Go Completely "On-line"

[Roger Morency <rogerm -at- ONTARIO -dot- COM>]

My company has just completed a series of focus group discussions with some
our most important clients. While these discussions revolved around
everything from product features to customer support, some interesting
feedback was received for the documentation team. Here is a brief summary:

(Note: our manual set is 20+ volumes for one product - over 2500 pages)
1.      The groups thought our manuals were very well written and a huge
improvement over previous versions.
2.      The groups then said that they rarely used the manuals to solve
problems, instead calling our customer support line.
3.      When asked why, they said it was easier to call for help.
4.      The most surprising revelation was that they unanimously said they
would prefer to receive documentation on CD ROM or on the Internet. They
would sacrifice printed material for the ability to do on-line searches for
topics. They claim they would use this media much more than printed manuals.
And wouldn't need to call for support as often.

Have many of you been getting similar feedback from your customers? If so,
what has your response been?

We are now looking at a completely on-line delivery for our documentation.
Instead of starting in FrameMaker and working our up to web pages, we think
it may in fact be easier to start by creating web pages first. We do not
want to use PDF because our clients have complained about this "extra step".
Ideally, we would create our documentation web and copy these exact same
files over to CD giving us two delivery mechanisms (Internet and CD).

It would be nice to add a 'shopping cart' type of functionality, allowing
our users to pick and choose content for printing custom manuals in house.
In other words, they would pick which topics to print and the order in which
they are printed so that they could create their own training materials. Has
anyone seen a tool that could do this?

We are getting ready for a major rewrite of our library and would like to
implement and on-line strategy before we start. I'd like to hear from anyone
who has already gone through the shift from printed manuals to on-line only
manuals and would like to share that experience. It sounds like it would be
much easier to maintain (update) once everything was in place. My concern is
would our customers really use this and how do we continue to provide
printed documentation to the minority that will continue to request it.

Thanks.

Roger Morency
rogerm -at- ontario -dot- com <mailto:Rogerm -at- ontario -dot- com>
Ontario Systems Corp.
1150 West Kilgore Ave
Muncie, IN 47305
(765) 751-7000