[Building Sakai] Proposal for Sakai 10 help files

[Steve Swinsburg]

I like the idea of improving help. My only obvious concern is that
screenshots are no doubt going to be taken of a base Sakai skin, but for
those that customise the skin a lot, it won't match up to their own system.

At various places I've worked in the past they created tutorials like these
but they were out of date when the skin was updated and the time and effort
to redo them was prohibitive.

Just something for discussion.

Cheers
Steve

sent from mobile device
On 07/11/2013 6:22 AM, "Margaret Wagner" <mwagner at umich.edu> wrote:

> 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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