Posted by
Ian Gilbert-2 on
Mar 29, 2006; 2:55pm
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/Users-Updated-documentation-tp138178p138182.html
Hi All,
I'm glad they are popular :) I am happy to release these under any license but I'm not sure that
this will have the desired effect. My reasoning is that the development community (that this doc
is not really targeted at) has a range of resources to pull information from (wiki, production
guide, mailing lists, intro docs on the Open Source Strategies site, the Undersun Consulting docs
etc.,) but most of my users are non tech and would simply get lost in the information. Indeed
they would not even consider contributing back and probably would have difficulties understanding
the concept. Certainly there would be hurdles to stop them (I cannot see them using Jira for
example although I can see them deluging me with the same emails a few hundred times). There is
not too much user orientated resource available at the moment but this is understandable because
the type of business user who has got involved in the project so far have all had a considerable
technical ability and inclination.
We have quite a high turnover of people at ES and so it made a lot of sense to write some form of
training or user reference doc simply to reduce the amount of time that I was spending with people
on the same questions. I think that there is still lots to do on this (similar books run to 5-600
pages in the shops so I'm not going to stop now ;) Granted I've skipped the traditional
'Introduction to the Internet' which most of them have (don't worry guys - it will be in the next
version) but even so there is a huge amount still to cover even with the limited way in which we
use Ofbiz. I was also keen to create a doc that could be pulled apart and used as a test script
as much of the UAT we do is much easier that way.
The reason I don't think it will work in the community in the same way is that there are very few
end users (or appear to be) on the list that wouldn't be better off updating the wiki. I've used
Open Office to create the DocBook format (it was the first of these that I've done and I do like
it but would like to use another editor to create new tags which I think might end up with a more
flexible document (i.e. use one document root to create sub docs for Administrators, store clerks,
accounts team etc., which should be quite straightforward with xml) but I have to fit this into
gaps between contracts like the one I've got right now.
That said I'm happy for this to be released under any license and for anyone to use this in any
way they see fit. Considering the value that ES and I have had from participating in this project
it really is the least I can do. At some point I would like to write a more professional guide
and ideally have it published properly. I think that this would be better created with a number
of authors simply because the subject is so big.
Very best wishes
Ian
On Wed, March 29, 2006 12:28, David Welton wrote:
>>> Yes, nice job indeed. It would be good to see something like this
>>> distributed with OFBiz itself.
>>
>> Yes, or maybe a link from official OFBiz site (Doc tab) will be sufficient ?
>>
>
> As the years go by, stuff that doesn't get held together tends to
> float apart (bit rot). Perhaps if the DocBook sources were in Subversion, more people would update
> them and add to them, as well. However, this is a decision for Ian, who would have to release the
> docs under a suitable license, and the developers, who would have to choose to include it.
>
> --
> David N. Welton
> -
http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/>
>
> Linux, Open Source Consulting
> -
http://www.dedasys.com/>
>
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Ian Gilbert
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