Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/27865
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

My documentation team supports a massive software product, over 30 modules. These modules are individually licensed, so one customer might pay for all the modules where another might only pay to use a few of the modules.

Currently, most of our documentation is delivered via PDF and can be accessed via a dedicated website. However, given the complexity of the product, this poses many issues, most pressingly, it makes finding specific information hard. The site has a search functionality which does search within PDFs, but if you click through a link, you just get taken to the first page of the PDF. Also, this makes linking to other topics in a different PDF, almost impossible.

So, we're looking to move everything to HTML/XML based output. My manager would like us to give the customers a few different options to get their feedback on which they like best. However, it seems that for large products with many modules, it seems to me that there is a fairly standard layout, like these:

[http://admhelp.saas.hpe.com/main/Content/AdmHelpCenter.htm](http://admhelp.saas.hpe.com/main/Content/AdmHelpCenter.htm)[http://qsupport.quantum.com/kb/flare/Content/doc\_portal/Content/docs-portal/docs\_portal.html](http://qsupport.quantum.com/kb/flare/Content/doc_portal/Content/docs-portal/docs_portal.html)

Basically, a landing page that lists out all the possible options, with links to module/product specific documentation centres.

Does anybody maintain, or maintained in the past, a documentation solution for a large software product that does not use this method? Is there an alternative that I'm missing?

Any suggestions, much appreciated.

Original score: 4