The Outsourcing Requirements Documentation Project provided a structured framework for managing thousands of pages of requirements documentation and business rules for an outsourcing situation, and providing these instantly to the project team by browser-based delivery.
The Air Cargo Reference Manual replaced a situation where the only softcopy of an important reference manual was held in the printer's publishing software, by an XML-based solution where the data content could be authored directly by its owners and then distributed to the printshop, to intranet and to other usages via XSLT stylesheet transformations.
The System Setup Documentation and the Help Desk FAQs demonstrate the effectiveness of our online documentation methodology to prepare, organise and deliver richly illustrated procedures documentation and to capture knowledge of specialised processes with very high author productivity. A lot of the content was screen dumps that showed precise details of step-by-step installation procedures - one of the objectives of the System Setup Documentation project was to develop self-contained CD-ROMs of instructions that could be used for installation of new sites or for disaster recovery. Projects involving these types of highly-illustrated documents are often cumbersome when attempted using Microsoft Word, but are perfectly suited to the web-based technology employed by our Manuals Machine approach - for fast development of thorough, highly accessible and easy-to-use outcomes.
These Database Documentation Projects used The Manuals Machine to prepare retrospective documentation of existing databases. The content included formal definitions of table structures with data extracted from the system catalogue, narrative about their usage, hyperlinked indexes for quick access (one database had over 700 tables) and graphics such as entity-relationship diagrams. One of the databases employed SQL Server, the other ran on Informix.