Please tell us more about printing

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 6:16 AMCathy Moya [MSFT]

0
Sign In to Vote
I have been asked to provide to the Powers that Be a list of requirements for printing. Meaning, what is the print experience that you want? It's one of those questions that sounds easy up front, but when we dig into it, there's more going on there. This will of course be an imprecise way to gather the requirements, and of course we need it yesterday. But please, tell us more about how you want to get your docs in printed form.

Let's start with the print experience you currently have. You can:

A) print single topic in the smsv4.chm

B) print a topic and all subtopics in the smsv4.chm

C) print a topic from the TechNet version of the smsv4.chm content (it's the same content in both places)

There is no way to print a topic and all subtopics from the TechNet site. We know that's a limitation. Is that something you would like and use?

You can print the entire section you want, or even the entire library, from the .chm, but that doesn't seem to be doing it for you. What about that experience isn't working? If we made it so there is a page break after every topic you print from the chm, would that help? Or would that just waste paper and annoy you?

Some Background

If you care, here is a bit about why things are the way they are. Not trying to whine or give excuses; just saying that we have some constraints that we haven't been able to get around yet.

For example, getting bound volumes for sale is not an option. They take months to produce and they are out of date almost as soon as they are sent to the publishers. We offered bound books of the SMS 2003 content and we sold a handful, I think less than 100. So that's out. If you like a printed book, Steve Kaczmarek's update to the Admin Companion will be out soon from Microsoft Press. (Side note: if the book comes in under the max page limit for an MS Press book, it will be just barely. With every version, this product keeps getting bigger.)

Several people in other threads have mentioned the MOM content as an example of what they like, however the MOM content is not structured at all the same way, so we can't package the ConfigMgr content up in the same chunks. They used a flatter table of contents with fewer, larger topics. Their content design ended up happening much later than ours, and the design constraints were different. Also, the scale is different. They have about 400K words and 1600 topics and the product performs a few major functions. ConfigMgr has 1.12 million words, 3000 topics, and is more of a suite of products packed into a mostly common infrastructure. Even if we had the resources to go back and rewrite all of the content in the MOM-like structure, it woudl be like trying ot fit an octopus in a pair of footy pajamas.

What we did do is group content into the following buckets:
- Getting Started
- Planning and Deploying the site infrastructure
- Planning and Deploying the clients
- Configuring
- The Features (with each feature getting it's own section of overview, planning, configuring, tasks, security, troubleshooting)
- Security
- Ops (backup, recovery, maintenance)
- Troubleshooting
We hoped that those groups would make it easier to find what you wanted, and also to print what you wanted from the chm.

We have considered trying to repackage those chunks into Word docs or PDF/XPS format, but after you factor in all of the feature sections, that's an awful lot of chunks and because of some tools issues, we don't think it's maintainable for the life of the product.

We've also tried building the entire Library into a single Word file, but it's huge. Also, because we have lots of little topics, the TOC gets really confusing. We can't try doing the entire file as XPS or PDF because it's just too big for the tool to process.

That's the situation now. I can't change the past that got us here. I still have several constraints going forward. But whatever insights you have about the printing question would be helpful.
- Reply
- Quote

Answers

Thursday, January 17, 2008 1:18 PM

Torsten [MVP]MVP

Cathy Moya [MSFT] wrote:

This will of course be an imprecise way to gather the requirements, and of course we need it yesterday. But please, tell us more about how you want to get your docs in printed form.

That's a bad timeframe ... this would be a great discussion for the MVP summit in April, wouldn't it?

Here are my 2 cents about the ConfigMgr docs: I think that someone who has no experience with SMS at all is missing something like the old concepts, planning and deployment guide (CPDG). I know that this information is covered in the sccm help, but unfortunately not straight forward. To put it in an IT wording: CPDG is a *serial* documentation and the smsv4.chm is in *parallel* mode. And humans like to read in a serial way (at least that's what I prefer). I guess that's why the community wants to have a printed version. If you have some SMS knowledge you just could search through the v4 documentation (because you know the keywords that will bring up the best results) in order to build your own concept.

One thing that's really great is the integration of the help in the ConfigMgr console. Hitting "F1" always brings up a lot of useful information.

You can contact me offline for further details. Maybe we should forward your request to the SMS MVPs in order to get more feedback!

All Replies