OSEG Community Conversation #2 - OnBase Documentation

[Adam_Levine]

Hello, OSEG members!

    Your Board of Directors has been hard at work in the past month to work on putting together content and exploring subjects with our Hyland representatives that are relevant to our group.  A subject which came up in our recent meetings with Hyland leadership was documentation.  We're about to dive in to some deeper conversations about what the community would like to see (in terms of improvement) and I'd love the opportunity to pass on stories from our membership to help drive those improvements.

OnBase Documentation - Two Levels

    When I think about documentation, I see two different, distinct types of documentation which can be important to us as OnBase administrators, developers, and users:

1. Official Documentation - this is the sum-total of all Hyland materials available to us.  MRGs, official Community posts, and other content provided by Hyland could all arguably fall under this heading.
2. Internal / Organizational Documentation - this is documentation that we generate ourselves, perhaps detailing procedures for executing certain Workflow processes, on-boarding a new user, or simply providing comments and explanation of features and functions which are specific to our OnBase implementation.

I think there is opportunity for discussion on both of these topics, and I'd be really interested in seeing what our members have to offer!

    Do you have any success stories or areas where you see opportunity for improvement with Official Documentation from Hyland?  What practices (if any) do you employ in your own organization to help document and track processes, procedures, and comments on your applications?

Join the conversation and post your responses below!  We look forward to hearing from you.

[Roger_Linhart]

I don't know how many times I've asked support, "What MRG is that in?" There are just too many individual PDFs with many potential crossovers. A searchable wiki containing all the MRGs would be awesome. It would most likely need to be hosted on community meaning errors and new content could be made available immediately, preferably with version control so we can see what was changed and when.

For me, the most inconvenient omission is context. Sometimes it is a case of "I know what all these words mean but I have no idea what you're trying to tell me". Examples of when and how to use a particular feature or configuration would avoid many issues with sub-optimal decision made on a loose understanding of what the MRG is trying to communicate.

[Brian_Williams2]

I don't know how many times I've asked support, "What MRG is that in?" There are just too many individual PDFs with many potential crossovers. A searchable wiki containing all the MRGs would be awesome.

A few years ago at a TechQuest, one of the best tips I ever received at ANY conference was the existence of CTRL+SHIFT+F in Adobe Reader to do an Advanced Search.

Since then, I keep all the MRGs in a folder on my local machine and I can search all of them at once.

I thought I was the only one who didn't know about it, but I've lost track of the number of people I've shared that functionality with who had no idea it existed!

[Adam_Levine]

I don't know how many times I've asked support, "What MRG is that in?" There are just too many individual PDFs with many potential crossovers. A searchable wiki containing all the MRGs would be awesome. It would most likely need to be hosted on community meaning errors and new content could be made available immediately, preferably with version control so we can see what was changed and when. For me, the most inconvenient omission is context. Sometimes it is a case of "I know what all these words mean but I have no idea what you're trying to tell me". Examples of when and how to use a particular feature or configuration would avoid many issues with sub-optimal decision made on a loose understanding of what the MRG is trying to communicate.

@Roger Linhart thanks for adding to the discussion!  Version control and reducing the number of steps required to find a certain piece of information across all documentation are subjects which are definitely on our agenda to discuss, so I will add your thoughts to that section for sure.  Speaking from personal experience, I also have encountered a few examples where context was lacking and have had to go searching through Community posts to see if any clarification or expansion of a statement in one of the MRGs has been made.  This might not be the best or most generally applicable example, but one document that I can think of that is lacking in a lot of supplemental detail is the database reporting guide - we have had to find out for ourselves (largely through trial & error) which tables/columns are used for certain purposes and what certain values mean.

A searchable wiki containing all the MRGs would be awesome. A few years ago at a TechQuest, one of the best tips I ever received at ANY conference was the existence of CTRL+SHIFT+F in Adobe Reader to do an Advanced Search. Since then, I keep all the MRGs in a folder on my local machine and I can search all of them at once. I thought I was the only one who didn't know about it, but I've lost track of the number of people I've shared that functionality with who had no idea it existed!

@Brian Williams that's great advice and a good tip to share with our members!  I have had a number of cases where this would have come in handy, specifically searching between Workflow and WorkView MRGs to find certain pieces of information which apply to both modules.  Thank you for sharing!

[Roger_Linhart]

@Brian Williams I've use CTRL+SHIFT+F for the nicer UI but only with current document. When I point it at my local MRGs folder it takes a very long time to provide search results. I'd expect a Hyland hosted, search optimized wiki to provide results much faster.

[James_Perry]

We have full text search so we imported the MRGs into OnBase and can search across all files for the term or setting.