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RE: A wiki for docs? Doku-Wiki and how to set it up...
Subject:RE: A wiki for docs? Doku-Wiki and how to set it up... From:Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:39:12 -0800 (PST)
The nice thing about DocuWiki is that you can pick up the docs and put them anywhere you want. I believe DocuWiki works on a host system without the necessity of a web server. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong on that. But the genius of DocuWiki is that it just processes XML, and doesn't use MySql at all (last I looked).
Anyway, you can always include a web server in your product to have a "desktop" version of anything that would ordinarily be published externally. The overhead for that is minimal compared to the hogs that just about every desktop application has become.
Today we still have the concept of a desktop application. I believe that will go away fairly soon (maybe not soon in internet years, but in dog years, yes). You should look forward to your "application" being a network of services communicating asynchronously. Whether that happens on a single desktop CPU with round-robin threading, one host running separate virtual machines (applications on a stick), on a multi-core or multi-CPU machine with parallel threading, multiple machines on a private network, or on the global cloud is immaterial. In that environment, serving documentation is the only solution that makes sense to me. So one of these services would indeed be a doc service -- doc services can get smarter and start responding to user roles, assembling combinations of docs on the fly, incorporating user-generated content, sending messages to help desk or other human service providers, and (as the Spanish like to say) un largo etcetera.
Reading the posted article, I see DocuWiki has evolved substantially since I tried it last. I'm definitely looking into it as a doc authoring platform, now that it exports to Open Office.
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Remember the opening scenes of (I believe it was) the first Mission Impossible movie?
Rooms a bit more secure than that are where many of our products go.
If I have to say it - no internet connection for anybody working in there.
That kind of customer would get cranky if the only product docs were online.
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