Oracle AppsLab - Latest Comments in David’s Excellent Adventure

Re: David’s Excellent Adventure

Meg — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:32:07 -0000

David, better not put sleep too low on the list or you will not be any good at the list items above. Or maybe that is just a personal problem for me.

Re: David’s Excellent Adventure

Jake — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:54:05 -0000

@David: I don't see "Comment on blog posts about me" on that list, must be pretty high.

@Nigel: Spot on. My observation about the official documentation was one of surprise. I think democratizing the doc makes it better, a la Wikipedia, so I was surpised and bummed that it's not cool.

I agree about exposing the doc to indexing too. The one issue is that someone will have to manage the SEO to keep the official content popping up on the first page.

Re: David’s Excellent Adventure

Nigel Thomas — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:09:55 -0000

> official documentation cannot be wiki’ed or democratized because it serves as the warranty for the software.

Sure you don't want the punters messing with the bible, but that doesn't mean you can't surround official documentation with democratized commentary/annotations ... just so long as the difference is clear.

Put your documentation in a searchable format, in bite sized chunks (even chapter by chapter), and it will rise from 4th to 2nd in your list. And help take the strain off your consultants and support (not to mention the customers).

Regards Nigel

Re: David’s Excellent Adventure

davidhaimes — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:37:11 -0000

Not to make excuses but...my priorities at the moment are:
1) Know the names of the people on my new GL team
2) Match those names to a face
3) Understand our project plans
4) Start to add value to the GL development team
5) Get to the know the names of my kids
6) Match those names to faces
7) Blog
8) Eat
9) Sleep

Just kidding... - I can eat while I blog.

Re: David’s Excellent Adventure

Jake — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:11:08 -0000

Quality and quantity of documentation notwithstanding, the big reason specifically Apps doc isn't higher on the list is that it's provided in pdf form and not indexed by search engines.

Searching for database or middleware products provides more Oracle results, but still not as many as you'd expect on the first page.

The fact of the matter is that blogging services and software are highly SEO'ed by design so the content you blog will come up higher in results than regular indexed content almost all the time.

One interesting tidbit I learned recently was that official documentation cannot be wiki'ed or democratized because it serves as the warranty for the software. Did not know that.

Re: David’s Excellent Adventure

Tim — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:47:27 -0000

Its a shame that 'Read the documentation' comes in fourth - I know that list is a 'Jake's Take' - hey there's a neat blog title for you!
I know historically Oracle has had not such good documentation but we and others try real hard to make the doc as good as possible. We are now suffering from having so much doc ~600pages last time I checked, that I can understand that folks get googling when they want a specific piece of info.
We also suffer from the fact that our blog (blowing our own trumpet here) has so much information, ~250 articles, that has not made it into the official doc and has become its own BIP resource on the web. To back that up, the majority of 'Came From' hits to he blog are almost exclusively google searches.
Roll on instantly updateable documentation ...