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I've been a techwriter for just shy of 30 years. For the first bunch of years it was always books, then early this century it switched to WebHelp... but on CD or in the customer's file system, not served by a webserver, and certainly not web-served by us or any third-party service company. With reference to Hannah's questions, several of our customers put the product in a sealed room that does not have network connection. (As I've mentioned in the past, think of the Mission Impossible movies with the criss-crossing lasers, pressure-sensitive floors (bring your trapeze), sound detection (don't sneeze or fart if you are breaking in), temperature-change detection, scanning for anomalous RF emissions, infrared and ultrasonic detectors... and of course, video surveillance. Oh, and multi-factor authentication requirement to get through the front... vault... door... accompanied, of course.)
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+kevin -dot- mclauchlan=safenet-inc -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+kevin -dot- mclauchlan=safenet-inc -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Julie Stickler
Sent: December-04-13 2:49 PM
To: Technical Writing
Subject: Re: Hosted Help - server specs?
Also I find it kind of interesting that you talk about "the traditional CHM" as backup.
I've been a technical writer for over a dozen years now, and I've never produced a CHM file. I've always produced some flavor of WebHelp. Are people still producing CHM files? (not to derail my own topic, but I'm curious).
On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Hannah Drake <hannah -at- formulatrix -dot- com> wrote:
> 1) Are all of your customers hooked up to the Internet? any
> high-security customers? These kinds of things can cause hosted "help" problems.
> 2) Most companies that have online help also do the traditional CHM as
> a backup, so you can't completely get rid of in-product help.
>
>
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> On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 1:31 PM, Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com>wrote:
>
>> I've had several requests from various product managers about moving
>> from having our Help files built into the product to having our Help
>> and documentation hosted on a Web site somewhere. I'd love to make
>> this change, because Release Notes are always changing up to the very
>> last minute, and then we have to rebuild the installer and run
>> through the QA test suite again. Decoupling the doc deliver from the
>> builds would have so many benefits for not just our process, but
>> would allow me to make doc updates as needed (vs. on the release
>> schedule).
>>
>> I've got several ideas about how to go about this, but before I head
>> down to talk to IT about getting server space, I thought I'd tap the
>> collective brain power of TechWrl and see if there's anything I
>> haven't thought of, or good advice from the TW brain trust.
>>
>> Anyone made the move to Hosted docs? Have any lessons learned to share?
>> Success stories? Horror stories? Stuff you wish you'd done differently?
>>
>>
>> --
>> Julie Stickler
>> http://heratech.wordpress.com/
>> Blogging about Agile and technical writing
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