Microsoft just published the latest and greatest version of their OCS 2007 R2 documentation. I asked the official Microsoft OCS MVP mailing list, "Is there anything new about the OCS 2007 R2 docs contained on this page or is this just a centralized repository of all the Word docs and the single .chm help file?" I added, "Perhaps this is the first "official" 1.0 release of ALL the documentation?"All you know-it-all techies out here are probably thinking, "Documentation? We don't need no stinkin' documentation!"
Yeah, in most cases I'm right there with ya, but not something as complicated as OCS 2007 R2. I often tell users who come to me repeatedly with the same IT question to go RTFM. So I suppose if I tell users to 'Read The "Friggin" Manual', I should read the manual as well. But I digress...
In any event, Jeff Schertz from Pointbridge, a consulting firm (including OCS) commented, "I hope that is really not the case. IMO if there is going to be three different formats of the same content (online, .CHM, .DOC) then they really need to be consistent across all three. I'd assume the .CHM will fall behind and require periodic updates, online content should be updated in parallel to downloadable docs. Forum questions regarding 'confusing OCS documentation' is a daily occurrence.
My sentiments exactly! I should mention that the .chm (Compiled HTML Help file) is a nice quick searchable index of the help content, but updates often lag behind other forms of documentation.
Elan Shudnow from CDW (I buy most of TMC's computer equipment @CDW by the way) also responded when he wrote, "This is one of the issues I saw with R1.. I saw a ton of inconsistencies with information on Technet and the Word files. Now there's Word files, CHM, and Technet with probably additional inconsistencies because now there's 3 places for information instead of 2 like with R1."
Microsoft's Patricia (Trish) Anderson responded, "In OCS R2, we are now single sourcing all docs. The chm were updated 5 hours after the online update for this refresh and will generally follow that same model. All three deliverables have been refreshed with the latest info and are inline with each other."
A few people, including myself all reacted to the good news of consistent and updated documentation. Getting Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployed is a fairly complicated task so good documentation is crucial for OCS resellers & installers, as well as customers' IT departments that install and maintain OCS deployments. We do
Download the docs
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Digg
twitter
Leave a comment