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âRe: Differentiating between software versions in help articles
Subject:âRe: Differentiating between software versions in help articles From:Lawrence Orin <startingfresh1 -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com, âNina Rogers <janina -dot- rogers -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Sun, 15 Mar 2015 10:59:01 +0200
Hi Nina,
Your question is excellent. Many factors come together to create problems
when updating online content:
* Between versions of the same product, typically 60-90% of content remains
the same.
* But we must keep back-versions live on the web for legacy customers.
* When customers search through your doc library, the scope of a customer's
search is key:
- Either search per publication (like webhelp, PDFs), or
- Search across all publications (modern knowledge base portals like
Suite Share, Fluid Topics, Confluence, MindTouch).
* In my experience, customers expect to search across all versions (thanks
to the flat world brought to us by Google et al).
* So searching a phrase often yields multiple (almost) duplicate search
results, which makes content harder to find.
âThere are several solutions to this problem:
1. Mark your content with metadata like the version number, product name,
audience type. Then allow customers to filter their searches with these
criteria.â
2. Choose a doc portal which can process search results to group very
similar items together into one entry, then sub-categorize by version
number (like Fluid Topics).
Many thanks,
Lawrence
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