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>Cayenne Woods wrote:
>>This week, the company decided to change the name of all the software (4
>pieces + admin guide - not huge/complex software, but enough). The deadline is Friday.
and then "Jane Carnall" <jane -dot- carnall -at- digitalbridges -dot- com> suggested
>... It's infuriating. It's added work at the wrong time. But it's not the end of the world.
>
>Document how much more time you're going to need to implement the required
>changes, tell them, and get back to work. (You may need to make it clear to
>them that it's really a very bad idea to run through documentation with
>automatic search-and-replace, no matter *how* sure you are that the changes
>you make can't impact on anything else. They may have this idea that you can
>do it all in half an hour.)
This happened to me a number of times when I worked for Borland/Inprise/Borland, but with the company name. And, actually, I have worked at several companies where the product name changed, sometimes several times just before first release.
I always make the company name and the product name variables in my FrameMaker documents at least, so when they change it's a little easier to deal with. If you do this, be careful not to do this for directory names and in code examples because these may or may not change when everything else will.
One big, big problem when these kinds of words change is that usually many, many of the screen shots also have to change because they use the old product name or company name. And, since these words are not usually tied to fields that are being documented, you end up having to look at all the screen shots and illustrations to and find the ones that must be re-done.
And, of course, since the installers and so on must have been re-written to remove these words, there are good odds that the installers will not have been updated in time for you to get screen shots without the old product name, company name.
No great advice, but sympathy. Remember that no one is perfect.
--Emily
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~ Emily Berk ~
On the web at www.armadillosoft.com *** Armadillo Associates, Inc. ~
~ Project management, developer relations and ~
extremely-technical technical documentation that developers find useful.~
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