Doubling the effort
by Volker Weber
In July I asked How many pages must a man read. I was referring to the WebSphere Portal installation guide. The page count at that time was 1754 pages, where chapter 5 was only a duplicate of the following chapters. The problem was rectified and that brought the page count down to around 1000 pages.
The guide has now been revised. This time all the other chapters are duplicated in chapter 1, bringing the page count to 2264 pages.
Does anybody read these manuals before they are being published?
Comments
Well, at 2264 pages, would you?!?
/snark
I just did, didn't I? ;-)
Well I'm sure the document was run thru a spellchecker, but not a "duplicate page" checker. Actually not a bad feature for docs around 1000 pages.
hmmm vowe, there might a job for you at IBM then (along with all the other formerly independant Notes bloggers)
8-)
ROFL! This reminds of a the time I picked up the printed version of a DEC manual and started reading chapter one. A couple of pages in the text referred me to figure 2, so I looked at figure 2 and it had nothing to do with what the text was talking about. I noticed that it was, in fact, a duplicate of figure 1. So I looked ahead to figure 3, and it matched what the text was describing for figure 2. I turned to the last few pages, checked the last figure, and sure enough... the off-by-one problem had continued all the way to the end of the book.
/cynic on
At 2264 pages, I would think that a 'normal' person would say "screw it" and call an IBM Business Partner to install WSP. Which may have been IBM's intent.
/cynic off
Gregg, it's not that hard to install it ... in fact it's quite easy.
Martin, that´s true if you're experienced and know what to do. But a newbie who tries to install and configure it for the first time having nothing else in his hands than this documentation - no chance. The base installation is indeed no problem, but then ...
Can any of you guys point me to some newbie kind of documentation or help for installing the product. I tried and failed a few weeks back.
Klaus, I guess Gregg is actually giving you the newbie instructions above: Screw it and call an IBM BP. Not that I have much experience with installing WebSphere myself. But from what I hear from people who do, that's kind of close.
It's not that hard at all to install WP on Unix/Windows platforms. Just follow the 20-step installation instructions in the WP InfoCenter and you'll be done installing.
btw: Nobody I know actually uses the PDFs and everyone uses the on-line InfoCenter. PDFs might be nice for printing, but who does that? If you want printed manuals I think you can still order them as you have to do with media packs.
