Thanks, Jean, for your thoughtful response. I think you are correct in
your priorities, with the very top priority as keeping the user guides
up-to-date.
Personally, I do not have the time for writing Knols either, so I feel
guilty to have brought it up with the implication that someone else
should do it... However, I chose to suggest it anyway so that we can
return to the idea at some future point when someone may be looking
for a new task to take on.
Thanks for the feedback.
-Ben
On Mar 15, 2009, at 7:18 PM, Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Benjamin Horst wrote:
I was doing some research for a Drupal project recently, and found
a Google Knol with useful information on the topic [...]
This got me thinking OOo might receive extra publicity by putting
various OpenOffice tutorials onto Google Knol as an additional
publication channel. Perhaps some of the Authors project
information could be uploaded in bite-sized chunks, and the
articles would, of course, point back to the project's homepage.
[...] Do you all think it would be worth the time and effort, or
are our online resources already sufficiently visible to web
searchers with our wiki and other channels?
Ben,
In general I think that the more places where we can make info about
OOo available, the better, especially if the info covers topics (and
has keywords) that might reach people who haven't heard of OOo yet,
or haven't seriously considered trying it out, or think it can't/
won't do what they want when in fact it does.
Comments on the [users] list often demonstrate that people don't
find the info they need about OOo because they don't know what to
search for, or sometimes that the possibility of doing "x" even
exists. Often they are familiar with MSO and its terminology, but
can't find the equivalent in OOo. I have a friend who keeps
complaining to me that "OOo can't do X" when what he really means is
"I can't figure out how to do X using OOo" or "OOo doesn't do X the
way I'm used to doing in MSO and the only way I've found in OOo is
cumbersome" (having missed the straightforward way because he hasn't
made the paradigm shift yet).
Lastly, although there are a lot of online resources available on
the wiki and other channels, IMO there are not enough tutorials
showing how to do specific tasks, both common and more advanced.
So... in general I'd say yes it would be worth the time and effort,
if someone has the time and interest. Most of the user guides are
quite modular, so reusing chunks of them (perhaps modified a bit)
shouldn't be too difficult, just time-consuming. I also suggest that
any new tutorials be put on the OOo wiki as well as wherever else
they go.
For me the priority of such efforts is well below the priority of
keeping the user guides up to date with new releases of the
software, and writing the missing chapters of existing user
guides... which is why I'm not already creating tutorials or how-
to's by reusing what we've got.
--Jean
Benjamin Horst
[email protected]
646-464-2314 (Eastern)
www.solidoffice.com
