10   Maintaining Manuals

Revising Online Manuals

One of the big advantages of online manuals is how quickly they can be revised. While print manuals require you to reproduce revised sections for every holder of the manual and distribute them (usually by mail), online manuals can be revised by simply uploading the revised files to the server to overwrite the old files with the new ones.

Online manuals eliminate the effort, expense, and time required to:

• reproduce copies
• maintain a distribution list
• prepare cover letters and mailing labels
• stuff envelopes and apply labels
• mail to holders
• integrate new sections and recycle old sections (manual holder’s time)

While you’ll save lots of time and money here, don’t forget that you’ll still have to do all the steps up to this point, such as writing the new section, editing it, and having it reviewed and approved—all time-consuming activities.

One potential problem with simply updating the files of your online manual is that this process is invisible to users of the manual unless you specifically notify them that a change has been made. With a print manual, users know what changes are taking place in the manual (and to their work processes) when they receive the updates to the manual.

To notify users of an online manual of important changes, you may want to consider one of the following methods:

• send a letter or email informing them of the changes (this will require you to compile and maintain a list of the known users of the online manual)
• on your organization’s home page, or on the manual’s first page, list new or revised sections (consider using a flashing new button)
• change the colour of revised text, or use a change bar in the margin

Maintaining Both Print and Online Versions

Some authoring software is specifically designed to let you produce a professional-looking print manual and a professional-looking online manual using the same set of electronic files with a minimal amount of manual coding. This is often referred to as single sourcing since both forms of the manual come from the same source files.

The single-sourcing strategy can have several advantages:

• it’s less work to maintain both versions
• the two versions of the manual will always be the same (if you make an error in revising separate files, the two versions will be different)

But single sourcing can also have disadvantages:

• it requires authoring tools specifically designed for single sourcing
• the process is usually more complicated than simply creating a stand-alone online document
• the need to derive both versions of the manual from the same set of files usually requires compromises in either the print or online versions, or both