Re: Download manual from site (was: Booklets or anything saddle-stitched)

[voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

You may be OK with this, but I would recommend the sales force add something
to their contracts emphasizing that the documentation is only available as
an online download and that the customer should download & distribute the
documentation to their installation crews before deploying them in the
field.

An anecdote that may let you know how the techs feel about this: My spouse
installs home theaters in homes, and there is an expensive and fancy remote
that many of his customers want to use (because it combines/replaces all the
individual remotes). It requires some extensive programming. All of the
documentation (and the programming software) is only available online, and
it annoyed him greatly. He would have been much happier with a CD included
with the product.

-Wendy

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 2:46 AM, Erika Yanovich <ERIKA_y -at- rad -dot- com> wrote:

> Kevin and all,
>
> We faced a very similar situation and at the end we dropped the entire idea
> of printing QSGs by packers, not because it is difficult but because of the
> sheer amount of administration of a few hundred QSGs on our side. We can get
> away with this as usually there is a business partner between us (the
> vendor) and the end user, who installs the equipment.
>
> Now we want to eliminate the CDs (that eliminated the printed manuals a few
> years ago), by download from our site. And here the 'situation' is back
> again because you can't ship a product without absolutely no instructions in
> the box, right? We feel that printing QSGs will defeat the purpose of the
> saving, so we are considering a 'universal' sheet that just points the user
> to our site for downloading the manual (perhaps together with product
> registration for activating the warranty).
>
> This download approach is probably not acceptable for products you buy
> privately for home usage, but our customers are large corporations, such as
> mobile operators or utilities.
>
> Your thoughts are appreciated.
>
> Erika
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