Documentation Services

Need help with your documentation? Got a backlog, or finding new projects hard to start? Is your business suffering downtime, operational problems or customer service issues because the necessary information isn't available when it's needed? SMH Systems can help you with:

• business procedures and operating manuals
• help desk and customer support manuals
• product catalogues and facts sheets
• IT documentation
• all other types of business and technical documentation

Scope of our Services

Please note: our Documentation Services product is specifically targetted at:

• medium size businesses and workgroups, that ...
• need a documentation solution, but ...
• want to keep it simple, and do not wish to get involved with complex content management and publishing products, and ...
• are already Windows / Microsoft Office users, with ...
• ready access to PCs by all stakeholders.

Our products and services provide such organisations with a simple, inexpensive and highly effective capability for preparing and maintaining business and technical documentation of all types.

If this profile fits, you've probably tried doing documentation work with office software tools - wordprocessors, spreadsheets and desktop database. And you're probably very familiar with the difficulties and frustrations, which can include:

• training and skills issues - the tools can be hard to use
• scalability (ever tried using a Word document with a hundred illustrations?)
• monolithic - it can be hard to decompose substantal subject matter into more manageable portions
• the jobs may never get finished
• documents aren't accessible when they're needed
• it's just too hard to incorporate small changes for updates or corrections, especially if print-and-bind is part of the process
• if PDFs are used to relieve the publication and performance problems this means more software to learn and more work for the authors

If you prefer to continue using these traditional office tools for your documentation, we can help you address these issues. And you'll get results - you can produce very good-looking documentation using Microsoft Word, and your subject area experts can provide the knowledge inputs. There are some professions and situations where the traditional approaches will be required in some situations (such as proposals) for many years yet. If your difficulties in the past have been getting the tools to work properly, and with managing the process, SMH Systems can help you. But first, consider migrating to online documentation.

Why Migrate to Online Documentation?

You can obtain major benefits by adopting the new online approaches to preraring and delviering documentation. These exploit the web technology that has emerged over the last five years and offer greatly improved processes and much more rewarding outcomes. The new methods:

• deliver high-performance online documentation
• provide far higher productivity for authors
• provide consistent high-quality product, with ability to impose central control over styles and appearance
• are much more amenable to inclusion of pictures, graphics and multimedia
• are highly accessible and convenient in use, and include hyperlinking across topics
• can be carried around on laptop PCs and CD-ROMs
• are lower-cost to prepare
• are attractive and motivational for users
• are easy to repackage and rebrand should this be required in future
• generate cross-platform content - can be used on Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux and PDA
• are not restricted to paper-based structures, they can include a variety of content types including multimedia

Changing to online documentation doesn't necessarily involve acquiring any new software at all. The key components of our methodology are an integral part of every modern installation of Windows. And you won't lose your existing investment because existing documentation prepared using Word and Excel can be converted to PDF and integrated into the online structures.

Interested?  Please read on ...