Tuesday 25 March 2014

User guides

I've been spending some time writing user guides for the new Iceni 2 system (http://www.opendium.com/user_manuals/iceni).  Yes, I know it might come as a shock that we're actually suppling documentation! :)

Its surprising how time consuming it is to write this stuff, put together screen shots, etc. even though this user guide isn't especially large: the aim is not to provide a 2000 page definitive guide that no one will ever read; instead we're doing reasonably short documentation that shouldn't take too long for someone to read through and gain a basic overview of how everything works.  Eventually we'll also augment it with a knowledgebase of how-to documents explaining how to achieve things that people frequently ask for help with.

Although Iceni 2 has had a year's worth of development work put into it, many of the concepts date back to the original Iceni which has been running many customers' networks for years, so this documentation may even be of interest to those customers (who will, of course, eventually be migrated onto the shiny new system).  Its surprising to think that we started developing the original Iceni back in 2005, and looking back on it we seem to have got most of the fundamentals about right right from the start.

While I've been doing the docs, we've also been rolling out our first Iceni 2 servers to customers.  That seems to be largely going ok, although as always you do end up finding a few niggling bugs that never showed up during testing.  So far they've been all quick to fix.

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