Re: Users - [OFBiz] Dev - Any interest in End-User and other documentation?

[Jacopo Cappellato]

Hi,

I'm replying to this interesting thread (born in the dev list) in the
user list because the content of this message is more user oriented.

I'm not so surprised to see that David's announce is getting a tepid
feedback from the community.

The main reason, in my opinion, is that, even if a lot of persons ask
for end user documentation, the real problem is that many of them really
want some magic tool to implement, without any effort or cost, complex
ERP processes in their company; these processes can be succesfully
implemented only with the help of persons with deep business/ERP
knowledge, not simply by (even motivated) IT managers.
Nowadays, you can set up a web server even if you are not a system
administrator; this is not true for setting up an ERP system for your
company.
SAP, Oracle, Movex and many other big ERP systems are bundled with a lot
of end-user documentation (for some of them, not so much as you could
imagine...) but I've never heard of a company that even tried to deploy
these systems without the support of a consulting company.

In short, the underlying demand is for free consulting, not free
documentation.

In my opinion, Undersun's end-user documentation will greatly help the
ones that, after they have received good OFBiz consulting by some expert
guys, will need a reference guide to help them refresh some concepts (or
explore new ones).

Just my 2 cents.

Jacopo

David E. Jones wrote:

> There was a bit of discussion following my message last week about the proposed new end-user and other document site using Confluence to run the site. More of the messages were more related to the tool to use to run the site. I still like the idea of using Confluence, even after briefly looking into other alternatives mentioned. It is available for free for this use, and we already having a hosting arrangement in place with people familiar with administering the software.
>
> There is also the potential of consolidating the documentation managed by a small group and more openly managed documentation in the same system by simply migrating the content from the existing OFBiz wiki.
>
> What I'm more interested in though is: is anyone interested in this enough to help with it?
>
> I'm basically saying that the documentation that Undersun has paid about $30k to put together and maintain can be made available for free. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of interest in this, or perhaps I wasn't clear enough about it, or perhaps people don't like the approach?
>
> There is a lot of work needed to reformat this to work in a different content management system because of different data structures and such. It doesn't matter which system we go to, the structures will be different. So the choices are either to extend the OFBiz content management piece (based on the work that Al Byers did a couple of years ago) to do everything we want, or just move the content to another tool.
>
> Both will require manual work. My opinion is that moving the content to another tool will require both less time and a far smaller skill set for whoever does it. This is based on some analysis of what would need to be developed, and on a couple of hours of manually moving content from the Undersun end-user doc site to the new OFBiz Confuence server.
>
> So, a few questions:
>
> 1. is anyone interested in using this documentation?
> 2. is anyone interested in helping move over documentation from other sources?
> 3. is anyone interested in spending a few hours per week to help maintain this?
>
> I'd like to see this move forward... It's basically free content it someone will just help move it over. The only learning is required is about how to use Confluence, and there is pretty good documentation for that. It is also very simple, being a wiki-based system. The work involves copying from a browser and pasting into the WYSIWYG text editor box, reformatting it, and also saving off images and uploading them to the new system and inserting them in the text.
>
> -David
>
>  
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