International Talk Like a Pirate Day, of course, is not until September, but if you’re a user of our products and you have a hankering to go looking for some buried treasure, this blog post may be for you.
Back in the "good old days," distributing a software product like the Teamstudio tools was quite a production. Once a version of the software was ready to ship, it had to be burned onto a CD, the CD had to be put into a jewel case, which needed a nicely printed sleeve, and then, of course, there was the user guide. All of the above, plus the obligatory free mouse pad, (sometimes we’d throw in a t-shirt!) would then be assembled into a cardboard box, also wrapped in a nicely printed sleeve, ready for shipping.
Other than the software products themselves of course, most work went into producing the user guide. We've been in this business since 1995, and quickly realized that Microsoft Word 95 wasn't going to serve us well in the long term for this purpose, so we switched to using an early version of Adobe Framemaker. As more products were added to the suite of tools, the user guide grew in proportion, until it became a weighty tome of more than 300 pages.
Old habits die hard, and we continued using Framemaker to create a very paper-oriented style of document right up until Edition 30 of the tools in 2013 (we had switched to distributing the guide as a PDF document by then).
With E31 though, came a new approach to user documentation, and we put a lot of effort into modernizing the user guide, including switching to a wiki format, based on Atlassian Confluence. Other than making it significantly easier to edit and update the user guides, Confluence also made it much easier to create context sensitive help linking straight to the online wiki from within the tools.
So why am I telling you all this?
Well, it's because I feel that the Teamstudio doc wiki is actually a significantly under used but highly valuable source of information about our products. Most customers will only interact with the wiki via the context-sensitive help buttons embedded within the products. And even then, only as a last resort after they have tried everything else in trying to resolve some problem.
But you can see the full range of documentation available by visiting the Space Directory. As you can see, this contains links to documentation for all the currently supported Teamstudio products. And once you start to dig into it, you might find you get some insight into products that you possibly already own that you hadn't previously appreciated. Almost like finding a stash of buried treasure.
For example, here is a great technical overview of how Build Manager fits into a typical development process. Interested in learning more about effective access? Take a look at the doc for the Catalog module of Adviser. Curious about the actual format of the XML archive files created by Export? They're all documented right here.
So, if you're already a Teamstudio customer (thank you!), take a browse, you might find something about the products that you own that you didn't already know. If you're not a customer, but you're curious about some of the technical aspects of our products, you'll find a lot more detail here compared to the marketing blurb on our web site!
Happy reading and, as always, if you have ideas about how to improve our documentation (or our products), please tell us. We're all ears!