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Re: Resistance to allowing anonymous web access to online help?
Subject:Re: Resistance to allowing anonymous web access to online help? From:Bee Hanson <beelia -at- pacbell -dot- net> To:Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>, John G <john -at- garisons -dot- com>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Sat, 18 Jun 2016 20:48:02 +0000 (UTC)
I agree with Gene and Mark - plus I would argue that your product is likely to be more successful if users can access the documentation by Googling.Â
I can't count the number of times I've searched for specific product info on a company's web site and been unable to find it, but then immediately got my answer by Googling.Â
Companies who don't understand how people use their products and associated documentation are shooting themselves in the foot if they restrict indexing.
Bee
On Saturday, June 18, 2016 12:23 PM, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
Unless your product is incredibly expensive or part of an incredibly
expensive system, any of your competitors who want to reverse engineer
your application are probably already running a copy of it and looking
at your features and source code. Which means they are probably also
already looking at your documents and help.
Your sales people will be handing out guest logins to your restricted
documents to prospective customers (whether they're supposed to or not).
So the only people you'll be blocking from your help will be existing
customers who forget their logins.
Gene Kim-Eng
On 6/18/2016 11:40 AM, John G wrote:
> The product owners are
> afraid that the competition will be able to use our documentation to
> potentially reverse engineer our applications.
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