[Building Sakai] Proposal for Sakai 10 help files

[Margaret Wagner]

A few things that we might want to consider (some may have been mentioned):

1.  Accessibility of the content created with ScreenSteps.

2.  Many websites provide several types of help to meet diverse user
preferences.  Some people don't want to watch videos.  Others don't want to
wade through lots of images to find simple steps they can read.  Still
others really need images to get anywhere.

A site may include some combination of the following…

---- Detailed instructions with detailed images for getting started

---- Short getting started cheat sheet

---- A video tutorial covering the basics

---- Interactive e-learning tutorial

---- Manual for the basics

---- Manual for advanced features

---- Very quick how-to step-by-steps of some tasks with no images

---- Forums for finding best practices and asking questions

… plus other types of help

We've recently added links to videos and embedded videos in our help
pages.  We've also included links to printable pdfs.  (We use our own
content pages with the Sakai/CTools help tool.)

3.  Knowledge bases that can really zero in on a topic are best.  Out of
curiosity I typed "getting started" in the TurboTax knowledge base search
and I got over 13,000 hits.  I stopped searching for basic instructions on
getting started after page 4.




On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Sam Ottenhoff <ottenhoff at longsight.com>wrote:

>
>
>> For some context, at the last North America Apereo conference, the people
>> who turned out to talk about documentation agreed to a two-phase plan—a
>> short-term fix to allow people to pitch in to edit the content and write it
>> back to trunk, while also developing a list of functional requirements for
>> some kind of new help tool in the longer term (Phase 2).  Here is a Google
>> doc with discussion around those functional requirements for the new help
>> tool:
>>
>>
>>
> Hi Elizabeth,
>
> So what is the plan of documentation group with Phase 2 and the
> implementation of these requirements?  Is there a plan to raise money,
> request bids, and contract for development to meet the requirements?  If
> yes, is there any progress or an ETA to share?
>
> To your question about the limit on the number of contributors:
> ScreenSteps allows for 20 contributors for twice the price.  If we suffer a
> deluge of active contributors, by all means, let's go for the higher
> subscription level.
>
> --Sam
>
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