Re: FWD: Documenting products integrated with your own

["Robyn M. Nace" <robyn -at- BIT-NET -dot- COM>]

Anonymous User wrote:

>
> I'm wondering what should be documented about these third-party products.
> We have two camps here.  Marketing/Sales wants to see us put together kind
> of a "tip and tune-up" guide that describes the kinds of maintenance you
> need to perform on SilverStream and Oracle in order to keep everything
> running smoothly.  Engineering and Documentation (yes, that includes me)
> feel, however, that documenting these kind of things isn't necessary (and
> we don't want to run the risk of making ourselves look like "experts" of
> SilverStream and Oracle).  We'd like to say, basically, "Regular backups
> and maintenance need to be performed, for instance...blah blah blah.  Refer
> to your SilverStream and Oracle manuals for more info."
>

The products that I document are very much the same. The solution we've figured
out depends on how mission critical what the user is doing is. For example, we
rely on Microsoft Internet Information Server, and we tell users how to shut
down and restart that, because we have to tell them how to back up the Server
and database. We also tell them how to install a certificate, because without
that knowledge, they won't be able to use our product.

However, there's another doc that talks about our database/reporting system. We
don't tell them how to install the drivers, we simply say that they must be
installed before you can run a report.

Hope this helps!

--
-Robyn

"You can't take the you out of you."
  -karen

http://www.bit-net.com/~robyn/

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