WHAT HAPPENS IF (WHEN?) THE MANUALS GO AWAY?

["Tom Parker [Consultant]" <PARKER_T -at- A1 -dot- WDC -dot- COM>]

Well, suppose just for discussion purposes that all the manuals went away.
What would techwriters do then?

Two directions seem to be opening up.

In the first place we could all become developers of
On-Line Help and compile reams of hypertext documents.  Hopefully we would
produce something really relevant and useful to drain the swamped tech
support folks.  Given the usual level of management support we could at
least come up to the Microsoft standard.  Try to find Equation Editor in
WinWord Help.  It's there.  It's really there.  Nope, you've got to find it.
Think how would Bill Gates think of Equation Editor.  Why OBJECTively, of
course.  So sharpen your hypertext skills, whatever your platform.

In the second place, those of us who didn't get hypertext compilers could
become Document Managers.  We could move from the trenches of trying to
help the poor end-user up to the watch tower of the Enterprise Wid
Documentation System.  Think of Interleaf 5 or an equivalent.  Every document
in the company is on the system -- CAD files, Word Processor Documents,
E-Mail, Faxes, from all the platforms, and the EDS is doing rev. control
so company folks can read all, change some, maybe work on everything all
at once.  But how does this happen?  Well for each new document created
you, as Document Manager, have to go in and set the security level --
this group can read/not write, that group can read, somebody can bump the
rev.  It is a little like what the System Manager does for your terminal
as to what files you can see on the LAN/WAN.  Only you have to make sure
that the engineers in Co. B. don't get in abump the revs on Co. C. documents.
Yes, it sounds like Doc Control -- but it is done way up front for the
prelim. versions long before it gets to Doc Control and besides, they're
swamped by ISO9000 anyway, to say nothing of downloading archival files.

So let me know what you think about all this.  Enjoy.

Tom Parker
parker_t -at- a1 -dot- wdc -dot- com