Re: Hosted Help - server specs?

Subject: Re: Hosted Help - server specs?
From: Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: Technical Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2013 14:43:47 -0500

Our product requires access to the Internet (that is, there is a "cloud"
aspect to it), So until that changes, we should be fine with hosted help.
And I've already got a plan for when we finally get a customer that demands
being able to work off-line (and I'm sure that's coming at some point).

We're generating Web Help, with Flare. Which is why I'm looking forward to
the chance to use Flare's "publish" feature to just push up Help changes to
wherever we end up hosting the docs.

>Web help is not very resource-intensive as web applications go.

Not sure what you mean by this? Our resource problems with our current doc
workflow are time (late breaking changes to the Release Notes) and QA
cycles (the need to re-build the installer and re-run the test suite for
last minute doc changes). For one of our products that build/test cycle is
measured in days.


On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:31 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>wrote:

> Web help is not very resource-intensive as web applications go.
>
> What tool and format are you using or is that something you're
> figuring out as well?
>
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com>
> wrote:
> > I've had several requests from various product managers about moving from
> > having our Help files built into the product to having our Help and
> > documentation hosted on a Web site somewhere. I'd love to make this
> > change, because Release Notes are always changing up to the very last
> > minute, and then we have to rebuild the installer and run through the QA
> > test suite again. Decoupling the doc deliver from the builds would have
> so
> > many benefits for not just our process, but would allow me to make doc
> > updates as needed (vs. on the release schedule).
> >
> > I've got several ideas about how to go about this, but before I head down
> > to talk to IT about getting server space, I thought I'd tap the
> collective
> > brain power of TechWrl and see if there's anything I haven't thought of,
> or
> > good advice from the TW brain trust.
> >
> > Anyone made the move to Hosted docs? Have any lessons learned to share?
> > Success stories? Horror stories? Stuff you wish you'd done differently?
>



--
Julie Stickler
http://heratech.wordpress.com/
Blogging about Agile and technical writing


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References:
Hosted Help - server specs?: From: Julie Stickler
Re: Hosted Help - server specs?: From: Robert Lauriston

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