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We currently have our product docs arranged in a set of books, like "Installation Guide", "Configuration Guide", "Administration Guide", etc. all of which are PDFs, but which are also webhelp-ish HTML pages (it's all done in Flare). In the output, there's a home page that provides a brief description of each "book" with links to the PDF and to the "first" page of the html version. Naturally the html version is all interconnected, with the "book" conceit being just an organizing principle. If a user prefers the PDFs, they have their internal Xrefs, as well as links to the other members of the set... as long as they all remain in their original file relationships (i.e., if you move a PDF somewhere, all external links break).
It works fine when accessed from the DVD, or when the whole file structure is copied to a local or networked hard drive, and similarly accessed via the file system. This, of course, assumes that the person reading has the relevant access to that file system. So, members of a department or a business unit can probably access the docs from a file server.
For other situations, it's easy enough to just copy the DVD content to an existing web server owned by the customer. It's what we do, in-house, for access by reviewers from other departments who don't have file access to our stuff.
My question is when serving from a webserver is contemplated, should we have any more instruction in the README than "Copy the contents of the documentation DVD to the web server"?
Should we just assume that anyone doing it knows where it should go, where the top index file would need to go, whether or where any web.config file might go, etc.?
I'm ok with either approach, but I would like arguments for-or-against.
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