This post was contributed by Talend’s CTO Cédric Carbone
RTFM*!! How many times are Technical Support and Helpdesk staff tempted to tell this acronym to a customer asking yet again the same question, clearly printed in the user documentation. Peers in Forums are usually less diplomatic and won’t hesitate to use the acronym – or to spell it out.
The fact is – users don't read the documentation. For their TV set, their washing machine, their car, their software. Unless they are really forced to (by their spouse, their teacher, their boss). I'm not arguing or complaining about this, nope, it's just a fact, that's all... And it is especially true when you have several manuals for one piece of software: installation guide, user manual, administrator guide, reference guide, etc.
Here is how it works: on the one end, the users complain they can never find anything useful in the manuals. On the other end, technical writers complain that users are too lazy to read their prose. As a matter of fact, the information is often there, just not exactly where the user expects it. But can we blame the end user to feel discouraged by the 20+ manuals that our genius technical writer team produces? After all, every release comes with its new set of features and corresponding pieces of documentation adding up to the thousands of pages of documentation already available.
So why can't smart users find the information they need? The problem is not that the information isn't there, or that users are not clever enough to find. The problem is where to search the documentation and find quickly an answer.
Introducing Talend Help Center
Talend just launched the Talend Help Center: http://help.talend.com. This new application assembles Knowledge Base articles as well as Talend's online documentation for each release of the software.
The Talend help Center also offers search capabilities, allowing users to search several books at the same time and to access featured Knowledge Base articles or other related sections of the documentation via the "See also" box.
Of course Talend help Center is meant to be enriched continuously and more task-oriented content and tutorials will be added in the future. You can get a quick overview here.
Don't just RTFM, browse Talend Help Center!
Cédric
* For these who don’t speak forum-ese jargon, RTFM stands for Read The F*****g Manual.