Reference Guide Updates
The Information Plan … is the primary document you will use to plan how to manage the publications project, providing the basis for your preliminary estimates of the schedule and budget needed to complete the project.
The project is intended to improve the overall quality, readability, and usability of the existing Reference Guide. There is no associated development project.
The current Reference Guide is quite large, and contains a significant amount of concept and task content, that would be better suited to other guides in the documentation suite.
Additionally, the Reference Guide contains a large number of screenshots (over 260!), many of which have become out of date as the UI has changed. These images were previously maintained by the automated screenshot system Fennek. Fennek, however, does not work in the current documentation toolchain, so we should consider if there is value in updating Fennek for the new toolchain. In order to do this, we need to consider if the number of screenshots is appropriate or useful.
The book is currently structured to match the SUSE Manager UI exactly, and the context-sensitive help in the UI links directly to the pages of the Reference Guide. For this reason, it is not being proposed that the Reference Guide be restructured.
The Project Plan takes the creative ideas of the Information Plan and sets a course for their development ... A Project Plan that carefully specifies what can be built in the allotted time and at the designated level of quality removes some of the risk.
This project is focused on the type of content presented in the Reference Guide. In order to complete this project, it will require a critical eye to identifying what is concept, task, and reference content.
In most cases, it is expected that the review will be removing content from the Reference Guide, relocating it to other places in the documentation suite, and then adding a cross-reference in the Reference Guide to the new location. During this project, the most important thing will be selecting the new location for the content and, where duplicate content exists, determining the most accurate content for inclusion.
Ideally, this work will be completed for the release of SUSE Manager 4.1 We do not currently have an expected release schedule for this, but can make the assumption that it will be around the middle of 2020. Therefore, we have scheduled 6 months for this project, beginning in November 2019 and completing in July 2020.
Budget is not being tracked for this project.
No additional technical resources are required at this stage, as existing test suites and equipment can be used.
The project will require only the existing documentation team members.
| Milestone | Start | End |
|---|---|---|
Phase 1 |
18 Nov 19 |
6 Dec 19 |
Phase 2 |
9 Dec 19 |
24 Jan 20 |
Phase 3 |
27 Jan 20 |
15 May 20 |
Phase 4 |
18 May 20 |
26 June 20 |
Phase 5* |
Note that Phase 5 is an evaluation phase, and can be completed after publication. This plan assumes an end-June 2020 release date.
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Joseph Cayouette: Tool-chain and production
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Lana Brindley: Writing and project management
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Karl Eichwalder: (80%) Writing assistance
Note that other documentation tasks are of greater importance than this project, and will always be prioritised.
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Document to be distributed internally to both the SUSE Manager and general documentation teams for review prior to release
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Limited beta review period for Uyuni community members and VIP SUSE Manager customers using the opensource.suse.com site.
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Maintaining this document across the long term needs to include consideration of how screenshots are managed (automatically or manually), in addition to keeping the content and delivery mechanism up to date.
