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.

[James_Perry]

@Jim Perry Powershell rocks! There is an .xml file in the AllMRG download that has tags for Version, Description and Filename. It doesn't include release date but that would be easy to add to the .xml file.

The original reply has been removed.

The newer MRGs zips have the XML files which is helpful. I believe that I used the date of the zip file for the release date. 

[Jonna_Pantelis]

Hyland's Database  Reporting Guide is very useful, however it's limited with what it provides in Table information. It would be great if they would release a more comprehensive Database Reporting Guide, or provide Database Table information in the module MRGs (i.e, Workview MRG = Workview related tables/info)

[Adam_Levine]

Hyland's Database Reporting Guide is very useful, however it's limited with what it provides in Table information. It would be great if they would release a more comprehensive Database Reporting Guide, or provide Database Table information in the module MRGs (i.e, Workview MRG = Workview related tables/info)

@Jonna Pantelis I agree 100%!  The Database Reporting Guide was one of the documents that I mentioned in our call with our friends from Hyland a few weeks ago as one of the specific examples of a document which provides a seemingly inconsistent level of detail (which corresponds to inconsistent levels of utility, depending on what information you need from it today).

I plan on doing a short re-cap here, either as part of this thread or a standalone post, detailing what was discussed on that call.  The shortest possible summary would read something like this: It was refreshing to get to speak directly with the folks responsible for working to improve these kinds of issues, and there was a lot of promising discussion, but it does seem like we're still a little ways away from seeing those improvements implemented.  The most important takeaway, I think, is that the Hyland staff members in a position to change things are aware of the feedback from our group (and other VOGUEs) and have indicated that they are taking steps internally to correct things.

[Sandy_Nielsen]

I haven't seen any discussion about Documentation  Type 2 -- Internal  / Organizational Documentation.  I'm about to embark on a project to get all of our  keywords, doc types, workflows, groups etc. documented.  I'd love to do this in a great big pivot table or Access database.  But I'm open to whatever works and is easiest.

If anyone has developed a system, I'd love to hear about it.

[Diane_Johnson]

I would like to see a Wiki also.  I find the MRG's are useful if you already have some knowledge or understanding of the subject matter.  They are not great documents if you are new or trying to learn how to do something you've never done before.  I'd like to see more "How to" guides and examples. 

Another area that doesn't seem to have much documentation is the web portal websites.  We have several websites that we display different meeting agendas, meeting presentations,  and other information on.  It took quite a few phone calls and a couple of meetings to get the right help to figure out how to do what we wanted.  I had several support techs tell me they don't have any documentation on how they work either.

We also set up our Public Access website and the documentation on that is awful too.  It would be nice to have some tools or a method that allows you to customize the look and content than the limited templates that are provided.  There's no documentation on how the temples work either.  I have some web development skills but I shouldn't have to be an expert web developer for a very simple page.  It took a lot of trial and error to get everything working, on supports side as well as ours.     

I'm really hoping when we upgrade to a newer version of OnBase that it has better features and documentation.

I'd also like to see more information on Internal / Organizational documentation and what systems are being used.  We are about to start a project to document our environment and process too.