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Tammy VanBoening wrote:
>I am currdently documenting this section of the application - the
>use of the Wizard to pull the .pdf form into our application.
>However, to my SMEs, this isn't sufficient. They want me to include
>in our end-user documentation explicit instructions on how to first
>create the form in Adobe Acrobat.
>...
>I am saying that if the users can't figure out a third-party
>application from the application's documentation and OLH, they need
>to get training on their own. We are not a licensed third-party
>vendor for AA.
Perhaps not, but you have a vested interest in seeing that your
customers are successful with your product. If that involves telling
them how to use a third-party product, so be it. Sending them off on
their own to the Acrobat manual places the success of YOUR customers
in the hands of another company's writers.
Your company chose to develop software that relies on a third-party.
Therefore, you must accept responsibility for teaching your customers
how to use that third-party product where it affects your own
product. There may be a moral correctness in refusing to document
another company's product, but that doesn't help YOUR users be
successful.
My advice is to suck it up and write your own doc (not copied from
the Acrobat manual) that provides a reasonable amount of info that
will allow your users to do what they need to do. Your customers will
be happier with five pages of Acrobat doc in YOUR help system than
they will by being sent to fend for themselves in Adobe's doc set.
You can refer them to the Acrobat doc for detailed reference
information, but your doc should provide the basic task information
they need.
(None of this is intended as a judgment on the quality of the Acrobat doc.)
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