A while back, the small team that started this project for IBM began to document the software in user guides and install guides, capturing what they thought was essential in just a handful of Word documents. These documents still exist, and are neatly split into small chapters.
The software grew. Over time, these individual documents have expanded, and new features have caused the total document count to increase. To cover the basic software features, the end user documentation is now dense subject matter spanning a sizeable document library that contains hundreds of pages of text and graphics. The software is, after all, a full blown video analytics suite, and documenting its features in detail is no small endeavour.
With each software release, the amount of content increases proportionally with new features. In fact, the last time I did a page count across the entire library, altogether it came to about half the number of pages in War and Peace.
Even a well planned process to manage that many pages of software documentation in Word will not scale for the team that writes it or for the customers who consume it.
We have reached a point where we need to change the way we manage our end user documentation and I've been asked to look into Daisy for this purpose.
At the moment, I'm cooking up a plan to consolidate all end user documentation into a Daisy repository and to host a Daisy wiki as a front end for the subject matter experts on our team. We want to cross-reference, index, and be able to manage translations of everything. We also want to support several publishing formats including xhtml and pdf and to generate document aggregates. Daisy seems to fit nicely into these objectives.
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