

Kimberly Ferri asked whether supplying documentation in 3-ring binders is a
good idea.  I would offer the following comments:

* - My firm used to supply all our documentation in ring binders.  New or
revised information was supplied in film-wrapped packs, with the volume &
page numbers clearly marked so that the new pages could be slipped in to
replace the old.  Both internal and external users failed to update their
manuals most of the time.  Anecdotal evidence talks of consultants visiting
customer sites finding piles of updates gathering dust.  Some people prefer
to keep the page on which they scribbled in the margins rather than put in a
new one.

* - Yes, it's easy to mislay pages if they can be removed.  If someone takes
a few pages out of a binder and doesn't replace them promptly (and in the
right place...), it creates trouble for others who may want the same
information.  Book(let)s might be a better bet - you either keep or lose the
whole thing and can't muddle the order of the pages.

* - Pages with holes where they fit in a binder tear more easily than pages
bound in a book.  Binder pages can get awfully tatty, especially the ones
that don't change and stay in there forever.

* - What do we do now?  We ship all our documentation on CD, which means
that (a) we don't have to keep stocks of manuals and (b) the customers can
print off exactly how many copies of which books (or chapters or pages) they
want.  In turn, we save lots of money on printing and shipping costs for
sets of manuals, and customers can control their costs more precisely when
they need extra copies of anything.  It's also a lot quicker to copy files
with updates onto diskette to be mailed out than have someone standing by
the printer getting new pages ready.

Before anyone rushes to accuse us of dictating to our customers what WP
package they must use, I should add that [someone] did some survey work and
this was not an overnight diktat.  As our older product only ran on Tandem
computers, the on-line help was in one format only and if you had the
product, you had access to the tools to use the doc.  With the newer
products, customers have a choice of hardware platforms and operating
systems.  We supply olh in various formats, and comprehensive documentation
in MS Viewer and Word for Windows.  Even if the customer has to buy one user
licence so that someone in one department can print off copies of manuals,
they don't necessarily have to kit out everyone in the office.  So far as I
know, this is going down pretty well.  (Leaping to a defensive position
before anyone attacks - you can see I've been reading this list for a while
now...)

I'm not necessarily advising Kimberly taking such a drastic step.  Depending
on the time available and whether she can get help in assessing what her
customers and colleagues really want, it may be out of the question.
 However, sometimes it pays to make a "quantum leap" and change the whole
approach to how you supply your documentation.  If you have more than one
type of document to supply with a delivery (as you seem to indicate), maybe
you need to look at a system which would allow you to concentrate more on
content than presentation - in my personal view, the most important issue is
to get the material right.

Gill Rollings, Technical Writer, Internet Systems Ltd
gill -dot- rollings -at- isl -dot- com