I've been listening with interest to the comments on ADSM documentation.
While ADSM is a complex product, I think that installation and use of
the package on the client side can be vastly improved. We have expended
great effort here to try to improve the client packaging, only to be
continually thwarted each time a new fix-level comes out.
It's frustrating.
Some examples.
With version 2, IBM has decided that all options for all platforms
should be documented in one place. I'm sure that someone, somewhere,
thought this was a great thing to do. For one thing, I can see that
it might make IBM's life a bit easier in keeping this document
updated. But from a user's point of view, it really stinks. First,
you need to understand that most computer users are bigots when it
comes to operating system environments. Mac users hate PCs, PC users
hate Macs, etc, etc. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be for
a naive user to wade through reams of documentation for options that
do not apply to them?
It has become very difficult to pre-configure a sample DSM.OPT or
ADSM Preferences file. These little black boxes that IBM uses to
help the installation process along get in the way more than they
help. If you want to help, IBM, let us get inside your little black
boxes and customize the defaults for our environment. I'm specifically
talking about the Mac and PC installer programs.
Either write some usable documentation for naive users that walks them
through the installation process, or stop changing your black boxes.
Each time you change your installation utilities, you get in the way
of folks who are trying to document how to use these things. Change is
good once in awhile, to improve things, but keep it to a minimum.
The mindset for the user documentation seems to be targeted for the site
administrator, not for the end user. At our site, we expect our users
to install and use ADSM, not us. One example I already mentioned -
putting all the documentation for all options on all platforms into one
file is fine for a site-wide administrator, but not for an end user.
I actually like the idea of moving the installation documentation out of
the User's Guides. It was just in the way, because it tells you how to
install from a diskette. Let's face it, installing from diskettes is
very painful for large installations. It's a lot of work to reproduce
and distribute diskettes to hundreds/thousands of users. It is much
easier to distribute code via a network. FTP is virtually ubiquitous,
at least for sites that use TCP/IP widely. It would be really great to
see IBM come up with a nicer way to install ADSM client code over the
network.
Please make it possible for us to print off copies of the User's Guides
ourselves, by providing PostScript for them. DynaText is a step in the
right direction (it allows you to generate postscript suitable for
printing), but it falls short in that there are formatting problems,
no table of contents, no index, and all of the internal references do
not use page numbers. What I want is to be able to print a duplicate
of what your printed manuals look like.
Having re-read what I just wrote, it sounds too harsh. I >know< that the
ADSM Publications folks are good folks. They are trying hard, and they
have done some really innovative stuff. I applaud their efforts to
make docs available online, and via the internet.
..Paul
Paul Zarnowski Phone: 607/255-4757
Cornell Information Technologies Fax: 607/255-6523
Cornell University US Mail: 315 CCC, Ithaca, NY 14853-2601
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