Multiple Licenses, multiple flavors of help?

[Geoff Hart]

Kevin McGowan wondered: <<With our latest release, our product 
introduced 5 different licenses, and the doc set is already suffering. 
Due to some R&D confusion (and the fact that I'm now the only writer on 
the team), the licenses are not clearly defined throughout the doc set. 
If you have license A, you open the docs and you will see information 
for license B, C, D, and E, even though it doesn't apply to you.>>

This shouldn't be a problem. Readers of our products are highly skilled 
at ignoring information that directly concerns them, so I doubt they'll 
be any less skilled at ignoring information that doesn't concern them. 
<g> In terms of the licenses themselves, simply provide the license 
information as a single help topic, with five subheadings, and start 
that topic with a mini-TOC that lets them jump straight to the license 
that relates to them. In effect, what you're doing is saying "if you 
want to use the following features, you need to upgrade from license A 
to license B (or whatever)".

<<I need to develop a help system that will allow me to simply 
include/exclude information based on the license triggers in the UI. 
And of course, I need to build it relatively quickly, because we've got 
another big release coming up for January, and they're introducing at 
least one more license option.>>

Similarly, don't bother trying to create multiple help systems. Create 
a single system for all licenses. Most users will never see features 
that don't relate to them because they'll be using context-sensitive 
help; that makes the features that aren't relevant... irrelevant. <g>

To accomodate the needs of those who enter the documentation via the 
index or search tool, and don't know that a specific feature isn't 
available to them, simply add a note in each help topic about which 
licenses it's available for. (Topics available for all licenses don't 
need this disclaimer.) Think of this as a marketing tool: if you need 
to be reading about this feature, you should be buying a license for 
it. Where it's possible to accomplish something in multiple ways, state 
which of those alternatives are available under each form of license 
and what can be done if none of these solutions apply to your 
particular license.

If you design your help system intelligently, the topic IDs won't 
overlap, so you'll never have to worry about renumbering the IDs for 
different licenses: each topic is identified with the same number in 
all versions of the licensing.

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Geoff Hart   ghart at videotron.ca
(try geoffhart at mac.com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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