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My organization also releases updates on a fairly frequent basis. Once a
year, we send hard copy manual updates to all users. In between, we
handle new release documentation in two ways.
First, when a new customer comes on board, the key contacts are added to
a listserver for that respective product. When we release an upgrade we
send a summary of the new features through the listserver. That way we
know that every customer is aware of the new features.
Second, our main form of distribution is FTP. We place a text version of
the release notes on our FTP site, and we instruct customers to download
the release notes when they pick up their new release. This has worked
well for us over the past three years. (We plan to move to PDF by the end
of this year.) And of course, we update the manual at the time of each
release so that when it comes time for the annual manual update, there is
little organization to be done.
Any time you can use the Internet to distribute docs, you're saving
yourself a lot of production energy. Hope this helps!
Kathryn J Acciari
Technical Writer/Communicator
University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine
Buffalo, New York
acciari -at- acsu -dot- buffalo -dot- edu
On Wed, 24 Jun 1998, James Lockard wrote:
> Here's the story: The company I work for releases updates to their
> main software product quarterly. It's a Windoze product, and we
> support it with
> o a paper reference guide
> o release notes
> o an online quick reference (winhelp)
> o a bi-monthly newsletter.
>
> We still don't have an established method for notifying clients of the
> most recent changes.
>
> What's the best way to inform our clients of the new features?
>
> Updating the manual would be nice, but since we're not gong to ship
> out entirely new manuals, that means we'd be asking our clients to
> swap out the pages themselves.
>
> Alternately, we could produce an addendum/appendix that includes all
> the relevant changes to the program, but wouldn't require any page
> swapping by our clients.
>
> Last quarter we instead sent out a help file that was available
> through the Help menu (Help-->What's New).Marketing feels like Help
> menu option was not visible enough.
>
> In addition, we've been writing "how to" articles in the newsletter
> that explain how to use the new features. Those articles always appear
> a few months after the new release.
>
> Given 2 weeks to address this issue, how would you inform your clients
> about the new features?
>
> TIA,
> James Lockard
>
> james -dot- lockard -at- experian -dot- com
> norton -at- megsinet -dot- net
>
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