This discussion reminds me of a time about 15 years ago when the company I was working for built a new data center and we had to re-write our disaster recovery and monitoring documentation to match the new environment. The old documentation was MS Word docs stored on a SharePoint (shudder) site. One of the major issues with SharePoint was the total lack of searchability. If you didn't know what the Word doc was titled or where it was buried in the link structure you weren't going to find it. Why they paid for a SharePoint license and this wasn't just a file share, I have no idea...
Anyway, we ended up creating all the documentation in a wiki instead. Everything was easy with search, even if you didn't know the title and articles were much more readable since there weren't unnecessary pages breaks and white space due to screenshots.
Since hard copies are important for this kind of documentation we used the PDF Export feature to put the DR binders together.
Obviously a wiki isn't a great choice for this kind of content so this story was a bit tangental to the issue, but it's an example of a small success story for content modernization.
Good times. Yes, I'm all for a PDF version or export option for folks that want it. Just don't make it the primary delivery format if the primary audience is on the web.
Oh, yes, searchability!
This discussion reminds me of a time about 15 years ago when the company I was working for built a new data center and we had to re-write our disaster recovery and monitoring documentation to match the new environment. The old documentation was MS Word docs stored on a SharePoint (shudder) site. One of the major issues with SharePoint was the total lack of searchability. If you didn't know what the Word doc was titled or where it was buried in the link structure you weren't going to find it. Why they paid for a SharePoint license and this wasn't just a file share, I have no idea...
Anyway, we ended up creating all the documentation in a wiki instead. Everything was easy with search, even if you didn't know the title and articles were much more readable since there weren't unnecessary pages breaks and white space due to screenshots.
Since hard copies are important for this kind of documentation we used the PDF Export feature to put the DR binders together.
Obviously a wiki isn't a great choice for this kind of content so this story was a bit tangental to the issue, but it's an example of a small success story for content modernization.
Good times. Yes, I'm all for a PDF version or export option for folks that want it. Just don't make it the primary delivery format if the primary audience is on the web.