[libreoffice-l10n] Need for a solid help content

Hi Michael and l10n community

Em 12/12/2015 22:48, Michael Bauer escreveu:
> To be honest I'm surprised LO has not tried to determine if the in-built
> help is actually worth the effort from the end-user POV in contrast to
> online help and/or active user forums etc.

Allow me to plea for the help content.

There is a dimension where documentation get critical, and this is in
the enterprise and in the development. A software that does not carry
proper documentation is subject to several drawbacks.

First, the help desk of the enterprise need to get trained into the
issues of LibreOffice in the same way they need to addres MSOffice
issues. For that they need to know how the software works to assist the
users. Docs and references are crucial, together with proper
professional support.

Second, the help desk is often charged per call. Enterprises where user
cannot find proper doc in their own language is facing a higher TCO,
because users call HD to get what they don't have at hand.

Third, in the way open source is developed and LibreOffice in
particular, there are no specs written in the canonical form a priori
before implementation (as it was in the OpenOffice.org times under
SUN/Oracle) and this is a choice LibreOffice made to offload all hassle
of development and rush into coding improvements long due. The trade-off
is a bunch of nice features very few know how to work and the curious
take much long time to figure it.

Forth, by writing the help pages we have a minimum of a reference guide
to address bugs and regressions. Without a reference, a regression is
allway harder to understand for the developer and the QA guys. Think
about shortcut ABC, that suddenty does not work anymore... how can the
developer be sure the sortcut was inded supposed to do what ABC was
designed originally....

So, users may not like the help content as we have today and don't like
to press F1, but it is our pursuit of quality software to give them the
best we can do in terms of documentation. Admitedly our help system is
not a piece of literature easy to read (nor is MS Office too), but it
must fullfill the mission to establish the landmark of the sofware
behaviour. Yes, "RTFM" comes to my mind actually, but there must be an M
somewhere.

Finaly, other documentation tools like public forums, books, wikis and
even Google are all stars of a documentation constellation but almost
never figure in a help desk SLA. As more litterature we produce on
LibreOffice, the best, because one of the steepest entry barrier we have
to propagate LibreOffice is its lack of culture in the office suite
marketplace, something MS already achieved long ago and is extremely
hard to displace.

Of course, there is room for improvement. The nice part of this is that
it is well suited for the non-code-developer community of LibreOffice.

Give Help a chance.

Kind regards

-- 
Olivier Hallot
Comunidade LibreOffice
http://ask.libreoffice.org/pt-br

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