ifPeople Announces Plans for End-user Documentation

The Challenge

Open Source technology communities tend to be driven by developers who are providing the code that drives the software forward with new features and innovations. But it takes more than developers for a successful open source community. Documentation is a key asset - and not just for developers - there also has to be information for non-technical users of the tools, decision-makers who evaluate the tools. Over the years, documentation has become a major distinguishing factor between software projects.

ifPeople's Position

ifPeople constantly evaluates software tools to ensure we are working with the best ones available for our clients. Documentation and non-technical information is often a distinguishing factor for many of the systems we use, yet it is a key part of our ResponsibleIT standard for quality and socially responsible IT service. For example, we found Plone, an incredibly powerful content management system we use to build web sites, intranets, and more, to be very robust, have good developer documentation, but limited end-user (non-technical) documentation. It was a weakness we identified when helping Plone marketing efforts, but were also confident that together with the community, we would overcome that. With each of our projects, we
created an additional amount of documentation about general Plone use, specific products, and information for individual client needs. That lead us to a growing collection, though lacking organization, that we wanted to share with the community.

Serving Users with Documentation

Luckily, we are not alone in thinking that end-users deserve good
documentation!

Business Directory:

ifPeople developed a custom business directory software for marketing businesses and organizations that are affiliated with local networks or member organizations. The system is used in the BALLE network of independent businesses around the US and Canada. As ifPeople built out the feature-rich system, we also developed a repository of documentation. We
have now made that documentation available publicly, organized for end-users, site administrators, and technical staff. To read more about the directory see this article or download a product description. You can access the documentation here.

Plone:

ifPeople formed an alliance with other organizations that use and support Plone in a project known as LearnPlone, which also includes One/Northwest, Netcorps, and NPower Seattle. The group has been working to compile documentation from videos to glossary to complete tutorials in an easy-to-understand  anguage. The web site we are working on is still evolving and we are moving toward a new means of browsing through the collection of documentation. But in any case, we wanted to let our stakeholders know about the progress and plans to make greater documentation available. Find Plone documentation here.

CRM: vTiger

Another tool used by ifPeople is the vTiger product for salesforce automation and client  relationship management (see article on ASP
service for CRM from ifPeople). Work on documentation for vTiger has recently accelerated and a great resource has been released, providing end-user and administrator guides, it includes detailed terms explanations and over 160 screenshots. ifPeople is working to evaluate the documentation and provide improvements, as well as to provide that documentation to our clients. See vTiger documetnation.

Comments Welcome!
If you have comments of questions about our documentation work, please contact us. If you are interested in our services, please see more information here.