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pageicon Friday Jun 22, 2007

How do users really want their technical information presented?

By now, some of you might have read Steve Wilson's latest blog. In it, he requests that technical information be presented through blogs. Not that I'm discounting his input, but it seems to me lately as though our internal stakeholders are making a lot of "everyone wants blogs" statements without having heard directly from Sun's customers that they want their technical product information provided using that mechanism.

Blogs have their place. They are a really good mechanism for selling products and for developing conversations around features for those products. And, of course, blogs are a cool way to just talk about non-product related information too. However, do people consider blogs to be "accurate enough" to provide quality technical information? Can blogs replace "books" (as Steve suggests) or do you (product users) still want some information to be provided in a more "traditional" format? What about wikis instead of "books?" I am curious (as always) about what our real users want. 

Posted at 09:16AM Jun 22, 2007 by jcinfoblog in Music  |  Comments[4]

Comments:

Blogs are a good way for someone with some involvement with a product (be it as a user, a developer, etc) to express opinions and publish experiences and 'How-to' style information. I know that I've more than once obtained information on particular use cases for Solaris and other Sun products from a variety of blogs, and this can be extremely helpful when what the author wishes to blog about aligns with what I want to do. It's also good to be introduced to concepts that the author wishes to blog about that I personally hadn't considered, and can be an enlightening experience. On balance, however, I also spend a lot of time reading the style of technical documentation available on docs.sun.com (and project websites, such as those available at opensolaris.org). While I'm not hugely fussed on the paper medium, I appreciate the HTML and PDF versions of book-like (i.e. Admin Guide and Admin Reference style) documentation available for times when I want to read through a broader range of information. It's a different structure for information that I find valuable, not least of all because it groups much of what I often want to know (the Messaging Server 6.3 Admin Guide is something like a thousand pages long in PDF form). Lastly, I'm a big proponent of Wikis for documentation purposes, because I like the live-editing, markup-centric technology. I'm still not convinced, however, that they're as generally applicable as other Wiki proponents would have us believe. I've found wiki.sun-rays.org to be useful at times, and I've found personally that for close-knit teams doing internal documentation the Wiki is a good medium. I'm not really of the belief that Wikis could entirely supplant other forms of documentation, though, because the inability for everyone to edit is sometimes a good thing. The quality control and editing processes around more 'traditional' book-like documentation is something of value, in my opinion.

Posted by Joshua Clulow on June 23, 2007 at 01:06 AM CDT #

To jcinfoblog: Steve's blog posting inspired me to blog about how there's a place for both screencasts and books, where you'll find more answers to your question.

To Joshua Clulow: As a technical writer in Sun's software Information Products Group (IPG), I am very grateful for your very detailed and carefully considered answer. There's much valuable input there to the discussion about what our real users want. Many thanks!

Posted by Paul Davies on June 23, 2007 at 04:30 PM CDT #

Joshua - Thank you for your comments. I think that you have hit the proverbial "nail on the head." I wonder if anyone else has any other thoughts (besides Paul, that is)?

Posted by Blog Owner on June 25, 2007 at 10:15 AM CDT #

Remember the recent high-profile furore regarding the Solaris OS telnet security problem? Before the gigantic SMI corporate steel wheels could get into motion, to issue the official massaged corporate response, (and to set up a meetings to investigate which parts of Sun's global support services organisation would deal with this problem and what their official process should be), Bloggers inside Sun had already acted. Bloggers inside Sun very quickly posted links to patches and full explanations, conditions, applicable systems, workarounds, etc. Customers (aka the community) really appreciated the speed with which bloggers inside Sun could deliver credible, findable and usable resolutions to this problem, and the way they could respond to questions. It's mentioned in this (which is, as luck would have it, also a blog) http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=31

Posted by Luke on June 26, 2007 at 09:52 AM CDT #

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