Re: Go Completely "On-line"

[Alexia Prendergast <alexiap -at- SEAGATESOFTWARE -dot- COM>]

> 4.      The most surprising revelation was that they
> unanimously said they
> would prefer to receive documentation on CD ROM or on the
> Internet.

This is exactly the response we got from our users. We do offer a
Installing <Product> and Getting Started with <Product> in hardcopy
(with quick ref cards) and will continue to do so. The rest of the
library is on-line only. We did PDFs as a first step, but our customers,
for the most part, hate using Acrobat. We are currently moving to HTML
and so far, the feedback has been very positive.

Like you, we planned for this change beforehand. Writing for a hypertext
model does require some shifts in thought and implementation and
requires more planning time up front and less writing time later.

If you go from FrameMaker to HTML, I recommend WebWorks for the
conversion -- it's by far the best tool. Once you get the WebWorks
template mapped to your FrameMaker template, it's a one-touch conversion
(provided your writers don't tend to indulge in overrides much). You can
also do some very sophisticated, yet portable, stuff. WebWorks tech
support has responded to me very quickly and their answers have been
useful. (The WebWorks documentation needs work. It's not task-oriented
or complete and, surprisingly, they haven't done much in the way of
design -- which they could do easily with their tool.)

Out of curiosity, what industry do you write for? Are your users
technically sophisticated?

Thanks,
A.
--
Alexia Prendergast Tech Pubs Manager, Seagate Software
If developers wrote error messages in Haiku (author unknown)...
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